Intro and Tank set up

i too am battling green hair algea, i recently purchased a BRS reactor and i plan on scrubbing the rocks witha tooth brush to rid them of hair algea, anything else besides that, that you would rec doing?
 
SMACKERS4 said:
i too am battling green hair algea, i recently purchased a BRS reactor and i plan on scrubbing the rocks witha tooth brush to rid them of hair algea, anything else besides that, that you would rec doing?
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I also bought a PO4 reactor and have been running gfo constantly which was a great start so you are on the right track. As for scrubbing I found that the toothbrush worked ok in hard to reach areas but a grout brush was even better as its much more rigid. If you are going to brush them off I always tried to do it while doing a water change. I had a significant amount of die off within the rocks at first so I would siphon myself a bucket of water and rinse the rocks in that to get all the junk out. Then I would have another half bucket that I also siphoned where I could put the rock and scrub it with the grout brush before putting it back in the tank. The rock design changed many times due to this but I almost have my numbers completely under control now.

The other thing I did a lot of is every day I would come home and pick with my fingers or tweezers as much algae as I could and physically remove it from the tank. You have to remember that all that algae has grown due to your phosphates and nitrates. If you remove the excess phosphate with the reactor some of the algae will start dying. Which will then release the phosphate that it had grown from creating an incredibly difficult cycle. So if you can go in and actually harvest the algae you are effectively removing that chunk of phosphate from your system. The same goes for scrubbing; if you scrub them off in the tank the algae will either attach elsewhere or die and release its nutrients back into the system just strengthening what is left.

Just believe me when I say it can be done. I'm still kicking myself for not taking pictures of how bad this tank really was. You couldn't see through any class nor could you see any bare rock and there was hair algae 4-5 inches long. In the past few weeks I have seen little to no growth of algae and have hand picked or siphoned any I have seen!
 
well i am optimistic to say that mine does not sound nearly as bad as yours, i have about 1.5-2" hair on about 1/3-1/2 of my rock. not sure why some have minimal, while others are covered. i suspect the rock with more hair algae absorbed more nutrients to slowly leech back into the tank in order to sustain the algae, i got my set up off of craigslist and it had the same amount of hair algae tho it was only about 1/4" at that time. so, my tank maintenance has no doubt room for improvement, i am hoping that with this GFO reactor and the new RO/DI system in place i will be able to conquer this nasty beast.
 
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