Green Hair Algae - Make it go away!

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dodwyer

New member
Looking for advice on eliminating some stubborn green hair algae in my tank. This is a 28g Nano Cube reef tank full of zoa's mushrooms, a few fish. Tank has been running for a few years now but over the past 8 months this hair algae has really taken hold.

Water tests give me no clues, feeding has been significantly reduced and I have decided I need to use a chemical of some sort.

any suggestions or advice?

thanks
 
Kick up your Magnesium to like 1400 and use algae fix from API. That did the trick for me. But not my battle is with Red Slime and I need to get some GFO for that. If it is not one thing, then it is the other. Oh, matter of fact I have some left that is like 3/4 full that I could let go for $10. LMK I am in Irvine.
 
I had the same problem. I significantly reduced feeding, tried magnesium, etc.. My biggest success was adding a refugium and growing chaeto. The chaeto used most the same nutrients I am guess, and by running the refugium light 24/7 the chaeto out of control using up the nutrients. It is much easier to export the chaeto than the hair algae! I also left my display lights off for a couple days straight for the first couple days. I think that helps weaken the hair algae and allow the chaeto to get a head start. Worked for me and now I am almost 100% hair algae free (*knock on wood). Every once in a while I will see a little spot in the display and I just pluck it, but I haven't seen any lately. Good luck I know how much of a nightmare it is!
 
Wouldn't heavy skimming help and other means of nutrient removal? (i.e., skimming wet, manually removing the algae, using chaeto, running GFO and/or carbon, etc.)

You would think if you remove the nutrients (which the algae is thriving on) and also manually pluck out the algae, this would do the trick.

Or have people found that the algae consumes the nutrients before it even reaches the sump/skimmer (which I would doubt)?

I just moved a couple of months ago, and have been dealing with this the last couple of months... slowly but surely it is going away, but I'm running GFO and carbon, and just recently started skimming pretty wet. This, along with larger than normal water changes, has thinned out the algae pretty well (still not entirely gone yet- but hopefully it will be sooner rather than later).

Good luck... just stick to it, and you'll get rid of it.
 
Have the same problem. I put some chaeto in my 2nd chamber with a HD clamp-on light. Double my water change to 10 gallons a week. Plucking/sucking them during water change. High Mg. On week 3 now, slowly seeing the progress.
 
I just finished up with my hair algae battle. I cleaned out the filtration chambers in the back, removed all sponges & LR rubble. Added Chaeto to chamber 2 and run the light 24/7. I cut my tank lighting down to 5hrs a day. 5g water changes twice a week & Rinsed my Chaeto with every water change.

That with the trimming and it was gone in 4 weeks :)
 
algae

algae

I had a problem prior with my solana tank setup. I tried reduced feeding,water changes, scrubing rocks, plucking algae. the thing that worked for me was api algae fix. I also reduced my lighting 1 -2 hours for a couple of weeks. Just make sure that you reduce the light gradually. 1/2 hour everyday a week then 1/2 hour the next week and etc. after about 2 months it was completly gone. good luck with ur battle.
 
I tried pretty much every strategy as well, boosted clean up crew, added lawn mower blenny, kole tang, sea hare, upped water change frequency, manual removal daily, reduced photo period, used GFO, cut feeding from daily to once every 2-3 days. I was able to get a reduction of about 20-30% but it was a ton of work and my efforts were not making anymore progress than that. After two months of battle, I finally gave in and tried API Algaefix and had very little hope that it'd work because the reviews were mixed. But after only 4 doses, the hair algae is now 90% gone and hasn't made a come back. The last 10% seems to be dying and on its way out. I am using GFO while dosing to suck up excess phosphate from the dead algae in conjunction with regular water changes. It sounds good in theory and is working well in practice. My sand bed hasn't been so clean of hair algae for months and the T5 reflecting off the white sand is almost too strong and bright to look at!
 
I had a problem with gha even with no fish! Some crabs, snails, a fire shrimp, but NO FISH. I only feed the corals 2-3 times a week, run biopellets, and keep the tank immaculate. Eventually, I started suspecting one of my additives contained something that the gha was using. I've always been a bit leery of seachem products, so I started by looking into the reef calcium that I had been using. Turns out that the Ca ions in reef calcium are bonded to carbohydrates of some sort. I suspect that in my case, the carbs broke down into something that the gha could use to fuel its growth. I stopped using that garbage, and the gha is slowly withering away.

So... you don't use seachem reef calcium, do you?
 
Another option is the check how old your light bulbs are- that also helps contribute to unwanted algae growth!
 
If you arent already, start running a Reactor with Phosphate media. Always clears it up for me...
 
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