# new tank syndrome



## pyrrolin (Jan 11, 2012)

I seem to be dealing with new tank syndrome on my 90 community which I moved from a 35 gallon a few weeks ago. Getting lots of algae on the glass.

substrate is clay then potting soil capped by gravel, well cycled canister filter and planted tank, not fully stocked but the number was slightly overstocking a 35 gallon. Also put on a new light, a 4 bulb T8 48 inch fixture with brand new bulbs, was using a 3 foot, 2 bulb T8 until yesterday. 

I have had to do large water changes every week to clear out the brown from the potting soil leaching, about 40 to 50 percent.

Any tips on how to get past this stage faster?


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

What kind of algae ? Green spot ? Soft n' mushy haze all over ? Something else ?

I wish I had experience with dirt tanks, but I've never done one. Though I've read that potting soils can leach a burst of nutrients at first which may not be very balanced, and that can contribute to algae issues.

I've only used gravels of various types as substrates. But when I set up my first new tank last year, I had a short bout with green spot. Not knowing that scraping it off is kind of pointless, since it simply reattaches itself, I did scrape it off. Despite the fact it can reattach, it never really came back in any great amount afterward. Within a few weeks it had gone entirely without my having done anything other than scrape it off the one time. I had super low light levels at first, just one 6500 K tube in one of those hoods that's flat and basically only lights the rear half of the tank. Hence the reason I first upgraded my lighting, even though I only went to 3 spiral 6500 daylight bulbs in basic round clamp reflectors, it sure made a huge difference to the growth of everything, especially the floaters.

I didn't have any snails at that time either. But Nerites are said to eat green spot and are certainly tireless little workers who also eat soft green and brown algaes. Nerites seem to adore brown algae, and I use them to clean it out of my tubing now and then, which is the only place I see it nowadays. Now I would not have any tank without at least a few Nerites, either the Thorny one or the Zebra type. I don't mind the eggs they lay, because they are such hard workers and keep the glass so clean. MTS are also very, very good for this, though I am not sure how good they'd be in a dirt tank since they do tend to burrow into the top inch or so of the substrate and churn it up to some degree. That's great for gravel, maybe not so much for dirt ?

Later on, not so very long after I upgraded my lighting, I discovered hair algae growing rampantly, but only in a very few places, only in two out of five tanks. It seemed mostly to want to float - perhaps it just liked the light on top ? In one tank it tied all the floaters together, a major nuisance to pry off. One persistent batch was stuck to the substrate in that same tank, as well as to a wood piece, the uptake tube of the filter & the glass at the back of that tank where it gets the most sun. [My two largest tanks are in a south window, so I'm always somewhat amazed I'm not a really major algae farmer  ].

When I first set up my second tank in the south window, the rear wall became covered in a thick layer of blue green algae, which also infested the filter. Fortunately it is easy to remove, coming off anything it's growing on with virtually no effort. After I rubbed it off that first time, it never reappeared on the rear glass. I covered the filters with some thin mylar film and that has drastically reduced all kinds of algae growth inside them. Mostly it's on the outfall lip of the AC70s. I get brown, blue green and just green in a varying combo of streaks there, but it's not difficult to remove most of it when I clean the filter media. No major scraping, just a sponge takes 90% of it off in no time.

Fwiw, I recently ran across a pretty amazing little downloadable PDF book that was written by Greg Watson. It has some really outstanding information on feeding planted tanks. It explains the various dosing strategies and theories in way I found much easier to understand than anything else I have read. The author,Greg, donates the modest $4.95 price he charges to various organizations that promote or support our hobby, rather than taking any profit from his work.

There is some very useful info in there on algae and the reasons it shows up, which, it appears, are more related to various nutrient levels, or lack thereof, than they are to most of the reasons we tend to think cause algae, including light. Though there is no doubt sudden increases in light levels will seriously fuel the growth of any algae that's present, so it can seem to suddenly explode from nowhere. Best five bucks I ever spent and I will keep reading it 'til I have digested its contents very thoroughly.

If you're interested, send me an email addy and I'll send you a link to the book.


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## pyrrolin (Jan 11, 2012)

a good way to help reduce algae reattaching is cleaning the glass right before a water change.

so I guess there really isn't any good way to get past this maturing stage besides time.


