Help! Brown hair algae all over new tank.

[jdeb101]

My 95g has been running for about 2 months now and for about the past month I've had this brown hair algae growing everywhere, rocks, sand, and glass. A few weeks ago after tank was done cycling I do a 20g water change, cleaned the glass and scrubbed a few pieces of LR I could easily take out. Things looked a bit better for maybe a week, but now the algae is back in full force and worse looking than ever! I don't believe this is diatoms as it cannot easily be blown away and is more hairy looking.

Test kits show 0 across the board for Ammonia, Nitrites, Nitrates & Phosphates. I do have a small cleanup crew of snails in there that consist of turbos, ceriths, astrea.
So what should I do to remediate this? Is this normal for new tank? I do have a couple snails that died in tank (still in there), could that be the cause?

 

[brandon429]

peroxide will easily kill it off without harming anything else, the growths on the glass id downscrape and manually clean with another large exporting water change. the fuzz on the rocks, hit the tank with one mil per ten gallons of water 3% from a new unopened bottle add daily once until it dies, usually within 4 days.

the other options are do nothing or begin phosphate scrubbing, some people see only scrubbing phosphates as the legitimate algae attempt with all else being a bandaid. Have to choose. i use peroxide due to 5000 after pics lol

when you make any stasis change to a system you can lose smaller inverts, a snail or two could die, we have to take all that into account when watching eutrophication spread. It should be stated that an alternate school of thought is developing thats directly opposite of the nutrients are everything model

by simply repeatedly killing algae, not harvesting it but killing it, using a few different methods, we have sustained algae cures across most tanks. We fought the biomass repeatedly not even factoring nutrient levels, and this was said to be a lost cause but turned out it wasnt. just like when the said tiny reefs weren't possible due to stability and coral warfare, thats no longer the case either...

since your tank doesnt have a load of corals yet you can do alot to the water column to starve it. the snails wont care if you do some strong GFO filtering to rob phosphates, which would prob work just well in time. The catch with GFO is thats a coral bleacher, its very cabable of being overdone which is how many got frustrated always chasing nutrients.

the real ocean grows tons of invasive algae in perfectly phosphate free waters, and then worse when there's pollution runoff. manual removal is the only thing that keeps it in check in the wild. thanks parrotfish, urchins et al

the best bet is to test for phosphate from a reliable kit and keep it within range, then hand kill anything that emerges despite a clean up crew presence.

 

[H2Ohio]

+1 for peroxide if you have the new tank blues and can't patiently wait it out. I think I did two 7 day rounds of it with a few days of nothing between.