I need an attack plan for the H.A.

[mcbunnymama]

so my hubby was up all hours of the night last nite reading on here, and he found a thread that said to remove the LR with the hair algae on it, put it in a barrel of fresh salt water and brush it off good, then rinse it in a second barrel of salt water before putting it back in the tank
I did not see the post, so I'm leary
any thoughts before I embark on this big project on my day off tommorrow?

[Jadinop]

Are you using RO/DI water? If you are doing all of these water changes with tapwater, you are feeding the algae problem.

Cleaning the rocks as you described is ok but you need to get to the bottom of the nutrient issue.

[mcbunnymama]

actually using steam distilled as I get it free at work(yay for small perks) and the oceanic instant ocean salt

[Loverotties]

Thats nice!I would do WC every day!

[mcbunnymama]

Originally Posted by Loverotties

Thats nice!I would do WC every day!

I have the time and free water so can I do water changes more than once a week or will I mess the tank up even more?

[mcbunnymama]

gonna bite the bullett and take each rock out seperately and scrub, scrub ,scrub, should be fun-isnt this how everyone likes to spend their day off lol

[chrisd]

tomorrow i am going to spend the day cleaning and planing my new tankbuild.the cube is to small for what i like.

[mcbunnymama]

Wow that was way more than I bargained for! I can't believe the amount of junk that came off those rocks(and I have been turkey basting almost every day). Everyone looks happy for the moment-except my purple firefish who is mia-hopefully just hiding in a cave

[mcbunnymama]

so happy I spent the time scrubbing yesterday! tank looks like a totally different tank today, it even seemed to jump start the cuc
also thanks to loverotties advice, I am going to do w/c every other day

[mcbunnymama]

yay, it's saturday and that means cleaning time. 2 1/2 hours took everything out and scrubbed. 10% w/c and now we've decided to do a 48 hour blackout
we also took out all of our crabs because we are pretty sure they are responsible for the death of our snails

[mcbunnymama]

so were at the 24 hour mark of our 48hour blackout, I was sooo depressed not being able to see in the tank that my kids drew little fish to tape on the black bristol board to cheer me up, will let you know if this works for the algae

[mcbunnymama]

so we are seeing the very first signs of possible deterioration of the algae yay!
daily 1g water changes with lfs salt water, 2 hour maintainance every week including 10%w/c
blowing off the rocks every night- the algae is blowing off now too!
the blackout seemed useless- the algae was back up in 24 hours so we moved the tank-possible light source from a window was making it worse
feeding 2x a week and rinsing the food really well with r/o
I'll keep you posted if it disappears any more

[jenglish]

I think a blackout is good against cyano, but algae has a lot more stored energy to it.

[three90s&125sump]

Some algae will survive a month black out. I thought I subscribed to this thread a long time ago but it appears that I didn't. Sounds like your making head way. The only way to get rid of HA is to remove its food source... PO4.
I read through the thread and I don't think anyone mentioned that HA will make its oun turf. Any detritus that finds its way to the base of the HA will be added to the turf. One thing you can do when you harvest the HA is to point a power head right at the base of it. Be sure not to do it when it is long because if it breaks off it will add more fuel. The constant flow of water over the base of the HA will remove turf and prevent any more from accumulating there.

Be sure that you are running your skimmer as wet as you can keep up with everyday.

Next water change you have, If you can, make up several gallons (the more the better) of ASW the day before and just over flow your skimmer untill you run out of water new ASW. Keep stiring up the top of the sand bed and blasting the worse part of the HA with a power head and blast your rocks to remove detritus while your doing it. Keep it all in suspension so it can get to the skimmer.

I'm not sure how your system is set up but this works better on some systems better than others. If you get an accumulation of detritus in your sump then just drain it out if you can to remove all of the detritus you can from the system. If your not running a sump then just keep it in suspention till the skimmer removes it. Do all your water changes like that every week untill the HA is gone then start doing it every other week for a while just to see if it returns. After several months you can go to monthly water changes. If you have a lot of junk in the bottom of the skimmer when your done then just rinse it out with some of the old tank water. You don't want to kill the slime coating on the skimmer by washing it out or you'll have to wait a couple days for it to grow back and it kinda defeats the purpose. Only clean the reaction chamber of the skimmer once a month or so but keep the riser tube cleaned daily if you can. All the crud that builds up in the riser tube will break down in the water and send PO4 back to the tank in an unskimmable form for instant HA fertilizer.

Hope this helps.

[three90s&125sump]

Double post