Hair Algea

Drock169 · #1 03-30-2008, 02:16 AM

I would "cook" the rock if your just starting up the tank. Hair algae is a tough one to battle.

Josh23 · #2 03-30-2008, 02:54 AM

how do I cook rock? anyone else have any thoughts?

toxic111 · #3 03-30-2008, 04:04 AM

All I did in my tank (and I jsut went through this) is let it go as part of the cycle, after a couple of weeks, I just used an algae scraper and cleaned it off the glass. The clean up crew I added after the cycle took care of the rest of it.

bv_reefer · #4 03-31-2008, 04:09 AM

hair algae is as mentioned a tough one to battle, at the end it's a couple things combined that end up eliminating. when it started developing on one of my rocks, I pretty much just ended up manually removing as much as possible, reducing my photo period, stopped feeding corals for 2-3 weeks, cut back on feding fish, and of course kept up on reasonably adequate water changes.

good luck, it's an ugly algae to have to deal with, but heres a thread from a couple months back originally posted by michika, try to get as much as possible out of it. and don't let the gha win!

Josh23 · #5 03-31-2008, 11:56 PM

Did you say you had a link to a previous thread?

bv_reefer · #6 04-01-2008, 12:11 AM

wow sorry totally forgot to post it

> http://canreef.com/vbulletin/showthr...&highlight=GHA

michika · #7 04-01-2008, 12:33 AM

Ah my GHA thread! Well to follow up on it something in my crazy list worked and I think it was three things;

1) time; the longer my battle went on the less GHA there was to deal with, my tank is now GHA free. I let all the phosphates that had accumulated in my rocks leech out, and I did it without cooking them, it never caused any problems to my livestock; SPS, clams, LPS, inverts or fish.

2) Good inverts; I got a longspinr urchin who mowed down the GHA, and once he took it off the rock it never came back. I also got a bunch of blue legged hermits and starved them in my sump for a week before putting them into my tank.

3) Staying up on my weekly cleanings; weekly-bi-weekly water changes, and making sure my MH bulb wasn't too old.

Since your tank is new I would just advise you to ride it out. Mostly likely your GHA is part of a normal cycle in your new system. Make sure you use quality water, RO/DI is recommended, and stay on top of your tank. If the GHA gets long just manually prune it out. If its still hanging around in about a month send me a PM or get in touch with me and I can give you some other suggestions.