Battle with Green hair algae

[dashnemo]

My tank is more than 2 years and started with dry rocks. Since I am new to the hobby, I made a mistake that I didn't cure the dry rock. And I have added 4 fishes only since the beginning .

I don't typically share stories , but yesterday I really cannot wait and feel that I am at a point to either give up or try harder. I decided to the try harder path although what I did may be quite wrong. So I decided to write down and follow many months again to see.

Long story , my tank at one point had 20 corals in addition to the 4 fishes and including SPS. They were all growing , though slow. It's a 50 gallon tank. However, a few months ago, Green hair algae started appearing and they took over the tank.

In the process of battling with them, I tried Vibrant and I tried to do water changes regularly every 1-2 week only.

But it never worked, the situation was worse.

I then added more cleaning up crew. At this point , I have 5 Hermit crabs, 10 turbo snails, 8 bumble bee snails and 1 Urchin. Again, I didn't notice that they help.

I then decided to do a ICP test and the result is quite bad. It shows almost zero nitrate and phosphate, but lots of metal, zinc, copper and aluminum etc.

At this point , I have lost all SPS. I started the ICP test too late. A very sad lesson. All fishes survived though.

These may seem so obvious to most reefers and they don't seem to happen so fast yet very fast. I definitely still cannot accept that this all happened.

I am really afraid of losing this battle and lose even more. I thought about sending the remaining livestock back to the store and stopped.

This week I decided to go try harder.....Will show some pictures...

 

[dashnemo]

I decided to take a few actions all happened in a week

1 - build a real sump , my previous sump is a 6 gallon that came with the tank, it is really challenging. And I made another mistake that some of the screws , and hose holders have metals and in such tight cabinet, I believe they are one of the source of the problem.

I bought a 30 gallon tank, and a baffle kit, took my gear from the old sump into a larger sump.

I started growing chaeto with seachem matrix in the 3 compartment. The first two compartments are the filter fleece and skimmer that I already had.

 

[dashnemo]

Next, I am going to do 4 water change with 20% and added seachem cuprisorb .

And this week, I took out all the rocks and remaining corals , scrub everything with tank water.

The two buckets here show the water clarity differences between just taken out from the tank, and scrub two rocks.

 

[dashnemo]

just trying to show some of the rocks. I have 9 pieces and the largest one can just fit in 5 gallon bucket, I decided to remove all of them and cleaned one by one.

You can see the green hair algae on them. They are quite bad in water .

I really shouldn't have waited and thought to use supplement only.

While doing this, I decided also to remove all the vermitid snails, although I thought the situation was a lot worse, while I was removing them , I felt it's better than it looked. Though I still removed easily 50 of them at least across all 9 rocks..

 

[dashnemo]

At this point, the tank has only very tiny hair left that I can hardly find, although whenever I found them in the last 24 hours, they are irritating......

This rock is a cleaned one, those green patches are not green hair algae? I don't know what they are because there weren't GHA on them before . I did scrub them anyway...

 

[dashnemo]

Last night, after the serious deep scrub, I checked water parameters

Ammonia 0.25, worrying but I only added 15ml of seachem stability considering how much action I took.

Alkalinity 9.5, I am trying to reduce it back to 8.5

Calcium 475, trying to reduce this too

Nitrate 0, my tank never had nitrate higher than 3. I feel the GHA in the main tank is essentially the sump?

Phosphate 0.16, this seems to be very high, again, probably all the actions.

I am going to stop all carbon dosing (Nopox or Vibrant ).

I added the chaeto yesterday. Will check parameters again tonight to see how things are progressing.