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## Kimchi24 (Mar 22, 2013)

pyrrolin said:


> I have had to do large water changes every week to clear out the brown from the potting soil leaching, about 40 to 50 percent.
> /QUOTE]
> 
> Are you talking about tannins from the soil? If so, my tank has been running with it for three months now and still has a yellow hue. Its not going away anytime soon. I did large water changes every day (50-70%) for the first three weeks and then simply did weekly water changes since then.


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## pyrrolin (Jan 11, 2012)

yeah, the tannins are an issue to, but I know that just takes time. I might toss in some carbon for a bit to help.

what I am wondering about is the new tank thing of extra algae and getting past that faster.


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## BillD (Jun 5, 2006)

The problem with most potting soils is their high nutrient content, which is why I wouldn't use them. The soil is probably the main cause of your problem. When the excess nutrients are gone, perhaps the problem will dissipate.


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

As it happens, I did do water changes just after I scraped off the green spot.. perhaps that is why it pretty much went away afterward.

Carbon will reduce or remove the colour from the water, but it won't speed up the leaching rate, so it's only a cosmetic help. And it's not generally recommended for normal filtration, except by the filter makers who want us buying those costly inserts they make up for us !

I take it you are not feeding this tank anything at this point ? Have you tested for levels of phosphate, iron, nitrate ? If iron's good or even high, then it's reasonable to think there are plenty of other trace minerals available, and no need to add any. If phosphates are high, that can really fuel algae. This from that neat little book I mentioned. Very high nitrates are also food for algae and an imbalance of the levels of N,P,K can contribute to it as well.

How thickly planted is this tank ? I think the one thing you can do to speed up the process is stuff it with plants.The more you plant, the more competition for nutrients and the faster they get used up. At this point it's not about the final look, it's about using up excess nutrients as quickly as possible. For this purpose you want fast growing stem plants and nitrate sucking floaters. Trimming back the stem plants often will give you many more growing points, [ bushiness] and thus more growth overall. You can plant the trimmings to root, and take off their tips to make them branch faster too.

Harvesting the floaters, especially duckweed, exports the nutrients they used up for good, rather than allowing some back into the process when a mother leaf dies and decays. Each duckweed leaf can reproduce about ten times before it dies. If you don't allow them to die and decay in the tank, you'll prevent them returning nutrients to the water. Younger leaves eat more to grow and reproduce, and regularly removing any dead or dying leaves from all plants prevents them adding nutrients as they decay.

One interesting thing about duckweeds is that so long as there is adequate nitrate in their water, they'll have short roots. If the roots start to grow longer, over an inch, it's an indication of very low or no nitrates in the water.


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## pyrrolin (Jan 11, 2012)

There should be plenty of iron, I put clay in the bottom of the tank.

Might toss in some extra plants for a bit


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

Yep, clay would give you iron. It can't hurt to toss in extra plants for awhile, and if you want to shorten the time spent waiting for the soil to finish leaching it is the only thing I can think of that's likely to make much difference. 

Got any guppy grass, or hornwort ? Both are mid level floaters than suck up nutrients fairly fast. Guppy grass in particular is very good, and grows very, very fast. If you don't have it, or can't find it, I could get you some. Only issue is it does not ship especially well.. it does not like to be deprived of light for more than a couple of days at most, so it can't spend much time in the mail, and it's brittle, so it needs to be cushioned to avoid having it arrive in tiny pieces. Mind, they will all grow and give you branches, but while they are small they also tend to clog up the filter intake pretty fast. I put all the little bits of it I find into a mesh bag to help stop them clogging the filter intake. Once they get to be a few inches long they're much better, and once past six inches they usually don't get caught by the intake any more.

Might trade you some guppy for some taiwan ?


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## pyrrolin (Jan 11, 2012)

I believe I have found the source of the algae problem. I finally got a phosphate test kit last week and decided to test my older aquarium and got a reading of 1.0. Then I figured, what the hell, test the new tank and the reading is at least 2.0. This is probably the cause of the extra algae and probably from the miracle grow potting soil.

Doing a large water change right now to lower phosphates for at least a little while and removing tannins, again, at least for a little while.

