Flourish Excel VS CO2 Injection

[Mathman]

Thank you for taking the time to read this post.

I recently (3weeks ago) took many of my plants out of my tank to replace them with new ones. The gravel was moved around and for hours my tank look almost like chocolate. Lately, I have noticed hair algae on my plants. I inject CO2 and the KH is 6ppm and the Ph is around 7.3. I dose flourish excel every other day. Any suggestions what the best Ph would be for a reading of KH 6ppm? Or should I be using more excel? Please help. thank you.:(

[White Worm]

High nitrates or high/long lighting periods can help algae if you are not heavily planted. Try reducing the hours of light during the day. Black out for a day or two. Do 50% water change.

[Chad Hughes]

If you are injecting your tank with CO2, your target pH should be about 6.8.

Other factors, as mentioned by white worm, are high lighting/too long photperiod, high nitrate, high phosphate and general nutrient inbalance will all cause/contribute to the growth of algae.

[discuspaul]

As Chad indicated, a number of things could be contributing. But your change-over was quite recent, so give it some further time, and with your continued use of CO2 (and Excel, although that may not be necessary with CO2), things should settle down with a little more time. If your nitrates are testing somewhat high, increase the frequency and/or amount of your wc's. I would gradually remove as much hair algae as you can by hand, clipping/removing plant leaves that have this growth on them. Eventually it should disappear. I had a similar problem once, did more or less what you have so far been advised to do, including the manual removal, and it soon disappeared, never to return since then.

[billybob]

Do you dose ferts as well?

Regarding CO2 vs Excel, if you are using CO2, you can do away with Excel. Its much more expensive than CO2, but its much more convenient, so whichever one suits you best.

[Mathman]

I thank all of you for your responses. I use seachem's flourish and sachems flourish excel. I did a 30% WC and added 7 caps of excel, I cut the light to 7 hours and trim any leave with a lot of hair algae on them. Right now I'm simply waiting to see what results I get. I have two eheim filters forgot which models but they are the professional 2 one with two compartments and the other one with three. Right now I have ceramic and biological media on the big filter. Any suggestions on what to put on the small one? Maybe denitrate, phosguard? Carbon? Thanks