hair algea

[midwest reefer]

any reccomended treatmants for hair algea. I have had the tank setup reef for a few months or so now. I have been adding marine SAT. run a protein skimmer, am getting a fuge, do my water changes and all that but i still have hair algae. i got a lawnmower blenny today to see if that will help. any other reccomendations?

 

[thomas712]

What are you nitrates and phosphates at?
What type of water are you using?
What is your lighting?
Thomas

 

[armageddon]

I had a serious hair algae problem due to a mistake a made about a year ago and i was in quite a battle. How i solved it was ran phosphate/silicate remover, kept my nitrates as low as i could, and cut down on my lighting. I kept doing water changes and manually removing the hair from my rocks. A clean up crew can take care of hair if its not too bad. My problem was on an aggressive setup so i aimed to try to rid the food source. Best of luck.
Andrew

 

[midwest reefer]

thanks for all of your help.... I am running phosphate/silicate remover, My nitrates are a little high and having trouble lowering them. I am getting an ecosystem filter for it soon. I run a prizm deluze skimmer. I have 2x65w PC, lights are one a little too much so i am going to cut back on that, and i am just beginning to use RO/DI water. any other reccomendations. I picked up a lawnmower blenny today and am going to add a tang once the nitrates drop fully to zero.

 

[exotickeeper]

You can get a bunch of blue legget crabs and it will take care of the job

 

[dreeves]

You will probably notice a decrease once your start using the RO/DI water...

 

[crazyreefnut]

Get yourself a couple of urchins they will eat it so fast you will see you rock white again. Mark Wiess has a great remover just by the way.

 

[aarone]

urchins will also eat any coral you have in the tank...and coralline algae.
aaron

 

[jedininja]

IMO, the best thing to do is not add all these things to try to take care of the problem, but instead you should take care of the problem at the source. Are you using tap, are you overfeeding, is your bioload to high? I thinkn you already are doing the best thing by starting to use RO water. You can do weekly water changes of 20% using RO water and that will drasticaly decrease your phosphates and nitrates. The fuge will also help. And all you have to do is manually pull out the hair algae and no new hair will grow because you are reducing the amount of nutrients athat you are supplying it with. But I would advise against adding a tangs, urchins, crabs just for the purpose of removing the hair algae. This will just add to your bioload and still wont solve the problem.

 

[roggy23]

so having the tang in the tank can add more hair algae? is it because of the bioload?

 

[yellowtail]

i also had a bad haire algae problem in my tank but it has been gone because i used 2 medecines by "B-ionic"
-Calcium
-Alkalinity
use it and you should get rid of it in no time.

 

[jedininja]

The 2 part bioni raises calcium and keeps alk in check; it does nothing to remove hair algae or any other type of algae. The only way to truly get rid of unwanted algae is to eliminate nitrate and phosphates.