Issues With Plants And With Algae

I've tried reading as many threads here and guides elsewhere as I can, but I can't make this work for me and it's really starting to put me off of keeping fish. Hopefully people here can help my address my specific problems and I can get on with the tank again!

PLANTS

I've never had much luck with plants, my experience has been of the "buy them, watch them slowly die, replace them" variety, but once I got settled into my new house I decided it was time to give it another go and try to really get to grips with my fish tank.

I don't even know what kind of plants I have, but they were all bought as plants that didn't need to be kept in special substrate and could be either grown on ornaments (or came attached to ornaments) or would float in the tank. I've attached photos of my plants, there are three pieces of what I think is Amazon Frogbit, two of the broad-leafed plant and three of the narrow-leafed plant (Java Fern, perhaps?).

The Amazon Frogbit looks like it's disintegrating and the leaves turn a yellow colour before becoming detached.

The broad-leafed plant has holes in it and looks like it's being nibbled. I've seen articles advising that such holes indicate a lack of phosphorus, but I dose once a week with Easy-Life ProFito, which claims to be everything the plants need, so I should hope it's not down to a lack of nutrients.

The narrow-leafed plant has brown patches on some of the leaves. I'm not sure what this means but when I see other people's photos, their plants are green, not brown, so I'm assuming it's a bad sign.

ALGAE

From online guides, I've identified my algae problems to be green spot algae. It's on the glass and on the tank decor - I haven't noticed it on plants or wood, but it grows on two fake rocks I have in the tank, along with my heater and filter. I've been dosing with Easy-Life AlgExit which claims to work on almost all forms of green algae. It doesn't appear to be doing anything so far, but I'm still dosing when I clean the tank because I figure I might as well. I have to wipe the glass every week and every few weeks there's a big clean to scrub off as much of the algae as I can, but it just comes back every time.

GENERAL

The tank is in the conservatory. I usually keep the blinds shut, so it doesn't get direct sunlight, but the room does get a lot of natural light when the weather permits. There's an air stone in the tank, and the lights are on from 8-10 in the morning and 4-8 in the evening. I do one 50% water change each week (and when I've really gone to town on scrubbing the algae, this gets up to about 75%) and use Tetra AquaSafe when changing the water, along with the ProFito and AlgExit above. I feed daily in the evening and don't overfeed - everything gets eaten, there isn't anything left sitting around.

The tank contains 7 panda cories, about ten amano shrimp and 1 cockatoo apisto. Nitrites and ammonia read zero with the API liquid test kit, and nitrate is in the 20-40ppm region, which is the same as my tap water. The pH is about 7.6 and my water hardness is 6.66dH.

Algae thrives, plants do not, fish/shrimp seem fine. Any ideas?

Hi FCMF, thanks for your support and response.

The tank is an Aquael Leddy 60 (60x30x30) and it's the Aquael "Sunny" 6W LED light that came with it and a simple sponge filter. There's no day/night mode, it's just white light as far as I understand it.

With what you've said about scraping the leaves, is that something I should do? Will the brown patches on the fern scrape off? I've always been wary of touching the plants for fear of damaging them, and as most of mine tend to be sickly, I've had leaves just come off in my hands when moving them before...

Mine is the Sunny with only white LEDs, it's the one that came with the tank when it was bought.

If the plants were happier and healthier, would they stop some of the algae growth? Or would swapping to the plant light result in the algae grown even more rampantly too?

Most of my plants were bought online, but the forgbit came from an aquatics shop, where it was growing quite happily in a large tropical tank with a mixture of tropical fish, so I'm inclined to believe the plant isn't at fault as much as it's the tank instead.

Even if the other fertilisers are better, shouldn't the fertiliser I add be helping in some way? I can't really see any difference at all in the plants in the tank (and I've been dosing for about 7-8 weeks now) and beforehand they weren't being given anything at all.

Healthy plants do indeed out compete algae...

