algea taking over...

[mermaiden78]

I have had my 29 Gallon up and running for a year. I do 20% water changes weekly. The algae started a bout a month ago and is taking over now. I do not currently run a skimmer, I have 5 hermits and 2 turbos for cleaning. I only have 2 fish, Royal Gamma and a goby. I know some of you guys work at LFS around mobile. Is there anyway I could bring in some water to be checked? I use API but the readings are all undetectable.

[lowrider]

B&B do free water testing .

[mermaiden78]

How much of a water change can you do without messing up the cycle? I dont wanna do to much and then the cycle start again...

[snoopdog]

That does not look like much in that picture.

Just leave it, it may go away on it's on.

[sb1227]

Yep, wouldnt worry too much just yet. You can vacuum it out when removing water during the water changes. Have you had your windows open recently? I'm beginning to think problems with cyano is somewhat seasonal. Just a theory though.

[Fishfood]

Yep, wouldnt worry too much just yet. You can vacuum it out when removing water during the water changes. Have you had your windows open recently? I'm beginning to think problems with cyano is somewhat seasonal. Just a theory though.

I've heard others rumble the same thoughts as well. I also heard of folks closer to the gulf having more problems, but I don't have first hand experience in that. Just something someone mentioned at a lfs one time.

[mermaiden78]

Here is another picture to give ya alittle more idea on how bad it its.

[snoopdog]

I can tell you a place in Florida you can get hermits cheap. A decent amount of Blue Hermits will make short work of that.

[redpheonix]

How much flow do you have in the tank.. could be caused by to little water circulation in the tank... also you might try a sea cucumber along w/hermits...

[mermaiden78]

I have about 5 hermits in there now and 2 turbo-snails. Had more snails than that but my big hermit ate them Right now for flow all I have as a maxi-jet 400 and the HOB filter. I am hoping when we get our refunds back that I can invest in a few things. For one I want to get a RO/DI unit and another pwerhead for the tank. I did have 2 HOBs but one died about a month ago and I havent picked up another one yet.

[redpheonix]

Rich has the maxi jet mods that make them put out alot more water... also try to add some phosphate sponge to your HOB filter... that might help you a little... and if by chance you are ... dont use tap wateer to make your salt water for waterchanges or use tap or top off... mobile has one of the highest phosphate counts around...  

[jason214]

this thread is sort of old so i don't know if your watching it anymore, but i've been fighting green hair algae for a while now and am finally on the winning side. i've don't countless hours of studying and figureing this crap out. First off light cycle, I would say 8 hours aday unless you have acro's or other high light corals in that case i would stick to 10hrs. Varying lighting hours and extremely long time of light can promote growth in gha. Also the sun isn't going to make algae grow unless its shining on the tank during lights off. I've seen nice coral tanks that only used sunlight that had never had problems. If you would like to see references i can direct you to them on reefcentral. Waterflow can also contribute, I have a 29h w/ a mj1200, a mj 900, A remora skimmer with a mj1200 and a 30/60 power filter /w only phosban in it and i honestly wouldn't mind a little more. Do not use Mobile city water for your tank. Its loaded w/ phosphates and a whole lot more of other crap that is bad for your tank. Only use ro/di water. Check salt to makesure it is phosphate free(some older salts had alot of phosphates in them). You won't beable to see the phosphates in your tank testing because the algae is holding on to the phosphates, it also holds on to nitrates so your testing could read a little lower than what is really there. Feed as little as possible w/o puting fish health in question. You can try feeding more times aday w/ less food. That way the fish will eat all the food all the time. Rinse frozen food before putting in the tank, there is always a little bit of die off when blastfreezing foods which means there could be phosphates on them. Flake foods and pellet foods may contain phosphates(most do). I had about 3 or 4 hermits and several hitch hiking snails that were eating algae but it grew faster than they could eat it. I bought 10 more and immediatly saw a differance. Your water changing habits are good, i would only add a good scraping of the glass w/ a razor(don't cut yourself) and pulling out by hand any algae on the sand, and also scrubbing a little bit of lr each time w/ a tooth brush. I would say do 25% of ur lr each water change outside of the tank( u can use the water from your waterchange. My bucket turned so green the first time i did it that i could no longer see where i was scrubbing. You have to get the stuff out of your tank to really get rid of it. what you miss in scrubbing the crabs will take care of the rest. they only eat the algae if it is short. Doing all that made a dramatic difference. I still have a little growth but my crabs keep it manageable. A trick that also works is dosing a whole lot of mg. Putting it up to about i think 1600ppm. I've done this and you could really seeing the algae dieing. If you try that i would watch all of your coral closely, it could have an adverse affect on leathers and softies but i didn't have a problem.
All of this stuff is going on in my tank and its taken all of it to put me on the winning side of this battle. I let the algae problem go to far before i started all of this so the battle has drug out to about 5 or 6 months now, if you start now, you should win quick, your problem didn't look to bad, mine was choking corals and me original few crabs even have little algae afro's on their shells. I know this is alot of stuff but trust me it works.
good luck, and don't give up.

jason

[DrHank]

You may want to check out www.reefcleaners.com. They can help.