Once my vals in this tank recover from bleaching, this tank should look very nice.


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

Testing is a pain, but it sure can tell us some useful things, no ? Good you got some idea of the issue.


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## pyrrolin (Jan 11, 2012)

I don't do testing very often, would be just too much to test all my tanks regularly. But if something seems to be up, I test out the tank in question. Right now I have 12 tanks going, about half only have 1 fish in them while I figure out what neons are males and what are females


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

Oh my.. well, I wish you luck with that. I wish I could fit 12 tanks in here.. but I doubt it's possible. Oh lottery gods, smile on me, please .

I get that testing regularly for many tanks is both time consuming and costly, but it's not a bad idea to do it periodically, if only to catch changes before they become obvious because some symptom shows up, whether it's algae or other plants with growth problems of one kind or another. 

If I hadn't been testing at least a couple of times a month I'd have missed the fact that one filter I had on a small tank was no longer functioning very well, which was causing the nitrates to rise higher, faster, than I'd been expecting based on earlier tests when the filter was working better. Ended up replacing the filter, but I still try to test at least a couple times a month, just to be safe.


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## pyrrolin (Jan 11, 2012)

I have finally finished my wc system. at the basement sink I have a y adapter with valves, one side goes into the sink, the other is a hose that goes to the fishroom with a shut off valve at the end also. I can set the water temp at the sink, turn off that valve and turn on valve to the hose. Go to the end of the hose, place in tank, turn on valve to fill.

to drain water, I finally got the pump I ordered weeks ago and picked up tubing. I just put the pump in a tank and the other end of the hose will either be in the floor drain or sink.

This is how a creative disabled man does wc for multiple tanks.

Only thing missing is a thermometer on the tap instead of doing it by feel.


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## BillD (Jun 5, 2006)

If you can stick an LCD thermometer onto the tap, it is an easy way to check the temp.


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

I get very frustrated at times doing WCs, because the water pressure in this building I live in is not very high, for one thing. Means I have to have both hot and cold wide open to make the Python siphon. 

Plus, whenever anyone else in the same plumbing stack that I'm using opens a tap it usually changes the temperature of the water coming out of my tap, sometimes quite drastically. It can go from cold to steaming hot in seconds. 

So even though I use a Python type gadget to do WCs in the larger tanks, I have to keep a thermometer handy, because I might end up adding water that's very different in temp to what I had going when I left the tap. 

Lugging buckets is hell, thanks to my own disabilities, but I still have to use a bucket for the small tanks because they are so far below the height of the tap, the Python won't work. The WC gadget is actually an Aqueon, not a Python. 

Main difference is you can add another tube to the Aqueon and have the water that's being pumped out of the tank diverted into a bucket, rather than all go down the drain. My house plants enjoy fish tank water very much, so I don't like to run it all down the drain. Wish I had a basement and a fish room with it's own tap and sink.. that would be heavenly.


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## pyrrolin (Jan 11, 2012)

I have a couple tanks I have to do manually, a 2.5 on main floor which isn't a problem and a 37 gallon in my son's room which very rarely gets a wc, poor fish.


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## Fishfur (Mar 4, 2012)

Sometimes life just fails to cooperate with our issues, huh ?


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## pyrrolin (Jan 11, 2012)

can't win them all


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## Sameer (Sep 30, 2007)

pyrrolin said:


> I believe I have found the source of the algae problem. I finally got a phosphate test kit last week and decided to test my older aquarium and got a reading of 1.0. Then I figured, what the hell, test the new tank and the reading is at least 2.0. This is probably the cause of the extra algae and probably from the miracle grow potting soil.
> 
> Doing a large water change right now to lower phosphates for at least a little while and removing tannins, again, at least for a little while.
> 
> Once my vals in this tank recover from bleaching, this tank should look very nice.


Are you speaking of 10:1 ratio? nitrate to phosphate? Im not an expert but here a thread I made, I hope it helps.

http://www.plantedtank.net/forums/showthread.php?t=324338&highlight=

Then again, I dont know how accurate my test kits were.


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## pyrrolin (Jan 11, 2012)

it was just phosphates from the potting soil that made the levels too high and caused algae


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