Let me just say this has been the single most frustrating thing I've ever had to deal with in fish keeping. What a pain!
I've been battling bba for about a year and a half in 3 tanks. Two of them planted and one hard-scaped.
I spent hours online researching and tried pretty much everything under the sun. And ultimately nothing worked, had a little temporary success with some things like peroxide and excell but, yeah just temporarily. In fact, those two things made things much worse.
But After all of that trial and error and losing a lot of plants in the process I finally figured out how to fix it, and what's more important, what caused it.
I just wanted to share this as I know this is super common and theres a lot of bad advice online.
Basically it all boiled down to having carbon fluctuations in my tank and not quarantining new plants before introducing them. In addition to that, I had also started using excel to have faster plant growth so that made things much worse.
Here's the thing with excel and why I'm never using it again:
Excel (or any other carbon source) on it's own is great for certain plants, faster or richer growth and even keeping some algae strains at bay. But the problem starts when you miss a day of dosing, or you accidentally pour a little too much or too little. That's when the balance starts changing and bba makes an appearance.
Then you start over dosing, or maybe injecting excel directly on plants to burn off some bba. And yeah, excel does kill it when it goes on it directly. But you also end up adding an irregular amount in the tank while doing so. Which seems to fix it temporarily but then a few weeks later it comes back with a vengeance.
This is also why extra water changes dont help at all. they just dilute the nutrients present in the tank and make it more unstable. (good for the fish, but terrible for the plants and your bba problem).
Now I'm not saying this is the only sure fire solution, but it definitely worked for me on three different tanks; all with different parameters, lights and one without plants.
* I stopped dosing completely; no carbon or supplements.
* stopped messing with extra water changes
*minimized feeding, but not too much.
* turned the lights off completely for 4 days (only ambient light) and then set my lights to be on for only 7 hours total.
One hour in the morning to see my tank while getting ready for work and then back on at night after coming home.
Within two and a half weeks of doing this the bba started dying on it's own. I waited to give the tank a good scrape and trimming the worst looking leaves as I did a water change, and that was the real turning point.
Bba did not come back and the plants were finally able to regrow and fight back.
Now I'm back to normal and dosing ferts sparingly. No carbon tho lol
View attachment 1361581
I've been battling bba for about a year and a half in 3 tanks. Two of them planted and one hard-scaped.
I spent hours online researching and tried pretty much everything under the sun. And ultimately nothing worked, had a little temporary success with some things like peroxide and excell but, yeah just temporarily. In fact, those two things made things much worse.
But After all of that trial and error and losing a lot of plants in the process I finally figured out how to fix it, and what's more important, what caused it.
I just wanted to share this as I know this is super common and theres a lot of bad advice online.
Basically it all boiled down to having carbon fluctuations in my tank and not quarantining new plants before introducing them. In addition to that, I had also started using excel to have faster plant growth so that made things much worse.
Here's the thing with excel and why I'm never using it again:
Excel (or any other carbon source) on it's own is great for certain plants, faster or richer growth and even keeping some algae strains at bay. But the problem starts when you miss a day of dosing, or you accidentally pour a little too much or too little. That's when the balance starts changing and bba makes an appearance.
Then you start over dosing, or maybe injecting excel directly on plants to burn off some bba. And yeah, excel does kill it when it goes on it directly. But you also end up adding an irregular amount in the tank while doing so. Which seems to fix it temporarily but then a few weeks later it comes back with a vengeance.
This is also why extra water changes dont help at all. they just dilute the nutrients present in the tank and make it more unstable. (good for the fish, but terrible for the plants and your bba problem).
Now I'm not saying this is the only sure fire solution, but it definitely worked for me on three different tanks; all with different parameters, lights and one without plants.
* I stopped dosing completely; no carbon or supplements.
* stopped messing with extra water changes
*minimized feeding, but not too much.
* turned the lights off completely for 4 days (only ambient light) and then set my lights to be on for only 7 hours total.
One hour in the morning to see my tank while getting ready for work and then back on at night after coming home.
Within two and a half weeks of doing this the bba started dying on it's own. I waited to give the tank a good scrape and trimming the worst looking leaves as I did a water change, and that was the real turning point.
Bba did not come back and the plants were finally able to regrow and fight back.
Now I'm back to normal and dosing ferts sparingly. No carbon tho lol
View attachment 1361581
