Its really a question if you should cheat or do it right. You should be focussing on the plants. Cheat if you want to: after many private conversations, I am certain more people use Excel than talk about it. But using something like Peroxide or Blackout or whatever just depends on your plants being stronger than algae, and once you start back up you need to let the plants recover or repropogate, and as you know, your plants are your saftey net. Don't weaken them.
A point many forget is that everybody --
everybody -- has battled algae. Tom, Travis, Steve...
everybody. But you look at those guys now and what do they have in common? They grow plants. Look at Zezmo, or Glen, or Sherry, or Purrbox, or Rich, or me, or whomever. We're growing plants and everything has gotten easier.
But back to cheating for a moment. I am of the opinion cheating to kill algae is a fine shortcut: fighting with BBA sucks. I bleached a bunch of plants for 30s 5% bleach once, and my poor delicate plants, namely P. stellata "Fine leaf," melted like a crypt. I swore off bleaching then. I've used Excel, blackout, and so on with varying succcess. It is easier to focus on plants when you're not looking at algae all the time. It is easier to master dosing when you aren't afraid of algae.
The hard part is not caring about algae so much. Algae just means the plants aren't 100%, so fix the plants
The grower's way to beat that type of algae is prune the affected leaves, manually remove as much other algae as possible, big water change, then keep feeding the plants. Repeat. Watch the plants and address the deficiencies. Manually remove algae if needed. Repeat. This is a pain in the rear, sure, but will get you where you want to go without endagering the plants or animals. Plants recover much faster from a pruning than from most algaecides, and you may as well practice pruning and while fighting algae. And in the end I promise you'll know how to grow plants. Then cheating is just... unnecessary.
In your case, I think you need to get over limiting PO4, despite what your test kits say. Dose it anyway. As you know, your lack of tests for K, trace, and Fe doesn't matter. The first you can just dose to excess and forget about -- everyone agrees on this. Fe/trace you can observe easily with your Wisteria and other plants. You're already dosing NO3. PO4 is what you're missing. Use waterchanges as another saftey net.
You should absolutely mess with your tank. You should just mess with what helps your plants first and stop the algae from spreading. Then trim and waterchange. You'll get algae to nuissance levels, and then its just a matter of tweaking your dosing/CO2 to beat it. I know this because its the path the guys who succeed take after looking at their tanks differently. I'll bet plants on this. Not kidding.
So, just two cents.
Here's my old thread where I finally bought into EI after fighting with BBA for months, not dosing PO4 based on my test kit results, caring about ratios, fishing for alternative plans, and so on. May of last year. As you may recall I cheated with Excel later to kill the remaining algae, but I kept up with the dosing and trimming and focus on plants after that. We all start at near the same place, man. Advancing is a matter of what you focus on when troubleshooting, and finding good gurus doesn't hurt either.
Good luck.
