raising no3 and po4 to address hair algae?

[Backreefing]

No one has mentioned your CUC is incomplete. You need a good amount of hermits ( blue leg red legs what ever ) they are very good at HA . Urchins, rabbit fish .
raising nutrients is a bad idea . So is chemicals . I’ve never done that stuff.

 

[SeeFu]

i dont really have a big desire to add hermits.

 

[SeeFu]

so of course the sequence of events had to be like this

spent months trying to solve hair algae
***** on r2r about my problem and a stupid idea to try to resolve my issue
do nothing
5 days later, hair algae just gone on its own

lesson learned, dont need to try things in the tank to get what you want, just ***** on r2r.

 

[SeeFu]

i'm guessing that i had been dosing microbater 7 for about a week now and its finally kicked in. i did move a pair of tangs from QT into the tank, but both are juvenilles so i doubt that they were the ones that solved my problem.

 

[Lovefish77]

Best way I have with getting rid of hair algae in display is an algae scrubber. Since installing a big diy scrubber in my sump I did not see a single strand of green hair algae in my display. You have to give algae a more favorable condition to grow than your display. That was my experience.

 

[SeeFu]

yea its possible that my refugium solved the problem too. probably a mix of microbacter 7 and the refugium.

 

[rhostam]

i've got a yellow tang, blue tang, and the 50 snails. should i be adding more snails?

What kind of snails?

My turbo goes to town on the GHA. I get breakouts when I cut into the rock to place stuff. Also when I over feed.

I also increase flow and use a pipe cleaning brush bent into an L shape to scrub it loose and then clean/replace the filter pads every few minutes in between scrubs for areas that are hard to reach for the snails. The pipe cleaner helps to get in between polyps of palys, zoas, and others easily when it pops up.

I’ve tried hand picking but it’s not very efficient and doesn’t scrub the GHA off of surfaces nicely.

The picture is a screen shot. The snail reached that rock that was covered in GHA. The area behind it was cleared by that snail in about 30 minutes. The screen shot doesn’t do it justice. I took a time lapse and it is stunning to watch. Like an herbivorous Roomba! Too bad I can’t post it.

 

[Dan_P]

What kind of snails?

My turbo goes to town on the GHA. I get breakouts when I cut into the rock to place stuff. Also when I over feed.

I also increase flow and use a pipe cleaning brush bent into an L shape to scrub it loose and then clean/replace the filter pads every few minutes in between scrubs for areas that are hard to reach for the snails. The pipe cleaner helps to get in between polyps of palys, zoas, and others easily when it pops up.

I’ve tried hand picking but it’s not very efficient and doesn’t scrub the GHA off of surfaces nicely.

The picture is a screen shot. The snail reached that rock that was covered in GHA. The area behind it was cleared by that snail in about 30 minutes. The screen shot doesn’t do it justice. I took a time lapse and it is stunning to watch. Like an herbivorous Roomba! Too bad I can’t post it.

Is that a Mexican turbo?

Totally agree about physical removal. It is not possible to remove all the microscopic filaments that adhere to the rock surface, even for a smooth rock.