Hair Algae :'(

[Yellow Eye Tang]

Well, my tank has been chugging along but the plant growth is minimal. Nothing seems to be dieing but baby tears and swords are not growing much. Now there seems to be a massive breakout of hair algae on the plant leaves. I've reduced lighting to 9 hours but the algae seems to be growing still with no growth to my plants. DIY Co2 is cranking and I've been using florish accel and nutrafin plant gro. If you need their specs let me know. Please help im worried. I'm going to go in and go snail hunting for now. Thanks a million!

[mgamer20o0]

i would try a black out. for me hair algae pops up with fluctuating co2 levels.

[timwag2001]

flurish excel is a carbon suppliment. you can use it with your co2 but it's kinda along the same idea.
i did a search for plant gro and the stuff i found has .15 Nitrate along with some trace elements. if you look at your bottle they usually have some numbers like .15 - 0 - 0. the first number is nitrate, second is phosphate, third is potasium. those are your macro nutrients and you have to have all of them in your tank. if you bottom out on one of the nutrients your plants cant utilize the other ones. and since there is nutrients that the plants arent using, algae will use them.

and your swords need root tabs. some say theirs do fine without them but swords are root feeders and mine die without them. give them a try, i bet they rebound in a few weeks

[happygirl65]

This is where it is good to have dry ferts so you can tweak your dosages of ferts to only include what you need.
For me, hair algae was an imbalance of too much phosphate and too little potassium....my tap contained phosphates so I had to stop dosing that and it eventually balanced out.