Hello! Nice to be here and thanks for taking the time to read my post and hopefully solve this issue!
To start with, I have 4 fish tanks in my house. Through trial and error all have had the same problem at one point in time or another. It's this reddish brown algae(slime) that seems to consume everything in my tank.
I started with a 29 gallon community for my first tank. After the tank cycled and I learned some very harsh and immoral lessons about fish keeping, I finally stabilized the tank and it is running efficiently now. During the course of this tank lesson learning process I had a time where the tank became overwhelmed by this reddish-brown slime, and still to this day it comes back mainly on the glass where I can scrape it off. No biggy right? Well this brings me to the other tanks, all of which have experienced this problem except for one. Another 29 gallon that was very slowly seeded by the water from a 75 gallon with perfect parameters. I unintentionally cycled it without fish just so that I would have a "Hospital" tank. And now it is more efficient than any of the other tanks(imagine that, it only houses a blue lobster,lol).
Which brings me to my current problem tank. It's a 125 gallon with 3 O's, a common pleco, 2 Bala's, a feather-finned cat, and a baby fire eel. I have 2 penguin biowheel 350's for HOB, and an FX5 to do the rest. For media I use only the common carbon cartridges for the biowheels, and for the FX5 I have ceramics in the bottom tray with some filter floss, the second tray has some peat moss pellets for softening my ever-so-hard tap-water, and the top tray has s different type of bio-ceramic along with some "clear-max" pouches I was advised to get by my LFS guy.
The algae problem came before the peat and the clear-max was put into the filters, the peat was a result of dying plants, and the clear-max was for this algae problem, supposively to remove phosphates.
I am not too familiar with this stage of care for my fish, I only have experience in keeping the parameters at the correct readings and housing fish and tankmates appropriately. This stuff is just plain nasty. It has covered everything in my tank, and killed pretty much any live plant I have attepted to keep. Through the research I have done I only have gotten more confused as to what it could be and now I am lead to ask for help verbally from the people that I deem as experts in the field, You. Please help me, for this is getting really expensive and I am sure that removing the rocks and decor every so often to clean is only ticking my O's off.Here are some pics, I did just clean the rocks and plants a day or two ago, but as you can see, the filter mechs and the live plants are covered in the stuff.
Oh and the readings for the tank are PH=7.5, Ammonia=0, Nitrites=0, Nitrates=20-25, and GH/KH=about 230PPM(This reading is a few days old, I can update later if needed)
Tigger apparently wanted to have his picture taken,lmao.
Thanks again for any help you can give!
To start with, I have 4 fish tanks in my house. Through trial and error all have had the same problem at one point in time or another. It's this reddish brown algae(slime) that seems to consume everything in my tank.
I started with a 29 gallon community for my first tank. After the tank cycled and I learned some very harsh and immoral lessons about fish keeping, I finally stabilized the tank and it is running efficiently now. During the course of this tank lesson learning process I had a time where the tank became overwhelmed by this reddish-brown slime, and still to this day it comes back mainly on the glass where I can scrape it off. No biggy right? Well this brings me to the other tanks, all of which have experienced this problem except for one. Another 29 gallon that was very slowly seeded by the water from a 75 gallon with perfect parameters. I unintentionally cycled it without fish just so that I would have a "Hospital" tank. And now it is more efficient than any of the other tanks(imagine that, it only houses a blue lobster,lol).
Which brings me to my current problem tank. It's a 125 gallon with 3 O's, a common pleco, 2 Bala's, a feather-finned cat, and a baby fire eel. I have 2 penguin biowheel 350's for HOB, and an FX5 to do the rest. For media I use only the common carbon cartridges for the biowheels, and for the FX5 I have ceramics in the bottom tray with some filter floss, the second tray has some peat moss pellets for softening my ever-so-hard tap-water, and the top tray has s different type of bio-ceramic along with some "clear-max" pouches I was advised to get by my LFS guy.
The algae problem came before the peat and the clear-max was put into the filters, the peat was a result of dying plants, and the clear-max was for this algae problem, supposively to remove phosphates.
I am not too familiar with this stage of care for my fish, I only have experience in keeping the parameters at the correct readings and housing fish and tankmates appropriately. This stuff is just plain nasty. It has covered everything in my tank, and killed pretty much any live plant I have attepted to keep. Through the research I have done I only have gotten more confused as to what it could be and now I am lead to ask for help verbally from the people that I deem as experts in the field, You. Please help me, for this is getting really expensive and I am sure that removing the rocks and decor every so often to clean is only ticking my O's off.Here are some pics, I did just clean the rocks and plants a day or two ago, but as you can see, the filter mechs and the live plants are covered in the stuff.
Oh and the readings for the tank are PH=7.5, Ammonia=0, Nitrites=0, Nitrates=20-25, and GH/KH=about 230PPM(This reading is a few days old, I can update later if needed)
Tigger apparently wanted to have his picture taken,lmao.
Thanks again for any help you can give!
