Algae Problems

[FerociousPuggle]

Question:

I'm currently battling a red, stringy, slime algae. It coats the rock's (not so much the sand bed) and continues to come back after multiple water changes. It brushes off the rock easily and can be manually removed without much effort. My question is that I've read that when you have algae you can't trust your test numbers for nitrate and phosphate. If you can't trust them then how do you go about fixing them? My numbers show pretty good (5ppm nitrate using Nyos and .02 Phosphate using Hannah). Not sure if I should adjust my feeding, add GFO, etc.....

 

[Spare time]

I would just do some chemiclean and then if your waste levels are high afterwards, do some waste away or a water change to get it back down. That stuff works well and the cyano only really comes back if you have high phosphates (or 0 nitrate).