Green water?

[krap101]

I was wondering what the best course of action would be. I have heard that you can blackout, or you can do water changes. Also I read that it could be due to a bottleneck with nutrients. Should I add ferts (I have a couple plants) or should I just do WC's?

 

[fisch]

Less light and WC's will probably fix the problem. Don't add ferts. Green algae comes from too much nutrients.
I heard of UV sterilizers or diatom filters working. Never tried myself. But both would require a purchase. A total blackout would work too.
Start with WC's and less light. Make sure you aren't getting sunlight from a window.

 

[krap101]

Well, I was thinking that the algal bloom was caused by an imbalance/bottleneck of a certain nutrient, so the plants could not use any of them, creating the niche for the algae. I'm injecting co2 as well, so this is supposed to give the edge over the algae?

 

[MichaelsLilGray]

algea is the anti plant lol.. were most require co2... it requires o2.. you starve it.. you kill it.. but also risk killing fish in the process.

 

[beglely]

it can come from many things. I got greenwater from cycling my tank with shrimp amazingly. But do a blackout--saves money and wont harm ur fish or plants. Just throw a very large blanket over the tank for about 3-6 days (depends on the tank) and dont peek and when its done take the blanket off and do a pwc. I did mine over spring break and when I got back the tank was crystal clear, and mine was so bad u couldnt see the back of the tank.

 

[Speakerman]

I had a severe case of green water a couple years ago in my 150g tank. I tried diatomic filters and it never fully cleared it up, I eventually bought a UV sterilizer and removed 1 of the 4 flourescent lights I had running, which solved the problem.

 

[7Enigma]

I'm a huge proponent of diatom filters. I have one I got for ~$100 (can't remember the make off the top of my head, maybe Vortex XL?), and while expensive is a multi-use and very efficient piece of hardware. The benefit of a diatom vs. blackout/UV is that it physically removes the algae from the tank, so there is no worry of ammonia issues that can occur during a blackout if the GW is bad enough.

It's multi-use comes from things like parasite/bacterial disease in a tank which it can filter out during medication treatment (whereas a UV sterilizer will also likely made any water-based treatment ineffective), or when stirring up a lot of crud from a renovation.

To be honest, I haven't used mine in nearly a year because I haven't had any issues that would benefit from it (filter floss in my filter cleared up a lot of the problems), but it's nice to know it is always there if needed.

A natural remedy that I've never tried but heard great things about is daphnia. These readily feed on the GW and will clear up your problem in no time, however, you need to keep them separated from the fish since the fish will eat them (so a mesh bag/etc. needs to be used). You can then let the daphnia go and give your fish a very nutritious snack.

Here's a couple pics from a long time ago:

Before diatom filter:

After diatom filter (~45min later):

Diatom filter after removing GW: