HELP! Fighting algae for 5 months!

Saltysav96

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Hey guys and girls

i have been reefing since 2016 and have never battled a algae issue this bad for this long. Pretty positive it is hair algae as it does not look fern like up close.
Fluconazole has not worked
Water changes and pulling algae has not worked
Blackouts has not worked
ICP test doesn’t really show anything in my opinion that would cause it but i will post results below

Ive cut down the amount of white, reds and green spectrums on my lights
And lighting period.
I am not dosing anything
Hardly any coral
Lawnmower blenny and kole tang hasnt worked
I only feed LRS reef frenzy and PE pellets, i rotate out and dont feed but a tiny bit

i have caribsea shapes rocks

this tank has been set up for 9 months
I dont know what else to do!
sorry for the long post

aquarium
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RODI-
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crappy pic of tank
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virtual reality

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Nutrients bound in the rock? I would add GFO to your filter. How many hours do you run your lights? What were you running before you cut them back? What do you have for a clean up crew?
 
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Saltysav96

Saltysav96

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Nutrients bound in the rock? I would add GFO to your filter. How many hours do you run your lights? What were you running before you cut them back? What do you have for a clean up crew?

CUC is something ive been looking at restocking lately. i have astrea snails, hermits, emeralds, and nassarius snails. (probably a few other types of snails that i cant think of right now.

lighting was running from like 8 or 9 to 11 at night
now they run from 11 to 10 if i remember.

the rocks leaching has been on my mind alot lately but wasnt 100% sure. i have been thinking about pulling all the rock out , spraying with peroxide, scrubbing , dipping in fresh saltwater and putting it back into the tank. but i am afraid that its just going to come back.
or just getting all new rock.. but i dont want to restart the tank because i do not have anywhere to keep the fish until its cycled. so not sure how i would do that idea yet.

GFO is not something i really want to run long term. but guess i could look into trying it as well. (never ran GFO Before)
 

olonmv

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I’m a complete rookie but, have you researched UV lights? Green killing machine is said to be flowed specifically to kill algae. Just tossing it out there.
 
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Saltysav96

Saltysav96

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forgot to add that i have tried vibrant...
and not purposely running low salinity..
i have been meaning to bring it up since i got those results back.
and turbo snails are on the list of cuc to get when i restock
 

ReefingFamily

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I am curious to know how long you tried these other methods before determining they were not helpful. I ask as sometimes I have learned that I was not getting enough time before moving on to the next method for me to notice any true difference.

I too ran into this problem when I first started my current tank in 2015. I believe it was due to using older rock that was established in someone else's tank and most likely filled with organics and nutrients.

CUC and other natural methods like sea hairs, urchins, and fish are all good choices in helping manage a problem, oftentimes from getting worse, but don't solve it. I would look at trying to figure out the root issue for long term success.

I turned off my lights for a few days and took one rock out each day to dip in hydrogen peroxide and manually removed what I could. Then I did a 50% water change as I was thinking this would eliminate more free-floating organics and nutrients from the water column. Then reduced to 20% water changes weekly. I did have some hair algae return however this did work. Time and consistency are key in any changes you are looking to make.
 
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t5Nitro

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I've got 2 tuxedo urchins that look like they mow their way through and the rock is spotless where they go. They're just too small and can't keep up, and are on the back wall more often than the rock. But if yours doesn't grow as fast as mine then you may benefit from those guys.
 

t5Nitro

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I've read pros and cons on the peroxide dips. It'll be spotless afterwards but you're essentially resetting that microfauna to a 0 population on each rock you soak.
 

brandon429

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Do a rip clean sand and rocks

get this outcome by tomorrow

you will still have to lessen what makes gha grow, but now from the clean condition vs the wrecked one

rip clean it.
 

brandon429

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Don’t use a chem to kill all that off in the tank, the mixing rot will be bad

that's why we deep clean and have no algae, then if some grows back you can use fluconazole and it won’t cause cyano or a rotten chemical soup. Don’t kill all that in your tank, even if a med exists to do so, choose the work option for its shocking results by Wednesday.


notes from the thread: don’t dip rocks in peroxide, score algae off with a knife back to clean, rinsed in saltwater, takes hours, price of following the common practice leading up to this need.

once rocks are clean outside the tank, no algae, spray peroxide on the clean spots let sit a few minutes and the rocks are ready to go back in on top of cloudless sand.

if that tank is huge, draw off most of your water in brutes for re use, about 75%

25% new added back into the reset tank. If it’s a nano put it back with all new water matching temp and salinity. Your sand is feeding the gha, notice the dark pockets of waste at the bottom.

in the thread what we did to sand is integral, can’t skip it.

any action other than a rip clean including using animals to eat the algae is going to cause the worlds largest cyano tradeoff invasion by massive waste accumulation by April. Then you buy chemi clean and hate the tank eight more months until finally as last resort a rip clean gets you the results above. We are always everyone’s last place option :)

indeed you should use animals

as growback prevention, in a totally cleaned and cloudless system.

the reason I didn’t link you the fifty page version of rip clean examples is because that short read above are the best two of the lot.
 
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ReefingFamily

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I've got 2 tuxedo urchins that look like they mow their way through and the rock is spotless where they go. They're just too small and can't keep up, and are on the back wall more often than the rock. But if yours doesn't grow as fast as mine then you may benefit from those guys.
again these work great at the management of the problem once you can reduce what is causing the issue to begin with.
 
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Saltysav96

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Don’t use a chem to kill all that off in the tank, the mixing rot will be bad

that's why we deep clean and have no algae, then if some grows back you can use fluconazole and it won’t cause cyano or a rotten chemical soup. Don’t kill all that in your tank, even if a med exists to do so, choose the work option for its shocking results by Wednesday.


notes from the thread: don’t dip rocks in peroxide, score algae off with a knife back to clean, rinsed in saltwater, takes hours, price of following the common practice leading up to this need.

once rocks are clean outside the tank, no algae, spray peroxide on the clean spots let sit a few minutes and the rocks are ready to go back in on top of cloudless sand.

if that tank is huge, draw off most of your water in brutes for re use, about 75%

25% new added back into the reset tank. If it’s a nano put it back with all new water matching temp and salinity. Your sand is feeding the gha, notice the dark pockets of waste at the bottom.

in the thread what we did to sand is integral, can’t skip it.

any action other than a rip clean including using animals to eat the algae is going to cause the worlds largest cyano tradeoff invasion by massive waste accumulation by April. Then you buy chemi clean and hate the tank eight more months until finally as last resort a rip clean gets you the results above. We are always everyone’s last place option :)

basically your saying
remove sand and rinse, and pull rock and spray with peroxide and scrub and put back in the tank?

at this point, why not just put new sand in? the sand bed has been vacuumed really well before and the algae pulled off the rocks and it has still grown back within a week.

spraying rocks and scrubbing is what i had in mind. just not sure im following the whole pulling the sand and rinsing. i feel as if that will cause a huge cycle at that point.
 

brandon429

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Be sure and read the thread to catch small details we use for safety

yes you can use new sand and you still would pre rinse that in tap water until cloudless, final rinse in ro


simply make sure no clouding exists in the new tank and it will skip cycle


it doesn’t cause a cycle here’s the fifty page version.


lights need to be lowered in intensity after the work, ramped back up


also, take one rock off the top and pre test it before doing the whole tank, you can mini model how the rock will respond before the big job

lift out one rock and detail it, put back clean, wait a while to see if you like it. If so do it all at once

i know how horrible all that work sounds, we just dont have a better way. The fluconazole thread is 3x as big as ours above, and a third have massive cyano challenges now. But in our thread you can scroll for pages and see only sharp looking setups.
 

brandon429

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How many gallons is that tank, it looks large
 

brandon429

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Ugg that’s huge. I know the deep clean doesn’t sound fun, nanos have spoiled us rotten but they also show in model the moves are safe if done deliberately, trusting the bac will be ok.


after you consider other options / don’t blame u eighty gallons is big reef/ if you wind up doing a deep dive you can at least drain off 75% of water for quick re use, that will help ease the make water portion.

params in the water aren’t the cause, it’s ok to reuse some. Allowance is the cause, any reef in nature will grow exactly that way when grazers are removed or boxed off from a test section. Even in pure Fijian water, same growth when allowed.

i believe fluconazole will kill that in tank, about 80% chance or vibrant. But you’ve gotta see those two’s tradeoff cyano invasions, they’re prominent in the fluc/vibrant work threads as a counter tradeoff. Large tanking is so darn hard I respect y’all for training up these huge tanks. If I had a large reef it’d probably have some gha too, nanos have spoiled us rotten.

your sandbed isn’t bad or rotten, it just has clouding components in it and these are gha feed.
 

LegendaryCG

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I’m really surprised if you used flucanozol properly that it didn’t completely decimate that algae. You sure you didn’t run it with a skimmer or carbon in the system and used the correct dosage for the time period required?
I have never seen it not work on hair, turf or bryopsis.
 

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