I feel your pain. I have had an outbreak of hair algae for awhile. It was all over the rock and in my flow box and I would have to clean the tower out to keep it from clogging up the slats that water falls through. I would pull it off in hunks. I knew something was wrong and I started a process of elimination.
I worked on several things to try to find out where the problem was. First, I paid someone to come upgrade my Mag 7 to a Mag 9.5 which increased the flow in my 90 gal reef and eliminated dead spots. I had him put two pipes coming out of the tower otherwise the extra flow would have been two much for my tank size. That worked great and eliminated detris from building up and feeding the algae. Second, I upgraded my protein skimmer to a Aqua EV 120 which really started pulling out a lot of skimmette from the tank. Third, I changed out the R/O D/I filters which were overdue. That helped a lot. Fourth, I bought a clean up crew consisting of astrea snails, red leg hermit crabs and dwarf blue leg hermits and my favorite of all is the dwarf hermit crabs. The little crabs jumped on my algae covered queen conch and cleaned her up pristine. I even purchased a kole tang and have a lawnmower blenny.
The tang picks at the rock and the blenny really works on the hair algae but eliminating the other problems really got to the core of what was causing the problem to begin with.
Now my tank is getting pristine and the hair algae is breaking off in clumps and disintegrating. Yay!
I feed fresh foods and rinse them off before feeding to reduce phosphates. You probably do that as well but I thought I would throw that in.
Finally, be patient. You will see a change in a couple of weeks.
Hope this helps.
Patty
