What I love about usenet newsgroups is that you can ask a question and
then read the discussion.

william kossack wrote:

After running a 65 gallon free water planted tank for a year I got tired
of buying plants and decided that maybe my 40 watt florecent light was
not enough light to keep amazon swords growing (unfortunately most local
stores sell large numbers of sword plants and not much else). When we
would buy new plants they would live but not really grow and we would
eventually have to replace them as the leaves got chewed up.

I upgraded my lights to a pair of 55 watt florecent lights from
ahsupply.com and bam! Everything was covered with algae. I also started
using a mineral supplement someones recommendation. I live in Denver
and I think they implied the need for more iron than the local tap water
would provide.

I'd been doing normal water changes and I did not think my nitrate was
too high but I decided to increase to daily water changes to get the
nitrate down further (it started at about 20 ppm and its now about 5ppm
and falling).

The amount of algae is less but it is still present. All of the old
plants took a real hit from the algae. I had some long filiments along
all the edges of the plants. It looked almost red in color. However
that stuff is gone as well as the leaves that it was groing on.

I've introduced algae eating shrimp, a few different smaller algae
eaters and even an apple snail (my clown loaches gobble up anything
smaller than an apple snail).

However most of the plants have a green covering of fuzzy algae and some
new plants look like they are getting it also.

Should I continue with the water changes? How low should I bring the
nitrates down? Or should I take other measures to get my display tank
back in line?