50G Update
January 5th, 2014After battling BBA for a couple months, I think it’s finally starting to subside as the plants grow in my 50G aquarium. Shortly after setting this tank up, the combination of intense lighting, too few plants, and a couple CO2 outages resulted in black brush algae to cover most of the rocks, and many of the plant leaves. I also had a brief bought with green algae, which I believe was due to an insufficient bacteria colony to help break down the organics in the tank.
Recall that this aquarium was basically started afresh, removing very old Aquasoil and replacing it with Seachem Flourite Black. I also made a couple of equipment changes, adding an inline CO2 atomizer on my filter outflow and a surface skimmer on the inflow. This has helped a longtime problem with surface scum. I’m planning to keep up on the manual removal of BBA until it’s gone. Let me know what you think of the aquascape in the comments.
January 6th, 2014 at 10:16 pm
Hey, just wondering, how have you gone about removing the BBA manually? I have the same problem and cause for it in my 75 but I’m fighting a loosing battle it seems. I’m even trying H202 and excel dosing and the one-two-punch method and its not killing my BBA. Even straight H2O2 seems to not be doing enough in my case.
Help would be much obliged.
January 7th, 2014 at 8:18 am
Thanks for the comment! I’ve been using a combination of H2O2 treatments, directly on the exposed rock during water changes, or by removing the smaller ones temporarily to do the same. That usually kills the BBA, turning it red or white. Then, I scrub off the remaining using a toothbrush, and let Amano shrimp and nerites handle the rest. Good luck!