Hair alage

[Mattl22]

My tank seems to be doing greAt other than a few hitches I'm running a phos reactor carbon I'm vodka dosing have a good skimmer been keeping up on my wc but still have hair alage got about 10 hermits and 30 assorted snails a cleaner shrimp and 2 peppermint shrimp
What's the deal?

Has anyone here won the battle with hair alage
I was gonna scrub it with a brush but can't remove the rock from the tank will it just cause it to spread if I scrub it in the tank

My sps frags r growing not as fast as I'd like but growing
I know all coralls grow at different rates but about how much growth should u get in a month on an acropora frag they seem to be the slowest for me my birds nest r growing like weeds

 

[ZANYMASTER]

Measure your Phosphates?

 

[TimberTDI]

Keep the phosphates in check

Here was my battle that I won by just changing out 2oz of GFO every week in 6 gallon nano.

Now it's all gone

 

[Mattl22]

My phos always shows 0 on my test kit proably because the hair alage is eating it

 

[TimberTDI]

How bad is it? How big of a tank?

One major step I forgot
Every water change I would save two buckets of spent water (about 1 gallon each). I would take out the affected live rock and manually pull the hair off the rock in one bucket and then rinse the rock in the second bucket. This really paid off.

Steven

 

[Mattl22]

It's not as bad as the pic above but it's bad enough I had a sea hare that gurp lent me but it got sucked into a power head a inked my tank then died

 

[noobzy]

In my experience, and from what I've read, hair algae can be kept under control by a varied and large enough clean up crew, but you'll need to remove the large growths yourself.

I won a hair algae battle a few weeks ago by:

1. removing as much as I could manually, into a bucket
2. then purchasing a Mexican Turbo snail
3. and then turning off my lights completely for 4 days.

I don't have any SPS in my tank though, and I wouldn't know how a complete blackout would affect them... maybe someone more experienced can comment. I am currently battling a red bubble algae problem with a similar approach in mind - harder battle, but the approach is working so far.

Good luck!

 

[nanchil]

get some mexican turbo snail...

 

[Mattl22]

They eat hair alge how many should I get I have 3 in there I think should I get like 20 is there a thing as too much cuc?

 

[noobzy]

As a matter of principle, I think there is always such a thing as too much.

In this case, if you get too many snails, some of them will starve and die. To reiterate Timber's question, how big is your tank?

 

[Mattl22]

Sorry thought I answered that guess it didn't go through it's a 75 gal with a 20 gal sump
2 x 250 w mh fixture mh on 6 hrs a day

 

[nanchil]

I had a huge problem with HA like 6 months back... was uncontrollable.... My tank glass was so dark green... Finally I got 20 mexican turbo and to my suprise, my tank was HA free in 4 to 7 days. And after 3 months I lost almost 15 snails ( I guess they didnt have food)... Now I have 3 and it keeps my tank clean... this is from my own experience. I run GFO and corbon and chnage once in a month. My tank is 75G...

Edit : I run 2 * 250 MH and run 6 hrs a day...

 

[Mattl22]

Anyone know where I can get some turbos in Nassau county tommorrow lol?

 

[Mattl22]

Soo yesterday I changed my phosban I accidentally plugged my intake into the wrong outlet for my reactor and spilt a decent amount of phosban in my sump I planned on doing a wc this weekend so I left it in there refilled my reactor with phosban !
Today the tank is cloudy but all my hair alage seems to be browning out now this worries me because I know nothing good happens fast in a reef! So I'm gonna start making water so I can have on hand if things start to not look good. Right now all live stock looks great

 

[Mattl22]

Anybody knows why the water is cloudy ?.