Help!!!!! Alge problems!!

[Brad-DA]

HELLO
I have a 46 gal bow front with 50lbs rock
Recently i have noticed my rock has lots of grey scummy looking
stuff on it woth some hair alge starting to grow also ! it looke real bad and is starting to affect the zoos in my tank. Hard corals look ok and so do sps. water params ok. I did reliaze i needed more flow so i added the bigest korilla they make! big big diffrence in flow. I hope this helps some. I aldo did add a canister ffilter with carbon and a phos ban in chambers and did add live rock in there also! I have 2 250 w mh and 2 24 watt t-5 antinic fixture to add color I hope i am on the right track to fix alge problems. Any other suggeations to help with problem ???

[Jasonf08]

sounds like you have the start of keeping algae at bay. Just keep up with those water changes. Are you running a skimmer? that would be the only other thing i can think of.

[Rosseau]

I have heard about people having great success by turning off their lights for a day or so.

It seem's crazy at first, yet apparently is great to get rid of a lot of algae. Corals however seem to do fine - maybe it was a super cloudy day out on the ocean...?

search around for it if you want.

[DidYouSayReefer]

Turning off lights does not work. It just comes right back, if it even dies. I had the best luck with Kalkwasser. Keeps the PH up which the algae does not like and presipatates phosphate. I had a terrible algae problem in my 29 when I first got into the hobby. I started dripping kalk and in about 2 weeks the algae was almost all gone. Then I started adding vineager to the kalk mix to try to get more calcium, but that ultimately caused my PH to drop and the algae came back. Here I am fighting again but once again the kalk seems to be working great. Flow will help, regular water changes are a must, don't over feed, and drip kalk...those are the rules I stick too.

[Lanceafer]

I would have to disagree completely with DidYouSayReefer. No offence, but I tried it and it worked great. I let the lights turn off like normal at night and just unplugged them for 3 days. I had hair algae all over with a little bit of cyno (spelling?) on the sand. Three days later I turned the lights back on and I was amazed. The hair algae looked really bad and the slime was gone. The sand bed looked new and all the corals opened up huge. On thing that I didn’t think about though was that the clean up crew just lost a lot of food. Most of my snails died about a week later :(. I may have had too many to start with though because I was trying to get the algae under control that way. It did not however get rid of bubble algae.

[zukihara]

How long are you leaving the lights on? That's a good bit of light on a 46. I would read about photoperiods people employ and try to adjust down unless you are running very low now.

Additionally, you say water parameters are fine, but, are you absolutely sure? Absolutely sure?

[Brad-DA]

i run a 7 hr light period. I am goint to try a 2 day no light period!
I have done this in the past with a cynao alge problem with some results. as for params the basics are good but i should go to fish shop to check alk and ca.
Brad

[Jasonf08]

Are you running a skimmer? I would test for nitrates & phosphates. Both are fuel for algae.

[Brad-DA]

I just shut my skimmer down! I had a cpr aquafuge with biult in skmmer. i did not like it I could not get rid of bubbles and it seemed like i could never get enough flow in fuge even with added powerhead. So i traded it for a new cainster filter, I HAD NO FILTER TILL now! and a korilla 4 even trade! i AM GOING TO lfs for further water tests!
Brad