Went with a 5/32" bit tonight and bored out all 30 holes on the spray bar tonight (thank you for the help
@Immortal1)
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Noticeable difference for sure, helped a lot but still some stuff getting buffeted around. Probably going up across all 30 again tomorrow by another 1/32"; if it's still not the effect I'm looking for after that, maybe add 3 holes to the back angled down as well, evenly spaced across the whole bar.
Looks like I'll need to do some trimming of old growth and more gda leaf scrubbing as well tomorrow, and get some more tests on the water colum to gauge how quick I'm going through nutrients and exactly how much the PO4 adsorption has slowed down.
From the maintenance session the other day to clean up the massive gda bloom (thoroughly enjoyed turning my dining room into a workshop for the day):
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Can't stress enough how important thinking things out is. I redid my entire water change system while I was preparing for this tank and I really put alot into it. I hooked up a 20ft long garden hose with basically a ball valve on the output end; the other end is just screwed into the cold water out from washer hookup (after a y-splitter which also splits to the RO unit's source line)
The thought was, initially flooding the tank to start the dark cycling process would be done with tap. No use making RO for that. More importantly, for heavy maintenance or uprooting sessions, which hopefully are rare because that's alot of upset all at once for anyone's ecosystem, having that hose feed tap into the tank while siphoning out at a roughly equal rate is enormously helpful.
I did this after scraping all the algae off the glass, giving the sub a heavy vacuum, and individually toothbrush scrubbing algae off leaves. It went from 830am until 630pm. I was then able to do what I'm super roughly estimating at a 4-500% water change to clear out all the algae left floating in the water column after scrubbing. The results have been great so far, and today a little is starting to come back. Maybe switching to 2x wc a week to be on the safe side and get the rest of this algae outbreak gone.
My thoughts on what caused the algae bloom in the first place:
Bear with me here. Sure it could absolutely be normal startup stuff. However...
I know (from second hand experience, as this is my first time messing with getting N from urea) that dosing urea is generally best done on a system with a mature biofilter. My guess is that I may have jumped the gun; when my nitrates bottomed out a couple weeks back, I knew I had to start dosing some kind of N. What's the harm, I thought to myself, it's cycled, it'll handle a measly 360mg dose per day.
I'm hypothesizing that jumping the gun on urea dosing was a catalyst for algae already present (as algae always is) to temporarily win the fight for nutrients against my plant mass. But, I have some evidence to lend support to this idea.
I was away for a couple days when the tank got worse with gda (aint that always the way lol) and my brother was keeping me updated with pics. I tested when I got home to confirm my own suspicions: ahh, higher NH4 than when I left. Around 0.5ppm. If you look back on the log of testing I've been doing every couple days, I've sat at 0.25ppm for awhile, and I've had lights and co2 at the same level since the tank was planted, and pretty much had no algae with only very, very minor melt.
So this tells me something may have bumped ammonia up a little bit, possibly urea. Now with the bump up in ammonia came an uncorrelated NO3 reading: 0ppm, or at least an undetectable amount from the test. So what does that tell me? Well, in my mind, that seems like the cycle took a slight bump from raised NH4 suddenly and, being a fragile and new biofilter, stalled out a little bit. Otherwise, I'd have that NH4 being converted into NO3 well within a 24hr period. The absence of that tells me the cycle took a little bump and stalled and floundered a little bit, although it doesn't seem like anything permanent.
How I would love to know if I would've continued algae free if I'd skipped on urea and instead opted to start dosing N from KNO3 instead; but that's not for me to know
the end result is that now I'll be scrubbing gda for a little bit, and my substrate is green. Oh well.
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Things looking a lot better with some cleaning
If you catch it in that pic, did some bulb rearranging with help from
@Burr740 @GreggZ and Ted K, who've all been giving me good feedback on how different brands and spectrums will work together, and lending a critically more experienced eye to things for someone who's running this sort of fixture for the first time. The new combo, front to back:
- Giesemann Superflora
- Giesemann Tropic
- PowerVeg 660nm
- AgroMax 3000K
- PowerVeg 420nm
- Giesemann Purple
In the pic below I have the channel running the Tropic and 3000K turned down about 10% lower than the rest, I upped them a little since then but it's a very subtle difference. I like this rendition alot better than what the previous combo gave me:
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Random notes:
- Hopefully the garra start munching on some substrate algae when they come, you can still see what's on the substrate if you look close enough in this pic and it's pretty brutal.
- S. repens has taken the biggest hit out of all of the plants with the ammonia spike strangely enough
- Switched to KNO3 for N on my last waterchange
- If I'm still doing 2x week or more frequent wc on my tank come tuesday I will have to make sure I'm careful, I killed two otos the other day not thinking about the fact that running from my coldwater tap change >100% meant that my water was going into the tank ice cold, not heated from the RO reservoirs
- I have a syngonanthus sp in here that I got from an unnamed hobbyist without an ID, I've never kept uaupes (sp?) but it looks similar. Same leaf structure as macrocaulon but different plant. There's also a group of erio in there (peeking out behind the bigger iguazu) that I do not know.
- Do alot of these groups look dead and ugly? Yes! But--look at all that new growth!!
most noticeable on the tulu tops. Game plan here is to try to push these as far as they'll go as far as new growth that's adjusted to this tank, and then it'll be a vicious session of ripping out old, unadjusted growth, to start everything over as close to 100% adjusted for this tank's parameters.
Coming this Tuesday:
- 4x Herbertaxelrodi (2 pair)
- 4x M. Boesemani (2 pair)
- 4x M. Trifasciata 'Goyder River' (mixed sex)
- 4x M. Mairasi, finally
- 3x Garra flavatra
they've been bopping around in there for awhile now though and all looks well. Well, besides those crazy nuisance algae issues 
but I believe cyano is something that usually needs a little bit of a helping hand to get going at least initially. I also tried API algaefix just to test out if any of this was hair algae...the product was originally recommended to me by Raj a long time ago specifically for hair algae, and if someone like Raj says something I usually listen to it. It immediately eradicated a small hair algae outbreak for me in a different tank, but in this tank has had absolutely no noticeable effect. Does that rule out that some of this is hair algae? I doubt it, but it's noteworthy. 
I'm going off others' experience with that one, I've never dealt with cyano myself before. I was googling some pics of freshwater cyano though and there's definitely a few that show it that way, less common than the stereotypical blue green slime mat pics...not too sure, you know what the quality of a lot of info out there is like lol. Even worse when it comes to algae ID and potential causes.
