I know how you feel. I have a 180 that went from being totally clean of algae to completely covered in GHA in a week or two. I've been battling it for 2 months now and have it reduced to 2 stubborn spots.
I used a variety of things to fight it. I did a lot of water changes and reduced feedings. I started GFO and purchased the Hanna phosphorus checker and changed the GFO anytime I seen an increase in the phosphate reading.
I also started to use lanthanum chloride dripped into my overflow which was filtered with a 5 micron sock. I did this once a week to reduce any phosphate so that I didn't have to change out the GFO so often.
I also have an algae scrubber running in my sump. It never really grew a lot of algae. What I did was I increased the flow to the scrubber by installing a new and larger pump. Then I turn of my tanks white LEDS for a day every week. That way I figure the scrubber was able to use the nutrients that it needed and not compete with the algae in the display. Well the growth on the scrubber increased and the algae in the display died.
There is no one way to fight this pain in the a** algae but it can be beaten with a variety of tank maintenance. Which one will work for you may not be the one that helped me but I seen the biggest difference when I turned off the display lights and let my algae scrubber flourish.
Good luck. I've kept tanks for many years and this was the first time that I've had to deal with GHA and I don't every wish to deal with it again.
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