Can flourish and excel harm fish at recomended dosage?

[fishstah]

I posted a thread on how to dim lighting in my aquarium in order to make my fish more comfortable and to control my algae problem a little. Someone suggested flourish and excel might help with the algae problem. I want to make sure it is well researched before I use it. I have an aubias and a amazon sword. You can see the algae i'm worried about on the anubias leaf in the picture. I already lost one leaf and don't want to loose another.

 

[fishstah]

By the way, Does anyone have any suggestions on some plants that would be good in my aquarium? I live in a small town, and I'm about an hour away from anything. I'm going to petsmart this weekend. I'm planning to get some grass that they keep in tanks to shade my tank some more. If you look closely, you can tell it did not do well the first time....

 

[phin]

flourish and excel don't harm fish at the recommended dosage.

You need to decide if you want to have a planted tank or a dim tank so your fish are "comfortable"

All of us with planted tanks have plenty of light and fish under those lights and they are just fine,"comfortably" speaking. Your fish might not be used to the bright light at first, but they will adjust and be just fine. If you need more shade add some driftwood, more plants and floating plants that the fish can hide around, but trying to grow plants in dim light so your fish aren't scared seems counter-intuitive.

 

[fishstah]

I already dimmed the light with 20% window tint. It is dimmed in the picture. The CFLs that I am using were way brighter than a normal flourecent tube, and anubias are low light plants. One of the main reasons I wanted to dim the light is to stop algae growth on the anubias to keep the algae from out competing the plant for nutrients and light and eventually killing it. My light is still bright, as you can see from the picture. I lost the biggest leaf on my anubias, and it had really bad algae on it. I'm not really sure if the algae killed the leaf or it was just kind of a natural death. My amazon sword has been doing pretty crappy though. Visible algae doesn't grow on it, but all of it's larger leaves seem to die. The smaller leaves seem to do better, and I think that they are all growing at about the same rate. Dimming the light worked, as far as making the neons more comfortable. The used to always hide under the amazon sword when the lights were on, but now they move more freely around the tank. I'm sure the new grass plants will help as well. The verdict is still out on what it does for the plants.

 

[phin]

I already dimmed the light with 20% window tint. It is dimmed in the picture. The CFLs that I am using were way brighter than a normal flourecent tube, and anubias are low light plants. One of the main reasons I wanted to dim the light is to stop algae growth on the anubias to keep the algae from out competing the plant for nutrients and light and eventually killing it. My light is still bright, as you can see from the picture. I lost the biggest leaf on my anubias, and it had really bad algae on it. I'm not really sure if the algae killed the leaf or it was just kind of a natural death. My amazon sword has been doing pretty crappy though. Visible algae doesn't grow on it, but all of it's larger leaves seem to die. The smaller leaves seem to do better, and I think that they are all growing at about the same rate. Dimming the light worked, as far as making the neons more comfortable. The used to always hide under the amazon sword when the lights were on, but now they move more freely around the tank. I'm sure the new grass plants will help as well. The verdict is still out on what it does for the plants.

Do you have ferts in the substrate. swords are root feeders, so lack on nutrients in the substrate could be the problem.

 

[fishstah]

I have never used any ferts. What should I feed the sword that's really fish safe, I have a ram and he's going to be really sensitive to a lot of things.

 

[phin]

flourish root tabs. aquarium plant supplements are fish-safe.