Easy Green and Easy Carbon?

[Seafarer]

I have been fighting a black algae problem in my 29 gal.

I pulled the affected plants out, soaked them in a couple of gallons water from the tank and dosed it with 4 shots of Easy Carbon. I let them soak overnight and then scrubbed them clean with a tooth brush.

I changed about 1/2 of the tank water and hit it with 3 shots of Easy Carbon.

My question is can the 2 products work together or will the essentially cancel each other out? 

Is it safe to "assume" Easy Green also feeds the algae?

Thanks in advance for any help with this.

Mick

[Native Keeper]

I've heard Ghost Shrimp will eat black beard algae, might try those!

Edited January 25, 2022 by HydraSlayer

[Buckman]

If ghost shrimp ate blackbeard algae mine would be fat. And they aren't. I'm not saying they don't eat it. They just don't eliminate it in my experience.

I am struggling with Easy Carbon and Easy Green as well. I switched from Seachem recently. It works well, but Easy Green just seems to keep nitrates in the water forever. I started squirting 2 ml of Easy Green every day into a ridiculously planted tank. That worked for about a week or 10 days and then I have to back off. Half the dose...same thing happened. After a while I got an eye dropper which delivers 20 drops per ml. I laughed thinking I had just turned Easy Green into Seachem by just using an eye dropper. Nope. It doesn't act like Seachem. If you start dosing less than a ml it just takes longer. Nitrates always go up to about 50 and I have to back off for about a week.

Easy carbon helps and it is pretty safe. I too tend to put my plants in another water filled container when trimming. I put quite a few squirts on Easy Carbon while doing it. Helps quite a bit. 

I might actually go back to Seachem and dosing a lot more than I used to. Not quite sure yet. Still working it out. But this is the third time I have lowered my dose and started again only to have to shut it down again. I have gone 5 days without fertilizing and my nitrates are still 25. It's going to force me to do a water change even though nitrates are the only thing that is off.

I actually bought the equipment to make an isolated black box to grow algae in. Some people online are calling this an algae reactor? (Everything is called a reactor.) I might switch to a much lower dose of fertilizer, and try the reactor and see what happens.

But to answer your question, Easy Green grows algae and plants like crazy. Easy Carbon puts the brakes on that algae a bit but it's not 100%. However, it may be that using Easy Green almost locks you into using Easy Carbon. I never looked for a product like that until I was using Easy Green.

[Seafarer]

thanks for the quick replies.

I appreciated it.

I'm just gonna stop the Easy Green for now and use the Carbon a couple of days a week and see what happens.

thanks again

Mick

[Mmiller2001]

BBA is not linked to nutrients added to the aquarium. It's more linked to CO2 issues and overly strong flow as well as organics building up in the aquarium.

Edited January 26, 2022 by Mmiller2001

[Torrey]

I'm ORD, wanted to say thank you @Mmiller2001 for clarifying the role added nutrients play in BBA.

Mick and @Buckman may I ask your water parameters, tank size, and plant and livestock?

After watching several of Irene's videos on planted aquariums, and comparing various individuals experience with different ferts, I think I am seeing some patterns.

As of this morning, I only have one tank showing any nitrates:

When I went into surgery in November, I was doing lots of water changes to keep nitrates between 40 ppm and they would climb up to 80 ppm. If I cut back on Easy Green to reduce nitrates, plants immediately vocalized their displeasure (75% of my pearlweed, and all the duckweed died, leading up to my surgery as I was trying to dial in the tank). Once the assassin snail brought the snail population into balance, and I was able to start feeding more, plants started to come back and nitrates started dropping. As of this morning, nitrates in this tank *with* an Easy Green dose over the weekend with the water change, are 5 ppm. Now, this is my only bare bottom tank, and I don't know how much a bare bottom tank is contributing to nitrates.

The rest of my 13 tanks are 0/0/0, despite heavy feeding and Easy Green dosing. I suspect that Easy Green supplies the nutrients that are not typically found in frozen and fresh foods, and supplements the fish waste. This would be more physics and chemistry than my brain can do right now, Miller would be better at the evaluation. 

The reason I suspect that Easy Green is ideal for people primarily using frozen and live foods, is because I really didn't have a lot of problems with algae or cyanobacteria before surgery, in any of my tanks.

I was feeding more live foods at that time. 

My spouse has been helping me with feeding fish, and is more comfortable with the flake foods (Xtreme and Bug Bites) and frozen (bbs, bloodworms, spirulina, daphnia, and krill).

There haven't been any live foods since November. 

My nitrates are down to 0 (were fairly steady at 20 ppm from July to November in established tanks), and I have discovered cyanobacteria in a couple of tanks, and hair algae in others... even with nitrates at 0 ppm.

 

This is the tank with both hair algae and cyanobacteria that showed up. Now that I am back up and on my feet, I was able to manually remove most of the hair algae, and all of the cyanobacteria. 

