Geez. I'm disagreeing with you twice in one day. Using 4wpg and up
didn't come into fashion until Takashi Amano's work becaue popular.
Sure, you need 4wpg to grow riccia tied to a rock or a lawn of Glosso at
the bottom of a 55 gallon tank! However, according to Greg Watson and
Tom Barr, (and my own experience) 2 wpg is considered the maximum for a
non-CO2 tank, and reasonable for CO2.

http://www.gregwatson.com/NonCO2PlantedAquarium.htm
http://www.rubick.com/aquarium/thomas_barr - see the Lower light CO2
method bit at the bottom.

I am not sure Japan beat Germany to the HID lamp race. seems to me the Dupla
folks were the ones that popularized it a decade earlier. But it did seem like
only a few years after finding out about Dupla that Japanese bulbs began being
discussed. At that time too peope were also playing with Mercury vapour lamps
and there was some guy here who ignored everybodys protests about being the wrong
color light, went ahead and did it and have garbage bgs full of plants to give away.
But I digress.

You don't HAVE to have CO2 to use 4wpg. You could use flourish Excel (I do)
and/or have floating plants. A 50% cover of floating plants will give you both
good srog light but something that will take over and cut it out of things get
out of hand, that is the floating plants will go nuts rather than any algae.

I've had 5wpg over a 50gal tank since November. So far no problems. No Co2, occasional
Excel use, 10% floating plant cover. It gets some sunlight too although not bloody much
this time of the year. Lemme see if I can get some pics up of it today. Barr's EI
is all I do for ferts, although I'm tending more towards Booth's idea of daily ferts as I
can see in the crypt leaves on what days they were fertilized - thee's a slight growth
spurt/curl. Maybe once a day isn/t even enough? Half strength feeindgs twice a day maybe?

I believe OP's problem is simply that the tank is cycling.

Yup. A dose of Flourish Excel will hurt it too, but now you need change even
more water as all that dead algae will produce ammonia which guess what, makes
more algae.

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