From my experience over the past half year only way to deal with the diatoms is to keep your water changes up and scrub everything down. Regarding methods of cleaning fun your props of the brown algae really no complicated process here Just get a sponge or a dish wash scrubbed and go to town scrubbing off the diatoms of the props. I myself didn’t use any soap just warm water. I don’t believe leaving the props outside of the tank will help with the growth of the diatoms at all, as the diatoms are growing due to the new chemistry of the water of the tank itself. So you can leave the props out for half a year if you want then try to put them back in to avoid having to scrub them down, but there really isn’t a way around diatoms it’s normal for all tanks to have the issue early on and time is the only thing to fix it. Lucky for you your tank isn’t too large cleaning the props shouldn’t be too hard of a task, here’s a pic of my tank. all the rocks you see used to be covered with diatoms every week i’d have to take everything out to scrub down but thank god the diatoms have stopped growing back
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