http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVQaJkjDsgk

Algae Removal – I recommend this as a last resort after you have tried everything else.
Remove live rock a piece at a time and take outside and use a high pressure sprayer to remove all visible hair algae. I bought a high pressure sprayer at The Home Depot for $99 bucks. After spraying each piece of live rock one at a time immediately put in a bucket of your tank water. Reduce the length of time it is exposed to air if all possible. This will reduce die off of your coralline algae and good bacteria that lives in the rock. The high pressure sprayer won’t take any coralline algae off of the rocks.
Once all of your rocks are clean use a tooth brush to remove any visible algae from the hard structure of your LPS. Make sure you have buckets of tank water ready to put your corals in.

After all that scrub your tank and remove all water. Rinse your sand very good with fresh water until it runs clean. This will take a long time and you may have to do it a handful at a time. My 13 year old did this for me while I was cleaning the tank. It was tedious and took him about an hour.

After everything is clean pumps, skimmer, heaters and anything else fill your tank back up with RO/DI water and add salt, PH and calcium if needed. Warm the tank back up. Add your live rock back to your tank and acclimate the coral and fish.
You may have some die off depending on your live rock and if you have a lot of sponges be sure to check nitrates each day for a couple of days and do a water change if required. Mine did not need because I did not have any die off, well not that I could see or that water quality checks could identify.

One thing I did notice is It took about two months to reestablish my pods and mysis shrimp back to a good level. The most important thing is immediately purchase snails and small crabs such as blue legged hermits. They will eat any small amounts of hair algae that tries to take back hold. They usually don’t eat it because they don’t like it but since there is barely any brown or green algae left in the tank from the fresh water wash they will eat the hair algae or starve to death. For my 55 gallon tank I had approx 50 snails and 50 crabs. I have since gave some away because there is not enough algae in my tank for them to live.

So this process worked for me, I was so frustrated with the hair algae it was either take the tank down or do something radical. I had tried everything. My Phosphates were near zero, I was growing caulerpa, reduced light cycle, change bulbs, replaced all my filters and resin in RO/DI unit, Reduced feeding fish down to once every three days, used phosobuster, did massive water changes, used a tooth brush on rock to remove algae almost every day for a month. I tried it all to get rid of the algae, nothing worked. This last resort I described above finally did the job for me.

So how did it come to this?
My only thought was after 4 years of a perfect tank with the normal light amount of brown and green algae I bought a coral with a little bromine hair algae on it. Figured my crabs would eat it. My mistake, I put it in my tank and something allowed it flourish. By the time I took action it was too late. One additional thing was at the time of introducing this algae my protein skimmer pump was on the frits and was not working very efficiently. I think my tank had the right conditions for the algae to take hold and even though I corrected the problems it was just to late.

Thanks for reading,
Your fellow reefer

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