TheSaltwaterKid
Member
Here’s the problem, my friend has a 55 gallon reef tank and he’s been battling a vicious hair algae outbreak. After months of trying to siphon the stuff out and using phosphate removers and doing massive water changes and buying all new filter/media for his R/O DI unit we were both convinced that the problem had to lie (literally) in his sand bed so he bought all new live sand, we tore down his tank, taking all corals, fish and live rock out and draining the water and taking the tank outside and emptying out all of the old sand (including cleaning out his HOB refugium of all it’s refugium mud and hosed everything out. After taking a toothbrush to his live rock to get as much hair algae off as possible we set the tank back up, put in a totally new live sand bed and then put in 25 gallons of new R/O DI saltwater, put all of the live rock and corals back in and topped it off with about 15 or so gallons (after displacement from rock, sand and corals) of his previous tank water and started everything back up and it looked great! That was on Sunday, this morning he calls me up and says that the algae is growing again and starting to spread. I thought maybe it was due to the new sand bed and his tank is going through a mini-cycle again, he has a totally new (as his old one had completely died off over the course of a couple of years) clean up crew consisting of Scarlett Hermits, Cerith and Astrae snails arriving today (and I believe he’s going to buy at least a coupld of giant turbo grazers today), he’s going to double the dosage of phosphate remover in his refugium but after that we are just totally at a loss as to explain why and how this damn algae keeps coming back, does anybody else have any idea’s of what is causing this problem and how to get rid of it??? I’ve been in reefing a few years longer then him and I’ve never seen hair algae be this persistent…especially after all of the measures we’ve taken!!!