Another vibrant journey

[ahiggins]

In case anyone wants to follow my journey trying to get rid of some hair algae.

Tank: 10 gallon nuvo, started with dry everything. Actual volume of 7 gallons.
Livestock: 8 rock anemones, a sapphire damsel, hundreds of dwarf Ceriths (seriously what the heck), a trochus, 2 nerites, a few astraea, and a handful of scarlet and blue leg hermits.
Filtration:
Mechanical only, few different micron pads in the back sections (100, 50, and 10)
After beating dinos a few months ago I bought some new astraea snails only to find they brought hair algae with them . Now the tank is pretty well infested with it. I tried manually pulling it and decreasing light, peroxide, nothing seemed to work-which leads me to vibrant. I’ve heard the hype and wanted to try it before I took any “drastic” measures to rid of this stuff.

Parameters:
Nitrates- 5-10 pretty stable
Phos-was holding at 0.02 ppm until the hair algae explosion, now it’s at 0.002 ppm (I believe that’s the right conversion for 2 ppb)
Main ones don’t change, I use Red Sea salt, not reef salt.

So, some before pictures of afternoons and whites. I cleaned off the front glass but not the sides.

Day 1/Dose 1: 0.7ml
Nitrates 10
Phos 3ppb

 

[don_chuwish]

I'm curious if it'll reduce the frequency you need to clean the glass, so following along!

 

[ahiggins]

It’s close to once every other day now
We shall see!
Another interesting note is that I originally had a skimmer for this tank but I don’t have an issue with maintaining nutrients where I want them. So I took it off a while ago.

 

[ahiggins]

Day 3:
No visual change
Nitrates-25
Phos-1 ppb
Prepping a 3 gallon water change to get some of those nutrients out.
I did notice one of my smaller rock nems decided to take a walk under an overhang but who know if that’s related lol another side note is that the algae on the glass seems to be the first to clear up. No regrown on the front glass from day 1 either.

 

[homer1475]

While I don't see any moajor concerns with the amount of algae you have, keep in mind it didn't take overnight to get to this point, so it won't take overnight to remedy it.

Sorry for no pics, but I'm on week 9 of vibrant dosing(some small patches GHA but not out of hand. I started using it for bubble algae). GHA got way worse before it got better, and I can finally see frag plugs again which were covered in GHA. Basically the same process @Bulk Reef Supply had in their testing of it.

No ill effects other then now I have dino's as I wasn't keeping track of nutrients and nitrates dropped to 0 while phosphates were pretty high. My tank is a mixed reef with mostly LPS, RFA's and many sticks. Only side effect is my corals are now growing instead of being strangled out by GHA, and bubble algae, so my 2 part consumption is up and it's costing me more to supplement. LOL i suppose I could have worse side effects.

 

[ahiggins]

Lol that’s encouraging-it gets worse before better it’s easier for me to document here than it would be to find a notebook so I thought if anyone wanted to tag along, they could.
did you do 1x per week or 2?

 

[homer1475]

I did and still do 2 times per week ATM.

I'm finally at a place I think I can go back to once a week though. Things really are starting to look better!

If your planning on doing twice a week I would go slow. Maybe a few weeks of once a week, then go to twice a week. While I have not had a single bad thing happen to my tank, I have read horror stories.

Just took an FTS for another thread, but I'll post it here also. Just think of where I started. Literally everything was covered in BA, then the GHA took over, and that actually started to strangle out some corals. Manual removal around frag plugs saved them, but the vibrant has really knocked the snot out of it.

Only thing I have noticed with vibrant, after your other algae finally dye back, cyano takes over(kind of where I'm at right now if you look closely). This is my second go round with vibrant and both times now I have gotten a really bad case of cyano. While I did completely stop last time, and dosed chemiclean to knock out the cyano, I'm wondering if the maintenance dose will knock out the cyano? Maybe @UWC could come to the thread at some point and explain it to us?

 

[ahiggins]

I did and still do 2 times per week ATM.

I'm finally at a place I think I can go back to once a week though. Things really are starting to look better!

If your planning on doing twice a week I would go slow. Maybe a few weeks of once a week, then go to twice a week. While I have not had a single bad thing happen to my tank, I have read horror stories.

Just took an FTS for another thread, but I'll post it here also. Just think of where I started. Literally everything was covered in BA, then the GHA took over, and that actually started to strangle out some corals. Manual removal around frag plugs saved them, but the vibrant has really knocked the snot out of it.

Only thing I have noticed with vibrant, after your other algae finally dye back, cyano takes over(kind of where I'm at right now if you look closely). This is my second go round with vibrant and both times now I have gotten a really bad case of cyano. While I did completely stop last time, and dosed chemiclean to knock out the cyano, I'm wondering if the maintenance dose will knock out the cyano? Maybe @UWC could come to the thread at some point and explain it to us?

Thanks! I’ll keep up with once a week for a while. GHA does seem to be whiting at the ends

 

[ahiggins]

Quick update.
yesterday I was sitting at the same parameters and wanted to do the water change I said I would do the day before.
I also had an idea of using eyebrow brushes to scrub and suck up the algae. You can see that here:https://www.reef2reef.com/threads/eyebrow-brushes.677006/#post-6896987

I’m 100% positive that the work vibrant has done so far made the algae come off much easier with those and I was able to clear up all the existing algae that I could reach.

I’m still going to keep up with dosing vibrant to get rid of the last bits of it.