Quantity Or Quality?
- Thread starter Gnome
- Start date
I would rather practice good tank management than try to overload my biocapacity.
Good tank management includes keeping the hood lamp off if you do not have live plants. Algae in un-planted tanks is most commonly a result of too much light/nutrients and not enough tank cleaning. I have had all my tanks going now for about two years and have never had algae problems because I keep them out of direct sunlight and only turn my hood lamp on when I'm viewing or feeding. I'm not home for 12hrs of the day, my fish can see just fine with ambient room light, so there is no need to have the hood lamp on when I'm not home, or during any other time I'm not watching them.
The little algae I have I just simply scrub off with the algae pad during my weekly water changes. In fact I so don't have algae I have to subliment my clown plecos with algae waffers to make sure they get a well rounded diet.
From everything I've researched, having algae in a planted tank usually comes from having the CO2 injection/lighting somehow not in the proper balance. This might take awhile to fiddle with, but from what I've understood once you find the right ratios you can pretty much have an algae free tank without a whole lot of algea eaters/maintance.
Algae eaters are not the solution to algae. That is a pet peeve with me that people feel they can throw in a pleco or a few CAE/SAE and never have to clean their tanks. WRONG! If you do not solve the algae problem from its source then you will continuously have algae and eventually have sick/dead fish from eutrification of your tank. People are so misinformed about plecos/CAEs that I've seen fish starve to death simply because they've eaten all the algae in their tanks and now have nothing to feed on because people don't subliment their diets with veggies/waffers.
If anything, I like snails as a solution to chronic algae over fish. When I worked retail LFS I would culture snails in all my tanks because the lights were on them 14hrs a day and by three days the algae was disgusting. Snails really helped out by keeping the tanks algae free and allowing me the time to attend the other duties I had instead of spending my day 100% elbow deep in the tanks. But I knew the source of my problems was over-stocking, over-nutrient, over-lighting, things you can't help with displays but in home aquariums are easily controlled.
~~Colesea
Good tank management includes keeping the hood lamp off if you do not have live plants. Algae in un-planted tanks is most commonly a result of too much light/nutrients and not enough tank cleaning. I have had all my tanks going now for about two years and have never had algae problems because I keep them out of direct sunlight and only turn my hood lamp on when I'm viewing or feeding. I'm not home for 12hrs of the day, my fish can see just fine with ambient room light, so there is no need to have the hood lamp on when I'm not home, or during any other time I'm not watching them.
The little algae I have I just simply scrub off with the algae pad during my weekly water changes. In fact I so don't have algae I have to subliment my clown plecos with algae waffers to make sure they get a well rounded diet.
From everything I've researched, having algae in a planted tank usually comes from having the CO2 injection/lighting somehow not in the proper balance. This might take awhile to fiddle with, but from what I've understood once you find the right ratios you can pretty much have an algae free tank without a whole lot of algea eaters/maintance.
Algae eaters are not the solution to algae. That is a pet peeve with me that people feel they can throw in a pleco or a few CAE/SAE and never have to clean their tanks. WRONG! If you do not solve the algae problem from its source then you will continuously have algae and eventually have sick/dead fish from eutrification of your tank. People are so misinformed about plecos/CAEs that I've seen fish starve to death simply because they've eaten all the algae in their tanks and now have nothing to feed on because people don't subliment their diets with veggies/waffers.
If anything, I like snails as a solution to chronic algae over fish. When I worked retail LFS I would culture snails in all my tanks because the lights were on them 14hrs a day and by three days the algae was disgusting. Snails really helped out by keeping the tanks algae free and allowing me the time to attend the other duties I had instead of spending my day 100% elbow deep in the tanks. But I knew the source of my problems was over-stocking, over-nutrient, over-lighting, things you can't help with displays but in home aquariums are easily controlled.
~~Colesea