Down to business though - I believe your issues relate to having too much light - green spot algae indicates too much light and the fact your tank is in the conservatory also concerns me greatly. Appreciate you try and keep direct light of it but really I think the crux of this is despite your best efforts the issue here is that the tank needs to be relocated to resolve your issues. The fact that your are lighting the tank outside of the natural daylight period also means that your lighting duration in effect is too long 8 till 8 ie 12 hours when I would want to aim for more like 8 hours altogether.

I would highly recommend you do a blackout to get the tank back on track  wrap it tightly so no light can get in and leave for three days - no peaking, no feeding the fish, no nothing. This will lead to the demise of the algae but the plants will more happily wait for the next ‘day’ to arrive.

From your photos I can see anubias and Java Fern - neither should ever be planted in the substrate they rot if the base is planted and should always be attached to decor.

Are the floating plants getting condensation dripping onto them or being submerged by the filter flow? These are the most common issues I see with them.

I wouldn’t worry about your fertilisation and potential deficiencies too much - slow growing plants in general here at the moment so nothing should get used up too quickly. I do think it would help massively for you to get something like elodea which is a fast growing super easy plant to help out compete the algae going forwards too. It needs no special treatment - chuck some in and let it get to work.

Thanks everyone for the further replies.

@fcmf - I had a look for the "Plant" LED light yesterday after Sue first mentioned it and couldn't find one that would fit my tank. I had intended to look again more thoroughly, but your comments are matching my suspicions.

@Matt

I've added some more photos, one of the tank with the light on and one without. Right now, it's a bit overcast here but otherwise quite bright and probably a fair indication of what the room's been like recently. I call it a conservatory, but it's a bit tacked on to the end of the kitchen with solid walls on either side, half-walls and double doors on the end and a polycarbonate sheet roof. The tank's positioned on the wall that gets the least direct light (due to the house next door) and as mentioned, blinds are generally closed. It's not a big glass conservatory letting in lots of light on all sides. I've got backing paper on the rear of the tank and on the side facing the windows to cut down on light entering the tank, too.

Perfection isn't the goal. I've always had to clean off bits of algae before now and that's never been a problem, but the amount I'm having to clean now is a problem. My tank maintenance used to take about half an hour on a good day, and a fair bit of that was spent waiting for water to be drained out of the tank and for kettles to boil, but yesterday took over two hours by comparison. As you said in your first message, healthy plants will out-compete algae - that's the goal here. I bought the amano shrimp a couple of years ago to help control algae but it's clearly overwhelming them.

I've wrapped the tank in a blanket and turned off the lights. I'll open it back up on Wednesday morning and hope for the best! I have also bought some bunches of elodea densa that'll arrive later in the week to help the situation.

The floating plants didn't have condensation on their leaves this morning when I checked, and I don't recall seeing this previously. The filter output is at water level, so it doesn't force anything under the surface, it just pushes them around instead.

Out of interest, what happens to the fish/shrimp during blackout? I've skipped feeding before now when moving or introducing new fish, but only ever for a day at most. Do they enter a sort of "hibernation" mode due to the darkness? Will they be ravenous come Wednesday as they're not getting fed for three days?

Sorry double posting again... it’s important that we also identify the root cause of the issues you are experiencing and tackle these too or the issue will reoccur. Can you cast your mind back to what has changed since you were doing less maintenance on the tank vs now. Something must have changed to cause the algae growth...

I’m still of the thinking that the conservatory is the problem to be honest - the issues your are experiencing all point me towards too much light - or indeed equally it could be too much low light availability time outside the main lighting period - low light levels encourage algae which can thrive on lower light levels as they are simpler organisms than the more complex plants.

Fingers crossed!

Yep - to be clear, it’s the horisontal bit that joins the leaves (The rhizome) near the base rather than the ‘roots’ (which are incidentally not really like most roots but that’s for another day) that need to be above the substrate