tired fustrated and algae

[Myka]

I wouldn't say there are "bad" salts, but personally I dislike both Seachem and Kent (and a couple others) just because they are a pain in the butt. Some people like to keep their calcium high, so Seachem would be great for them (although I can't reason with keeping calcium that high lol).

I have worked my fair share of retail LFS jobs, and I can tell you that Seachem doesn't sell very well. If it was that great it would be more popular.

When changing salts you should mix them. I have always just done:

Water change 1 (assuming 15% water changes): 100% Old salt
#2: 75% old, 25% new
#3: 50/50
#4: 75% new, 25% old
#5: 100% new

If you're doing big water changes, like 25-50% you should change the salt slower since you will be introducing a larger amount at a time. Make sense?

I use the same fuge reflector. I have used the same bulb you have except I used the 23w version. How big is the fuge anyway?

[Myka]

Raising magnesium won't work for the hair algae you have, that only works for Bryopsis which is a specie of hair algae, but not the one you have.

[e46er]

thanks for all the advice everyone

the fuge holds about 8 G of water

[chandigz]

Seachem salt will often cause inaccurate kh readings because of the high levels of borate. Most test kits read the combined total of borate hardness and carbonate hardness giving a higher reading than what the actually carbonate hardness is. When I used the seachem test kit and subtracted the borate I found that my actual carbonate hardness was about 2 dkh lower. So your kh is probably a lot lower then your already low reading.