Algae Control During Fishless Cycle

[anderson_p_r]

Anyone have any tips on controlling algae during the fishless cycling of a planted dirtied tank? Heavily planted so I can't just turn off the lights. I do have pressurized CO2 on it. I'm only about a week in and I'm starting to notice some algae growth on my driftwood and some plant leaves. I'd rather not use algae fix because I'm planing on putting invertebrates in the tank. I guess I could just load it up with floating plants?

 

[pbmax]

You could shorten the photo period a bit and see if that helps.  What is your ammonia looking like?  Worst case you could add some purigen for a while as the soil leaches stuff into the water, then take it out and cycle it after that.

And yes, floating plants would be what I'd try first, but you'll need a lot of them.

 

[Jubs]

What kind of algae are you getting? I just finished cycling my 40 breeder without fish (thanks Aquasoil for providing ammonia) what I did was lots of water changes and manual removal of infected leaves, the best thing you can do is get rid of the algae as soon as possible to keep it from getting a foothold in your tank.

I had a ton of what I call "snot diatoms" which is the brown stringy algae that seems to love tanks with Aquasoil in it but once it starts to disappear is a good indication that things are balancing out. Also make sure you are fertilizing as well, once I started dosing (I should have been doing it the whole time) my dry ferts it really started to progress and in a week's time things really balanced out.