scrubbing lr

[rudyr03]

my tank is starting to get hair algae all over my rocks. im planning on taking out all the live rock scrubbing this algae off and replacing my water completely..is there any risk involved

[Jim96SC2]

I was going to, but spiny turbo snails are beating me to it.

[FOSELONE]

youre gonna kill off all the good stuff thats growing/living on them...

[cdbias2]

Make sure and scrub them in SW because FW will kill all of the bacteria and pods.

[-Pixie-]

i scrub mine in the tank there in. Filters or fish get rid of the floating form for me =)

[Frick-n-Frags]

scrub LR? yep, that's me. may as well get some use out of waterchange water before getting rid of it. i have 2 scrub brushes. a big normal one and a small one on a long handle.

i scrub outside the tank. i am trying to get rid of the algae and spores, so i rinse the scrubbed rock in a second container of WC wastewater. i also found that pushing the brush away from you down into a bucket keeps the gnarly green stucco off your face and shirt

funny thing is, basically even a scrubbrush only polishes valonia.

[CJO]

I'm fairly new at this, so take my advice with a grain of salt. My first question would be, why do I have this bacteria? I think that some algae is normal, but a lot points to an underlying problem. Take care of the cause, you take care of the issue.

CJ

[Frick-n-Frags]

there are ammonia based wastes from fish and food that have to be converted to less harmful nitrates. there are sets of bacteria that do this. when people talk about "cycling" generally it is in reference to establishing these sets of bacteria in a brand new tank.
if you rinsed all your rock in FW, you would disrupt a bunch of that bacteria since it mostly is on the LR in a reef setup.

algae is a coral competitor, and unfortunately is very good in our less-than-ideal closed sewers we try to keep corals in. so generally, algae must be a focus, and must be minimized to benefit the coral. a huge % of threads around here deal with this issue, as it is a serious issue.

[CJO]

Whoops, meant to say algae, not bacteria! Don't see of any way to edit my post. Thanks for the info on algae vs. coral.

CJ

[sedor]

If you remove all the rock and scrub it and replace all the water etc. you will bandage the problem temporarily, but they will inevitably come back. The reason HA grows is because it has nutrients to feed off of. If you take that away it won't be able to survive. I would suggest setting up a refugium or begin carbon dosing in order to remove some of those nutrients from the system and possibly get in there and manually remove as much as you can. This is the only option that will truly work for an extended period of time.

[lordofthereef]

Originally Posted by FOSELONE

youre gonna kill off all the good stuff thats growing/living on them...

I disagree, unless it is done outside of the tank for long periods of time and with fresh water. I would just drain a bunch of water into a clean tub/trashcan (basically do a water change and keep the wastewater) and use that water for scrubbing. I find a plastic bristle shoe cleaning brush and toothbrush are good weapons for this task. It might be good to note that even if you visibly get rid of it all, it will eventually come back unless you take care of the reason it is present in the first place.

[KRAZ4REEFS]

Originally Posted by sedor

If you remove all the rock and scrub it and replace all the water etc. you will bandage the problem temporarily, but they will inevitably come back. The reason HA grows is because it has nutrients to feed off of. If you take that away it won't be able to survive. I would suggest setting up a refugium or begin carbon dosing in order to remove some of those nutrients from the system and possibly get in there and manually remove as much as you can. This is the only option that will truly work for an extended period of time.

+1 I had a huge hair and venolia problem when I first set up my 90 gallon over 10 years ago. I set up a simple 20 gallon refugium and within a couple of weeks it was already working. After a few months I had NO venolia or hair and haven't had any since....that's 10+ years later!