marvelous

I recently began turning the lights off for 3 hours in the middle of the photo period to help with some algae. Now, when the lights go out the tank becomes very cloudy and when they come back on it gradually clears up?! I have a 75 fully planted with pressurized CO2 and controller. I dose ferts per EI and feed once a day. This is very weird and would like to know if someone else as had any experience with this.

Laith

Never heard of this happening...

In any case, I've never found the "light siesta" method to add any benefit to the plants. So if you stop this type of lighting schedule, this issue will go away and your plants will thank you .

So what kind of algae issue are you having? And how are you plants doing?

marvelous

Hair and staghorn algae are my current problems. This algae issue seems to be getting worse unfortunately. Any help with this type of algae? I have 260watts of light and my controller is set at 6.6 pH. My KH is 6 and my GH is at 9. I change 40% of the water once a week and dose religiously per EI recommendations for my tank volume. My tank has been set up since mid July. I have 10 rasboras, 10 Otocinclus, 1 rubber lip plecostomus, 4 corydoras, 8 Amano shrimp. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

247Plants

How long of a photoperiod per day do you keep your lights on?

Typically 10 hours a day is recommended....However I have a different story on my hands where because of work reasons I leave my lights on for approx 12 hours a day....I used to have algae problems until I switched from 12 hours of full lights to an hour of half light for the first hour and last hour and full light at ~3wpg for 10 hours...none of my plants flinched

Do you know how much CO2 you are injecting into the tank? A few around will tell you cranking up the CO2 a little will help with the hair and staghorn...

hoppycalif

People don't like to stress their fish by jacking up the CO2 bubble rate, but it doesn't have to stress the fish. If you increase bubble rate a little bit each week when you do routine maintenance, then observe the tank for a week, very carefully, and if nothing seems to be bad, do it again, until you see algae not regrowing so quickly when you prune it all away. Usually that will be at a point before the fish start showing problems. That is how I got control of my algae at one time - but then I let the tank get badly overgrown with plants, and had some guppies die, probably from the summer heat, so I had ammonia issues, and some of the algae came back.

I have now reduced my light from 3.8 watts per gallon to 2.4 watts per gallon, so I expect to soon be possessor of a completely algae free tank. (I also expect to win the lottery.)

Laith

You're probably low on CO2; try out Hoppy's advice on this.

You don't mention how your plants are doing? and do you have good plant density?