# Green water



## AquaticPulse (Jun 19, 2011)

I got a recent outbreak of green water in my newly planted tank with ada soil. I currently use a sponge filter as the only filtration and haven't completed planting everything yet. Is my only solution to do a big water change? I feel like i'm wasting all the nutrients if i dump out the water.


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## Splash768 (Mar 29, 2011)

It's probably a case of imbalance between nutrients, light and CO2. Is sunlight directly hitting your tank? If not there is probably too much light from your bulb. What kind of nutrients are you putting into the tank? If you have a lot of light, a lot of nutrients but no CO2 input, plants still won't grow and algae will take advantage of the excess and go nuts. 

Also is your tank properly cycled? If you got ammonia buildup and lots of light, algae will also bloom. I'd cut down the light and whatever fertilizer you are using and do 20% water change per day, more if you don't have fish, and the problem will go away.


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## AquaticPulse (Jun 19, 2011)

I don't dose any nutrients, I just have the ADA amazon soil and plants in the tank at the moment. there's about 2.5wpg and i have the light on for about 6 hours. No Co2 and the tank is cycled.

I guess it's probably from the sunlight because last month i opened the blinds to get more light in the room. Though i didn't think it would be that big of an issue, guess i was wrong.


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## Zebrapl3co (Mar 29, 2006)

I don't think it's the sun light, this is December. I haven't seem much of the sun lately. We just got pass the longest night (or shortest day) of the year. All new tanks goes through that if you have too much nutrients in the tank. You can clear it up with a UV sterilizer. Either that, or add CO2 or dose Seachem Excel. But your best bet is a UV.

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## AquaticPulse (Jun 19, 2011)

I actually get a lot of sunlight in my room. i even put tinted plastic on my windows to lessen the light. The only nutrient i have in the tank is the ADA soil, if i remove the water, wouldn't the soil just leach more into the water and through all the water changes leave me with soil that has little nutrients?


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## Symplicity (Oct 14, 2011)

I had GW for weeks. Only way i fixed it was with Excel and adding a inline 5W UV Sterlizer. 

Pretty sure the sterlizer did the trick took about 4 days to get rid of with sterlizer. $80 is a high price though so decide between a black out or the sterilzer.


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## solarz (Aug 31, 2010)

Do you have any fish in there yet? If not, you can use daphnia to fix the green water. Otherwise, I've heard freshwater clams also work.


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## Antoine Doinel (Dec 20, 2010)

I had this, and it was horrible. Cringed every time I looked at the tank. I eventually got rid of it by large water changes daily. Each day it got slightly better, but if i remember correctly it still took a week or two.

Pretty sure the cause was extra light I added to the tank, but I can't be completely sure as I had also recently started dosing Flourish. Also, I continued using the extra light over the tank after the green water was gone and it never returned.

In any case, the problem was excess nutrients, and that is your problem too. Either block some of that light, get more plants, or start doing water changes more often.


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