Having a battle with green hair algae >:(

[kole]

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.

[asylumdown]

I have a little saying - you can't have a problem with problem algae, unless you have a problem algae.

Have you added anything new to your system recently? new corals, new frags, new fish? A single spore that hitchhiked in 2 months ago could have been quietly building to critical mass before it exploded and you noticed it. People seem to think that 100% of every kind of algae can potentially be in their tanks at any one moment, but that's not really true. Just like an un-planted garden will never magically sprout a tomato plant even though the soil is probably just fine for one, it's very possible that this particular species of algae is a problem for no other reason than it was recently introduced. If that's the case, your water parameters don't need to have changed for it to cause an issue. Think of all the cases of invasive algaes destroying reefs in places like Hawaii - the water was always capable of growing it, it's the fact that it's a recently introduced invasive species with no predators that explains why it's out of control now.

Some people think this is a controversial idea, but if you don't have the ability to get a natural predator for it, and you don't want to completely starve your water while devoting hours to manual removal, I would consider something like AlgaeFix Marine (you'll have to order it on eBay as I'm pretty sure it's still not available in Canada), or Fauna Marin's Ultra Algae X. knowing what kind of algae it is for sure though will definitely help you trouble shoot how to fix it.

[donkey77]

how old is this tank