Stumped with Hair Algae

[goldenhurricane2]

Check the rodi water for phosphates.

How old are your rocks

Rocks vary in age... some a year and a half all the way to a few I put in a couple of weeks ago.

 

[goldenhurricane2]

Check the rodi water for phosphates.

How old are your rocks

Holy **** my rodi is reading the same as my tank... around 0.08ppm

 

[larrylandes]

I had a bad hair algae outbreak due to overfeeding. Once I got stopped, my nitrates were low, and phosphates were high sometimes, low others. Algae can throw off the readings.

I tried everything to get rid of it. Manual hair removal, crabs, snails, etc. The problem was not going away even though I eliminated the source.

So finally I went dark for 3 days straight, completely dark. I turned off lights and put towels over all exposed areas.

After the first time I did this, I got rid of about 70% of the hair algae. However, I noticed it was still coming back with a vengeance. So.. a month later I repeated the process. This time, about 95% was gone, and since then my clean up crew has been able to keep up.

Food (or lack of food and light) for thought.

 

[Hans-Werner]

I agree that this should be Lyngbya cyanobacteria. I had them once but don´t know what to do.

 

[Bronc]

I've had a bit of the same problem a couple of weeks ago and ran some Chemi-clean and it cleared it up.

 

[by34]

You can go dark for 3 days and use kz cyanoclean.

 

[Steve McGlamery]

Can I put in my two cents???? I just solved a hair algae problem in my 120 gal mixed reef tank. It took 5 months to solve.I tried everything...Read books, R2R, LFS etc nothing worked. No3 5 ppm (Nyos) PO4 0.00 (Hanna). Only feed once a day. Manually removing the algae. Spent a lot of money on more CUC. Nothing worked. Then I relate really started to crashad somewhere to raise my Magnesium To 1800 ppm. (I never got it that high though). Started to raise the Magnesium. I started to remove the rocks that I could remove easily and washed them with 3% Hydrogen Peroxide. Got a big bottle with a squirt top and would squirt the rock down and let it set for about 4 minutes and put it back in the tank. Still manually removed as much as I could. Kept raising Magnesium. (it got to about 1500 pp when I stopped dosing).I was starting to win.... Then I decreased my photo period. Algae really started to crash. Kept up with the H2O2 treatments and the manual removal. I now have 99% of the Hair algae gone. But I keep asking the important question....What actually got rid of the hair algae? A combination of every thing or just one thing? If I had to guess....reducing the photo period had the biggest effect. I hope this helps.