What is the tan layer in my substrate ???

[crashnburn55]

11 hours ago, ChefConfit said:

I've removed stems and treated with h2o2 with pretty good success without loosing a lot of plants. I've also found spot treating with h2o2 works better for me than excel. 

So you removed the whole stemmed plant, treated and then replanted the plant?  I read somewhere that some painted/sprayed the H2O2 and left on for 5-7 mins then put back into water.  Was that similar to what you did?  Did you do the H2O2 treatments daily?  For how many consecutive days did you need to treat your BBA infested plant with H2O2?

[ChefConfit]

Filled a small container 25% peroxide 75% water then left the plants submerged except for their roots for awhile. Most instructions online say 15-20 minutes. Not sure how long I did as I was rescaping my tank and just left them in until I was ready for them. Then I rinsed them in clean water as I put them back in the tank.

I however made the mistake of stopping there. You should still treat the tank as if there's a minor outbreak for awhile after getting rid of all visible BBA or it will come back. Frequent large water changes reduced light and tightly controlled nutrients. 

[crashnburn55]

On 2/9/2021 at 8:01 AM, ChefConfit said:

Filled a small container 25% peroxide 75% water then left the plants submerged except for their roots for awhile. Most instructions online say 15-20 minutes. Not sure how long I did as I was rescaping my tank and just left them in until I was ready for them. Then I rinsed them in clean water as I put them back in the tank.

I however made the mistake of stopping there. You should still treat the tank as if there's a minor outbreak for awhile after getting rid of all visible BBA or it will come back. Frequent large water changes reduced light and tightly controlled nutrients. 

I hope my newly inserted plants consume some of the nitrates (to try get nitrates to 20 ppm) because the treated tap water that I refill the tank with has  40 ppm of nitrates to start with so I usually can't get below 40.  If I use my RO water, the pH is pretty low at 6.6.  So I usually have to do a 60 tap/40 RO mix to keep the pH of my tank around 7.8.  Big conundrum.  

I will try to continue larger weekly water changes and more tightly control the nutrient levels.  Do you think 50% intensity lighting on a Fluval 3.0 for 8 hrs a day is not too high?

[ChefConfit]

What are you keeping that needs such high pH? Most plants and fish in the hobby prefer close to neutral. 

[crashnburn55]

10 hours ago, ChefConfit said:

What are you keeping that needs such high pH? Most plants and fish in the hobby prefer close to neutral. 

Actually nothing specifically, but the parameters of my tap water are:

pH: 8.0, Nitrate: 40 ppm, GH: 30 ppm, KH: 240 ppm, Phosphate: 1-2 ppm

The parameters of my RO waters are: 

pH: 6.6, Nitrate: 0 ppm, GH: 30 ppm, KH: 0ppm, Phosphate: 2 ppm

I currently have guppies and glo-fish tetras, cherry shrimp, amano shrimp, and nerite snails.  Planning, at some point, to add Corys, neon tetras and hillstream loaches.

I do want a pH of 7.0 but my RO filter won't support the large water changes that I need to make for my 60 gallon tank (especially now that I have to do it more frequently with the algae issues) so I have to go with majority of water changes with tap and some RO (right now closer to 70/30 split) to not have it quite so high a pH.