hair alage/ live rock

u mike

Member
Again I have to clean my rock & power heads. Just when you think it is under control you get a major out break of hair alage. To get everyone caught up I have been fighting this problem for a while now. yes I am using ro/di water, feeding very little,have cut lights back also,using phosphate pads,I am waiting for things to change in the wallet so I can get a skimmer,start a refugium, just can't seem to slow this down. When I was at lfs to get my water today we talked about this , we are thinking since I wasn't able to get water from them for a while I did no water changes ( about 2 weeks )Wed will do 15 gal water change scrub the alage off a try to mantain it .
 

mpdan

Member
I was having a problem with hair algea as well in fact the whole back piece of glass in my tank was covered in the stuff then i picked up a foxface 3 days the tank is clean no hair algea if a little spot comes up he eats it best addition to my tank ever
 

nyceltic

Member
I recently added a 20 gallon refugium, plumbed into my DT and have Chaeto and DSB, and I don't know if it is the main reason but the algae growth in my DT has been drastically reduced.
In my reef the snails do a great job - Not perfect but very very good
 

yellowmach

Member
Dude I battled the evil algae for 6 months...don't give up! I finally eradicated it (but not before it smothered my fav frogspawn to death). Here's what I did for my 29 biocube:
I bought about 10 mexican turbos, 20 margaritas, 2 tiger snails and 3 electric blue hermits to bolster my cleaning crew.
I cut my light back by timing actinics to come on at 11am, pc's at 12, then pc's off at 6, act's off at 7pm... so really only full light for 6 hrs... (i was running them all day before)
I put filter pads down to where ALL the water passes thru them and then proceeded to use a stiff nylon scrubbing brush to scrub the algae off every rock and surface in the tank. It took me about 3 hrs to really get it cleaned up.
I let the filter gather as much of the algae as it could then took it out and threw it away. I replaced it with a phospad and a carbon sack.
I dosed the tank with algaefix marine. I was desperate and took a chance on it. It worked very very well. It didnt bother any fish, my shrimp, any corals... i had about 6 snails die off, but they are casualties of war as far as im concerned. I kept dosing as per the instructions once every 3 days.
I repeated the cleaning process 1 more time 2 weeks later for the little bit that came back and to remove the dead algae.
I replaced my powerheads because they were just gross...
I do a 10% water change every week, and that continued as I did the above...
Now I add the algaefix marine stuff once every 2 weeks just for good measure and the cleanup crew has mowed down any pockets I missed. I've been hair algae free for a few months...
I really hope this helps you dude...
 

spnohio

Member
I have a 75 gal with Sump, Refugium, skimmer and UV system, I have had my tank up going on two years, I have noticed hair algae coming from the coraline algae on the live rock. All the measurements seem to be fine. Do I need more flow? More water changes? Is there a good fish that will eat the hair algae?
 
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