Habitat - Indoor :: Black Algae control

[callussun]

Hi,
I have a 55 gallon fishtank with 2 medium sized RES and 6 goldfish that survived from a bunch of feeder fish I put in when the turtles were small, together with a Chinese algae eater and a flying fox to clean the green algae in tank. I also have a lot of rocks and fake plants in the tank to make it nice.

I am filtering the tank with Rena XP3 with one whole basket of pads (came with it), a basket of ceramics, carbon and purigen, a micro-filtration pad.

With this setup, I usually don't have problem with green algae. However, black algae will slowly grow and spread to all the fake plants and rocks. They are very hard to get rid of. The only effective solution I found to get black algae off the fake plants and rocks is to soak them in high concentration bleach. But then it's very hard to get the bleach totally cleaned from them. Some of my gold fish died because I put them in a barrel that I used to soak the plants and rocks, which I flushed with tap water a few times before putting the fish in, while I was doing a full clean up of the tank.

I have to do the full clean up 2 times a year to get rid of the black algae. This is quite painful. Now I got a baby to take care of. It's getting harder to keep the turtles.

After reading the posts in this forum, I guess what I can do is to put more bio-media into the filter and clean the filter more often (I clean it about every 1~2 months), replace the carbon with purigen (I never replaced the carbon pad), and replace the micro-filtration pad (I never replaced it before).

I wonder if there are any inexpensive methods that I can do to control the black algae? Is there a better way to remove black algae from plastic plants and rocks than bleach?

Thanks very much for any help!

[steve]

What about prevention by limiting the amount of light and nutrients they get?

Carbon and Purigen have overlapping features, and you should at least use carbon.

[callussun]

Because Purigen needs to be bleached for 24 hours, sometimes I don't have purigen in the filter due to this. I will get another purigen to exchange.
Carbon needs replacement, I guess I will switch to Purigen alone.

What about prevention by limiting the amount of light and nutrients they get?

Carbon and Purigen have overlapping features, and you should at least use carbon.

[steve]

Carbon removes chlorine and chloramines which Purigen does not. If you buy carbon in bulk, it will be much cheaper. How is the media layout in your XP3?

[devilduck]

I also have issues with black brush algae in my tank. This stuff is tough an resists pretty much everything you can throw at it. It's the cockroach of the algae world.

Purigen and fresh carbon helps slow their growth but once you get it, without a complete tank tear down and disinfection, it will always return as their spores are microscopic. I would remove the microfiltration pad in your filter, in a turtle tank it gets clogged way too fast.

Instead of bleach you can soak your plants in drug store hydrogen peroxide. It will kill the algae so it can be easily wiped off and unlike bleach breaks down completely in no time in the presence of light and some aeration.

After cleaning you might want to cut down on the amount of time you have your lights on to limit it's growth, I find that less than 6 hours of tank light works great. You can have your basking and heat lamps on longer if you position it so that it only hits your basking area and none of your tank decorations.

[callussun]

Hydrogen peroxide seems the way to go. I did some research about it and find someone treating black algae with hydrogen peroxide directly using a syringe without removing anything from the tank:
http://www.malawicichlidhomepage.com/aq ... oxide.html
This is quite exciting news! No more bleach! No more whole tank cleaning! I will definitely try it next time I see any black algae.

Thank you so much for the suggestion!

I also have issues with black brush algae in my tank. This stuff is tough an resists pretty much everything you can throw at it. It's the cockroach of the algae world.

Purigen and fresh carbon helps slow their growth but once you get it, without a complete tank tear down and disinfection, it will always return as their spores are microscopic. I would remove the microfiltration pad in your filter, in a turtle tank it gets clogged way too fast.

Instead of bleach you can soak your plants in drug store hydrogen peroxide. It will kill the algae so it can be easily wiped off and unlike bleach breaks down completely in no time in the presence of light and some aeration.

After cleaning you might want to cut down on the amount of time you have your lights on to limit it's growth, I find that less than 6 hours of tank light works great. You can have your basking and heat lamps on longer if you position it so that it only hits your basking area and none of your tank decorations.

[callussun]

One of the followers of this method got some fatalities. I guess I would remove my fish and turtles from the tank before doing this. Catching the flying fox and Chinese algae eater will be quite a challenge...

Hydrogen peroxide seems the way to go. I did some research about it and find someone treating black algae with hydrogen peroxide directly using a syringe without removing anything from the tank:
http://www.malawicichlidhomepage.com/aq ... oxide.html
This is quite exciting news! No more bleach! No more whole tank cleaning! I will definitely try it next time I see any black algae.

Thank you so much for the suggestion!

I also have issues with black brush algae in my tank. This stuff is tough an resists pretty much everything you can throw at it. It's the cockroach of the algae world.

Purigen and fresh carbon helps slow their growth but once you get it, without a complete tank tear down and disinfection, it will always return as their spores are microscopic. I would remove the microfiltration pad in your filter, in a turtle tank it gets clogged way too fast.

Instead of bleach you can soak your plants in drug store hydrogen peroxide. It will kill the algae so it can be easily wiped off and unlike bleach breaks down completely in no time in the presence of light and some aeration.

After cleaning you might want to cut down on the amount of time you have your lights on to limit it's growth, I find that less than 6 hours of tank light works great. You can have your basking and heat lamps on longer if you position it so that it only hits your basking area and none of your tank decorations.