Algae Scrubber. That’s me.


Well, further to the previous article, I am now an algae scrubber. No not the kind that sits in your sump.

The kind that pulls the rock out of your tank and takes a scrub brush to them.

Here are a few pics of a pile of scrubbed rocks next to some yet-to-be scrubbed.

Scrubbed Rocks

Left is scrubbed. Right is covered in algae.

The process of scrubbing half a tank of rocks took about an hour. I only scrubbed bare rocks (no corals on them) or easy to manage rocks that only had a few corals on them. No corals were harmed in the making of this picture.

I siphoned out 15 gallons of water from the tank to use in the cleaning process. In one container I had 5 gallons of scrubbing water and in another container I had the receiving water. where the rocks sat until I was ready to put them back in the tank.

I will wait till next weekend before I tackle the other side. For some reason working with this algae gives me a terrible allergic reaction and I now feel like I am full swing in the middle of a nasty cold.

Lets hope this cleansing lasts.
As you can see, i need to do the walls too. Sigh.

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More on algae removal

My quest to erradicate hair algae isn’t going well.
After testing out Hair and Sludge, which seemed to help a bit by slowing the growth, it did not get rid of it entirely as I had prayed it would. I guess my genie in the bottle didn’t appear.
I have decided to do something drastic. If you read anything wrong with this plan please post a comment.
A trip to the fish store to top up my cleaning crew to start my day.
1 a water change. I plan to remove aproxomately 15 gallons of water to be used later.
2 one rock at a time I will transfer to a bucket and manually scrub, with new brushes, off as much algae as I can. This may require a seperate tank where I will need to transplant corals that I remove before I scrub.
3 shake off any detritus. A really good shake. I don’t want any dead matter back in the tank.
4 place rock in a bucket of SW
5 repeat with half the tank.
6 replace rocks to tank
7 repeat steps with other half.


The reason i am going to split this is I see this as being a big job in a 75 gallon tank. Part is to give me a break and also to allow me to rebuild after removing half the rocks.

After I will replace any phosban and start my skimmer from fresh. I will also need to scrape off the glass and syphon out any crud left on the substrate. I am hoping that the drastic removal will remove any sources of phosphate that may be feeding it.

That’s all for now. I’ll reort back, possibly with some progress pics.

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Hair and Sludge algae removal.


I finally got my free sample of Hair and Sludge from Ultralife. Following you will see my progression of using the product. As of me writing this I don’t know what to expect! Exciting!

January 28th
Following the instructions I plucked out as much algae as I could by hand and did a 20% water change.

I used half of the contents of the 3 packets that come in the bag. 2 packages look like standard media you would put in your Phosphate reactor. the 3rd bag looks like little Styrofoam balls the size of a small ball-bearing.  After rinsing out all the bags they were placed into filter bags. and the bags were placed in the sump at the first stage (where water flow is the fastest). thsi was allwoed to sit for about 24 hours. After 24 hoursI put the rest of the media in the sump along with a little pouch labeled ’A’. That went directly into the tank. Now I wait.

Feb 5th
Slow going after first week. The algae seems to be growing normally, if maybe a little slower. So I emailed Ultralife -
” It varies. The product removes the nutrients feeding the hair, so it will possibly take a little while. You should start to see it slow then actually recede. From testing it takes anywhere from a few days to several weeks.”

So there you have it. I’ll pump up the skimmer and the Phosphate reactor. The skimmer seems to be producing more skimmate. I assume its due to the process.

This is where we sit at this point. I just replaced the media in my Phosban reactor and bought a new pump for it.

BE GONE FOUL ALGAE!

Stay tuned for an update around the 11th.

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