Ballyhoo
Active Member
couple weeks ago I put up a mirror in between the space from my wall and my cube. I just felt it was hard to get a good look inside the tank from that side because of the small space bw the wall, and the mirror would help so much more to get a look. I was especially happy to be able to watch my Gobi and pistol shrimp. Shortly after, well, maybe a week or two after slowly progressing I had an algae bloom. i've gone through questioning my mind all the things that might've caused an algae bloom because no specific parameter is outside of what is considered a normal limit and I just know it happened after the period of time that I placed up the mirror but I didn't realize that until last night. I never thought to think about a mirror. Also, I gave a second heater (smaller) inside the aquarium. Well, last night I saw a huge brown cyano wall on the side of the mirror, but also that is the side where second the heater is. The second heater is another issue. The first heater I bought I think it's 100 W or 150 W, my LFS told me it was fine for my 50 gallon or 52 gallon system. It never quite got me up to the temperature I thought I needed to be at. It never really got me up to above 74 or 75°F. So I added the second smaller heater and ever since then I've always had problems with my temperature being a little higher than I've wanted it to be, like hovering around 81 to 82° sometimes . I don't know if that's contributed to the algae bloom, but I've just slowly decreased the heater settings as to avoid a massive temperature of fluctuation. Any case I'm just wondering if that mirror being in between the wall and the tank, all my LED light is probably going back and reflecting from wall to tank with a huge spike in light that I was not calculating. the picture shows the mirror, but I'm taking it off during the day now for sure. am I overthinking and the mirror would have nothing to do with this
All new aquaria develop algae no matter what you do or add.
