GHA Plan of attack

So I'm getting a pretty good amount of fine GHA on the back of my tank and some of my rocks. I have a 72 gal bowfront with a 20 gal sump. I've added 5 blue legs, and 15 astrea snails, two small sand sifting stars and two small clowns. I currently have a candycane, hammer, torch and frogspawn coral so I can't limit the photo period too much.

Should I just wait this out? Go for a small fuge? Add more snails? I'm extremely OCD and a large algae bloom simply isn't going to work for my living room... And my girl will probably kill me. Any ideas for a plan of attack?

My params:

SG: 1.025
Nitrate: <10
Nitrite: 0
Ammonia: 0
Ph: 8.1-2
Alk: 9
Ca: 320
Mag: 1000
*I will begin dosing these two with the two part I received from BRS today, begining with Mag (no more than 100ppm per day, blah blah)

Thanks for any feedback or suggestions?

Bastard algae..

 

3 words, Sally Lightfoot Crab....problem solved.

 

do you use RODI

 

Lol I watch fish more than TV as well... as far as the HA, the sallys will eat it but id recomemed finding the source of your problem or it won't go away.

 

like mentioned, are you using RO/DI?

How old are your lights?

If you're only fish are 2 small clowns, I wouldn't feed them more than 2-3x a week. (It's kept my 2 clowns fat for the past couple years). Any more than that and you're (IMO) overfeeding and giving nutrients to things like GHA.

 

I do use RO/DI. I picked up some "cured" rock that never actually cylcled my tank. Zero spikes, a couple of nitrAte points (<10). I added 2 clowns. A couple of weeks later, still nothing. Since then, I've added the CUC (prophylactically) and have just been waiting for a problem...

New lights (214w T5), new everything. Only been up and running a little over a month

 

your rock could have carried in phosphates... even if it was in a tank with minimal phosphates, some could have been picked up.
Additionaly, with any new equipment, silicates are released and then that causes a diatom bloom. once they all die, algae will surface to feed off of their organic matter.
If your not introducing more phosphates than your tank can export then your problem will go away on its own with time. otherwise, look to reduce your phosphate input (feeding/other additives)

 

Sooooo water changes, current CUC and this should
be self limiting? Should I step anything up, like the CUC?

 

Pretty much, Dingo nailed it......

Ideally you would want to figure out what is causing it, or caused It.... then again it could just be part of the cycle. Just keep up on water changes, make sure you don't over feed, keep your photo period under 12 hours a day, and manually remove as much HA as you can as often as necessary. If the problem persists, then a different approach must be taken.

Remember this isn't going to go away overnight, or even In a week or two. It will take much longer to go away than it did to appear. You should start to see a slight improvment within a month or so though.