Algae on live plants

[Jesse.R]

I've been struggling with algae growing on my plants for a while now and I'm not completely sure what do to. My tank is cleaned almost weekly and haven't had a fish die in about a year. It's a 10 gallon with 6 neons, 2 black neons, a female betta, and some MTS. I'm thinking of getting some more plants today. Any suggestions?

 

[PJFISH]

I had the same problem! It's very hard to get rid of it once it's on the plant. Some other people on this site can tell how to do it with peroxide, but I got good advice on using Flourish Excel. If you have a 10 gallon tank, you'd use 5 ml daily, preferably before the lights go on. Do this until you see a decrease. Also I had to decrease my light to about 6-8 hrs a day. If your running yours longer, that will cause algae growth. Hope that helps!

 

[Khuligirl93]

Rivercats is the expert on plants and getting rid of algae!
But normally, algae is caused by too many nutrients in the water (not frequent enough water changes-you should be doing 50% once a week), lights left on too long (try reducing it to being on only 6 hours a day), or not enough carbon source (liquid carbon or pressurized CO2).
Nerite snails are also a great edition to a planted tank with algae because they're little algae eating machines! But they should not be expected to fix the problem.