Flourish Excel dosing to kill algae

[windeindoiel]

Ok so I have some algae, not sure what kind exactly. It's kind of a deep green but sort of pale in color. It's hair-like but it branches all over the place and grows really long and has covered the entire front of my tank. Very not happy.

So I want to try this whole excel dosing thing to see if that will get rid of it. Today I filled up a syringe and put excel down where the algae was, but nothing drastic and sudden happened. So how often should I do this? Does the excel actually stay where I put it? Or will dosing the whole tank do the same thing? There's not very much water movement in the tank (broken powerheads). Thanks.

[EowynJane]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought excel only worked to get rid of black beard algae. I have the same kind of algae you speak of and I don't think I've ever noticed excel help it.

Maybe check your water parameters and give it a good scrub?

[arixonbarnes]

Use some caution here. If I recall right excel will melt riccia fluitans(kill it) and if you have enough in your tank it can cause a meltdown in water quality.

[jvision]

Try dosing Excel at 2X... unless you have Riccia or Val.

Other methods for beating algae are to remove as much as possible; do a big (50%+) WC; black out tank for 3-4 days; do another big WC; dose ferts & CO2 (which should be turned off during blackout). I've had success with this method on just about every type of algae out there, including cyanobacteria.

[Vallisneria]

Try dosing Excel at 2X... unless you have Riccia or Val.

Or Anacharis(elodea), or salvinia

[windeindoiel]

Ok so I did one dose of using a syringe to put it right by the algae and then dosing the recommended amount into the whole tank. It killed the cyano I spot dosed and all the weird hair algae had turned red.

I'm injecting CO2 and have been fertilizing. And doing 10% water changes every other day.

[werner]

The next step is to dance around your tank singing "Ding, dong, the algae's dead..."

[happeboy]

I would be very careful with excel, I believe a build up in my tank killed 2 fish awhile ago. I have heard that cats and rainbows may be very susceptible to excel.

And I do not believe either that excel would help with that type algae as I still have some.

[jvision]

The main reason for doing 50%+ WCs in planted tanks is to reset everything to 'normal', so there is little chance of having a build-up of anything. That being said, 10% WC every other day may or may not be enough. There has been a lot of discussion about the difference between many small WCs as opposed to 1 big WC each week. I just stick with what's easier for me

[windeindoiel]

Well all I know is that my tank has orange strands all over it instead of green strands.

I have to do small water changes because I can only drain so much water out of the tank before the water level in the tree hollow drops to nothing and whatever's in there will be out of the water. I suppose I could take out a bit, then refill it, then take some more out and refill it. I probably will do that now and then, because I think big waterchanges are important. :P

Anyways I'm so happy the algae is dead.