Algae in ACF tank

[Gemma]

I still struggle with diatoms in my 40B tank and it's been running since last September.

Has nothing to do with light, you added sand which contains silica which diatoms eat. They will eventually starve themselves to death. Just keep cleaning it up and it will go away.

Me too, I can't seem to get rid of it in one of my other tanks too that's been running since September. That one doesn't bother me so much because the tank is smaller so easier to clean. What confuses me is the light definitely affects it in that tank. If I clean it off everything and turn the lights off it doesn't come back. As soon as I turn the lights on again, it starts to grow back.

The day my lights broke in my 180L tank, I cleaned it off the glass and it hasn't grown back. That was 6 days ago so there's still time, but when the lights were on and I did this patches of it were appearing in the glass within a day or two of cleaning it off.

[Felis]

Hi,

diatoms are pretty common in new tanks, but it´s true that they aren´t restricted to them.
I also have some in my ACF-tank which is running since July 2012- without any further problems. Although they´re ugly to look at, I think a low abundance is not a major problem. In the beginning, I also had quite many, but most of them vanished within the first three months. Now, I can successfully reduce them to an acceptable level by scrubbing the walls of the tank every two or three weeks with the regular (weekly) water changes. In my tank, they mainly occur on those parts of the walls that get a few hours of sunlight in the afternoon.