Hair algea :(:(

[gregzz4]

Scott, first off how old is the tank ?

I've been battling hair algae since before summer in my nearly 3-year old tank

I tried cutting food back, cutting light back, more gfo, more waterchanges
I added hermits, tried sea hares, added tons more snails, added 3 kinds of urchins ...
I could only keep up with the algae by manual removal
Don't add critters to mask the issue .... it doesn't work

I finally settled on;
One shot of pellets for lunch (instead of 2), and alternate between frozen and flakes for dinner (instead of frozen every night)
Started cranking lights up for corals to grow and out compete algae
Been bumping my T-5s by a couple hours every 2 weeks
I'm up from 1836 watts/day to 2268 watts/day, and am planning on going as far as 2592 watts/day total
Corals are looking great so far. Lots of new growth and no bleaching

Knocked my gfo back from 225mls/100g bi-monthly to only 100mls/100g bi-monthly
I've always suspected my gfo to be adding iron to fuel the algae
Can't confirm it, but my PO4 is still reading low >0.03

I'm currently only performing 10% weekly WCs, but will change that to 25% bi-monthly soon

Hope that helps a bit

BTW, all my hair algae is 99% gone. Just a couple tufts of something different hanging on, but my Yellow Tang in QT will probably knock the rest out