Ok i have been screwin with this hair algae far to long....................i basically have a lot of corals waiting for me to pick up but i dont want to until i get this shit under control

i am doing weekly 25% water changes, ive raise salinity, lowered salinity to really no avail, it did wipe out a red slime out break i had.

i bought a new skimmer rated for 65 gallon tanks {mines a 20 long} ive moded the wet/dry filter and overflow so its basically a standard sump, new power head so i have stupid water movement and im still physically scrubbing the rocks pretty much weekly to remove hair algae - the last thing i havent touched is the sand bed, its 4 inches deep and 1 1/2 yrs old. I am not really sold on deep sand beds anymore and wondering if it's actually crashed . that being said


can i just syphon out a bunch of sand and let it recycle or will that cause a major tank crash

should i syphon out most of it and add a new bag of araglive

thoughts? ideas??


Boss

I would think that removing half and then adding a high quality sand back in would give your tank the kick start that it needs.

I actually had the same issue your running into a year ago. I bought an established tank and I couldn't get rid of the hair algae. I bought my current 95 gallon and transferred all of the rocks and sand over from the old tank. I scrubbed the hair algae off everything and strained my sand and rinsed out most of the crap with the old salt water from my system. I did this to 80% of my sand. My hair algae disappeared after two weeks and I bought a Long Spined Urchin that keeps all the algae in check. Down side is that he loves pulsing xenia's, so I can't keep those guys anymore. I'm not sold on deep sandbeds either. I just vacuum my sandbed every other week to keep it nice and white. There's a little biological filtration in the back side of my tank, but I've noticed a huge difference since I keep my sand clean. I figured the 160lbs of live rock is good enough filtration along with my protein skimmer and macro in my fuge. Anyways, I would suck out some of the nasty stuff and see what happens. Make sure you have enough pre mixed salt water, just in case your water quality changes. I never had a problem though, but I started doing weekly 20% water changes. Good luck Boss.

The long spine urchins get pretty big and I have to trim his spines every once and a while. I don't have to supplement his feeding because there's enough algae growing to keep him healthy. I do occassionally feed my fish some ulva and red grac from my fuge. He'll munch on that as well. He eats any algae including the green stuff that pops up. I haven't seen green hair algae on my rocks since I got him. My xenia colony is in my 29 gallon:)

I don't think you'll have a major tank crash from cleaning your sand a little. It's crazy how much crap you'll suck up. I've been cleaning the sand weekly for about a month because I'm moving my tanks this weekend. My water quality is still reading perfect right now. Thank God...

Chris

Urchins are sweet but they eat the purple algaes too. :( My pencil urchin was devouring the corraline algae in my tank.

thanks bud