Toughest challenges, and what finally worked (or not).

[Yugang]

Many of us have experienced really tough prolonged challenges with a tank, sometimes finding the solution after many tries and many months, sometimes a reset of the tank, or worst case scenario giving up.

In this thread we welcome any experience with crashes, mass extinctions, marital crises and worse. But in any of these is a lesson for fellow hobbyists, so why not share them?

I have a few, will share them. I'm still in the hobby and continue to learn.

 

[Yugang]

I usually experiment with my tank, always trying different settings, methods and see how that works out. I keep a logbook where I note any significant events, and look back to what may have caused some change.

I've experienced a period of several months where my tank worked, but was just not as vibrant as I was used to. Some plants refused to grow, little or no pearling and it all indicated that something was wrong. I tried adding some ferts to the substrate, changed my EI dosing, suspected micros KH and GH, triple checked CO2, changed water flow, and many other unsuccessful attempts.

Finally, by pure coincidence I stumbled upon a conversation about light intensity and duration and that opened my eyes. In one of my several experiments, months earlier, I had aimed to slow down the growth of the tank, reducing not only intensity but also duration. It worked well, but I believe especially light duration has a more longer term effect on the plants, and it will take time to see the impact on plant health. As all seemed well, I had kept my lights on for 6 hours, then forgot about it.

Light period from 6 hours increased to 8, and all my tank troubles went away in no time.

The lesson I learned from this is that I can't be too disciplined with noting all changes in my tank in my logbook, so that at all times I can go back and never miss any clue what could be the problem and solution. My lighting period was my blind spot, my logbook did not trigger me, and I unsuccessfully tried everything else without realising what was really wrong.

 

[Art]

Great, great topic! Thanks for posting it.

For me, my toughest nemesis is BBA. It’s the only thing that has ever caused me to throw in the towel and restart. I’ve been keeping planted aquariums for 30+ years.

The most recent episode happened last year. I rescaped my aquarium to try something new.


I then went on an extended period of travel that caused me to neglect the tank. As I used to run a high energy tank, there is little room for error. Of course, things went off the rails in spite of my full automation.



BBA grabbed hold like I’d never seen and it didn’t let go. I tried everything - blackouts, the One Two Punch, Excel, H2O2 , Algae Fix, and tons and tons of patience. Nothing worked. You can read more about it in The Great Black Beard Algae Thread.

I finally threw in the towel and restarted.


This caused me to shift to keeping a middle earth or middle energy tank and I’ve, thankfully, not had another episode.

The moral of my story is that you need to match your aquarium to your current lifestyle. Traveling extensively and keeping a pedal to the metal, high energy tank is taking too much risk that something goes wrong, quickly.

 

[HarryL]

For me it was the staghorn algae. I've been testing the highest PAR I can push my tanks to with my weekly 20-25% water change regime. I'm lazy and don't want to change more water/more frequently, but I also enjoy the tanks nice and bright. For my 11 gallon tank, I've had it on close to maybe 200 PAR for a month, dosing the Aquarium Co-op easy green weekly with water change. Plants have been growing but not in pristine condition. Staghorn algae was covering the hair grass and hardscapes, also attacking the buce and mosses. I would sit in front of the tank daily to manually remove them, and they will just come back again.

Then I dialed down the light to half what it was for a couple weeks, continued to manually remove what I can. After another couple weeks, I can see that they are slowly going away, but not as fast as I would like. So I bought APT fixlite since it was designed to be gentle on mosses and vallisneria. Dosed once, only enough to cover heavily affected areas, on mosses and buce, less than the recommended amount for the water volume. Along with the light reduction, worked like wonder. Never had to dose a second time.

Now I have the light on maybe 80-100 PAR between 2:30pm - 4pm, 150-200 PAR between 4pm - 6:30pm, then back down to 80-100 PAR from 6:30pm - 9pm. I've been slowly increasing the PAR during the high light intensity time to see how high I can push it. With 150-200 PAR, I am starting to see some filamentous algae showing up, but no signs of staghorn yet.

Here's a before/after comparison 3 months apart.


Still haven’t been able to figure why the Vallisneria won’t grow, might be them being shaded under the drift wood, but I thought they are low light plants? Crypts thrive in the same shaded area.