We will see if returning to feeding live foods, and supplementing live feedings with pellets and flakes will prevent the return of the hair algae and cyanobacteria. 

Which returns us to the tank that had high nitrates.

Because it had been a grow out tank, it got Easy Fry, plus flakes well crumbled, plus live foods, and was fed 4x a day... prepared flake and powder as predominant foods... live as a supplement. 

If you have stuck with me this far, I am wondering if the combination of prepared foods and Easy Green is leading to nitrates?

Or not enough plants for the amount of Easy Green.

Because the 4' tank only has 30 gallons of water, and dosing 3 squirts every 3 to 4 days is maintaining growth and zero nitrates. If I go more than 4 days without dosing, I see evidence of plant nutrient deficiencies. 🤷‍♂️

I do keep SeaChem Flourish on hand for anytime nitrates are above 20 ppm. I simply haven't had that happen in a while. 

[Buckman]

I did read it all. Thanks for the interest.

So I'll tell you what's going on with Easy Green and you can see if it fits what you are thinking.

This is a weird aquarium. I call it a modular aquarium and I came up with this so that I could freely experiment with plants without disturbing the inhabitants too much.

Size: 20 gallon High
Filtration: Aquaclear 50 HOB that holds the crushed coral and bio media to donate to other tanks when needed,
Also have air running into a Co-Op nano sponge.
CO2: Also something I experiment with. I do not yet have a pressurized tank, but I have been doing sugar bombs that release bubbles right up into the HOB filter sponge outfitted with a PVC ring that collects it all into a big 2 inch CO2 bubble on the bottom of the sponge.
Stock: 9 harlequin rasboras, about 10 ghost shrimp, 2 corydoras, 1 female betta, and two mystery snails.
Food: I feed them a mix of Fluval bug bites, Extreme Krill, and Tetra flakes all crushed together. I sneek betta pellets to the betta occasionally. And I give the occasional 1 or 2 algae wafers broken up on the bottom.
Plants: pogostemons, lots of ludwigia, two other stem plants I cannot even remember the names of, java ferns, java moss, scarlet temple, two different kinds of anubias, a betta bulb, and probable some other stuff I cannot remember. I keep several things floating up top including trimming that need time and water lettuce.

So, the odd thing about the tank is that it was made to keep plants in pots, and allow me to experiment with placement, flow, lighting, etc. I get in there about once a week and trim things and move stuff that maybe needs different light or flow. That sand strip in the front is actually contained by a hidden box holding aqua soil. Those concrete plates cover a giant stash of lava rock in landscaping pipe socks that holds the bacteria that keeps the tank stable despite it's 'modular' nature.

In the beginning I was using Seachem, and I was pretty timid with it. I was aiming for zero nitrates the next day. Some stuff did well, but I never got lush growth. Then I started listening to the podcast and decided to give Easy Green a try.

Boom! There was the growth. And there was the lushness. And there was also a lot of algae. So I played with lighting. Less nutes. More nutes and light. All of it was a rodeo ride. The annoying thing was that my stability was gone. This was a tank where I did not have to change the water if I didn't want to. Now I am changing water weekly to get rid of nitrates and squirting more than the regular amount of Easy Carbon in. I never even looked for a product like Easy Carbon before Easy Green. So after this made my tank look junky I went on a mission to reduce Easy Green to a daily dose that doesn't end in weekly water changes due to nitrates shooting up to 50. After a while I was down to a quarter ml a day and it still ended in way too many nitrates. They seem to stack with time no matter how little you use. I have now about given up and I am letting the tank dry out. I haven't used Easy Green in 6 days and the nitrates are still about 10. This weekend is going to see another water change (maybe 50%) and then going back to Seachem.

Feeding: This is what you wanted to know about, and it is complicated, so here goes. I used to over feed this tank. Algae would get started (not because of Seachem, stopping did not help). Then a friend scolded me for over feeding. I had a bladder snail colony going that looked pretty rough. So I started measuring and being exact. So I recently (last 14 days or so) have decreased the food and the bladder snail population went down. The corydoras seem to get by just fine, but the mystery snails started to suffer and I am trying to feed them specifically. Trying boiled carrots tonight.

So, this recent problem occurred even though I was feeding very measured amounts and might have even been starving my snails a bit. Despite this and not adding fertilizer for about a week, this tank is growing algae like the green water culture I have working downstairs. I finally got my scarlet temple looking good and growing a bit taller, then I came home today to see it completely overrun by hair algae. I was so angry picking off leaves and coating the stuff in Easy Carbon in a separate container.

Yep...I'm frustrated. Does this make sense to you? Got any theories? There has got to be something between the stunted anemic growth of Seachem, and the nitrate hosing that Easy Green seems to provide. My best guess as I say is to try Seachem again and not be so timid with it. Doubling or tripling the dosage wouldn't be anything like Easy Green.