Reef FluxRX for stubborn GHA or stay the course of tedious maintenance?

[Jcon82]

Not sure if this is the right place to ask this question.

My 40 gallon tank is about 10 months old. I've had GHA for most of it. I physically remove it every week. Most of my once beautiful rock work has been broken down so it can easily be removed and scrubbed in buckets then haphazardly piled back in the tank. Every week I pull handfulls of GHA out and within 2-3 days it is back. Its growing over my corals and irritating them, it grows on the tank walls, pumps and frag racks. It grows on my snails and hermits! My flow is higher than I would like to eliminate dead spots but the dang algae always comes back.

I've been running a skimmer along with GFO for 6 months, 20% water change every two weeks and I feed sparingly. I added a Reef cleaners CUC 6 months ago. My lights (2x AI Prime HD all blues) are never over 50%. I feel like I'm doing everything I should be but the algae just grows everywhere. No Dinos, no Bubble algae or Bryopsis. Just GHA.

I also did a 5 day black out that slightly weakend the GHA. I picked it clean and it looked great for 2-3 days before the stuff started growing again.

N03 never over 5ppm (currently 1ppm) P04 always 0.03 or less. The GHA is just established and not giving up. I'm researching Fluconazole and think it might be just what I need. I'll run the recommended dosage with skimmer off and GFO/carbon out then after 2-3 weeks do a huge water change and go back to what I was doing.

I think this will work but I'm nervous about my corals. I mostly have Zoas along with some LPS and a few SPS. The SPS have been on the rack for 4-5 months because I know they will get overgrown with GHA if I mount them. I just want to be done with this GHA so I can repair my rockwork and go back to enjoying my tank.

Am I making the right choice?

 

[blaxsun]

What do you all have for cleanup crew? Type, quantity.

 

[Jcon82]

What do you all have for cleanup crew? Type, quantity.

42 Dwarf Ceriths
14 Nassarius
17 Florida Ceriths
12 Nerites
10 Assorted Hermits

Give or take.

 

[w8lifts]

Dolabella auricularia sea hare will eat hair algae. He has been keeping my hair algae fairly trimmed and removing all red/white light has helped me.

 

[Jcon82]

Dolabella auricularia sea hare will eat hair algae. He has been keeping my hair algae fairly trimmed and removing all red/white light has helped me.

I've considered them but dont they excrete toxins?

 

[w8lifts]

I've considered them but dont they excrete toxins?

Not that specific species.

 

[blaxsun]

42 Dwarf Ceriths
14 Nassarius
17 Florida Ceriths
12 Nerites
10 Assorted Hermits

Give or take.

Ring cowries and spiny astrea snails can be good for cleaning rock faces. The nassarius and ceriths will typically focus on the sand bed. Hermits won't do anything for algae unless they're starving, and even then it's a crapshoot. If you have GHA on the glass - trochus snails will make short work of that. Without seeing any pictures of your tank it's hard to say how many you'd need, but it sounds like you'd need to make a dent in the GHA before any cleanup crew would be able to keep it in-check.

 

[taricha]

42 Dwarf Ceriths
14 Nassarius
17 Florida Ceriths
12 Nerites
10 Assorted Hermits

Give or take.

This is a good example of having a lot of "clean up crew" that's short on dedicated herbivores.
None of those are really GHA eaters in any big way.

It's hard to even get suitable herbivores to eat GHA in my system, so I'm not the best to give advice here... this hobby is complex

 

[Mr. Mojo Rising]

agree the clean up crew consists mainly of scavengers. Need more herbivores like astrea and turbo snails.

Have you ever pulled the rocks from your tank and brush them with a toothbrush in another bucket? This is the best way to remove hair algae so that clean up crew can help. 3 or 4 times of doing this and it has a really hard time to grow back.

A lot of folks will swear, including myself, that dosing a bit of phyto at nights really helps reduce algae/cyano problems.

Feeding sparingly is never the right strategy, its not the fishes fault there is algae in the tank.

If you do try bottled stuff, take my advice and start at 25% the recommeded dose and see what it does. Its easy to add more, but not so easy to remove it from the tank afterwards.