Hair Algae

[rhidien]

First off, read thru a lot of the long algae thread... I know what causes it and how to fight it off, just need some more quality time with my tank...but my real questions is, when scraping hair algae off the glass, while underwater, the scraped off pieces fall and get away from me far to easy. Has anyone come up with a good way of catching some of these lose pieces as they scrape the glass, so the spores don't spread even more throughout the tank? Right now, I've been siphoning, while doing water chances as much as I can and then using a brine shrimp net to catch a lot more, but still quite a lot escapes me...

 

[Krish]

The best thing I've come up with so far personally with scraping the glass is using a net with very fine holes in it (the net I use is usually a white net) to catch anything suspended in the water. I'd usually cut off all of the pump so the algae doesn't get carried away and net it as I scrape.

 

[mungus]

I saw somewhere that a guy took a nylon brush and drilled a hole in it. He glued a small barbed pvc fitting into it and attached a siphon hose to it. That way when you brush the stuff off it'll get sucked up right away. I don't know how well it worked b/c I have not tried it, but it looked pretty cool.

 

[reedman]

You can take a piece of pvc, add a barb fitting at one end and hook that to the hose to drain water. The other end you cut a slot in and put a razer blade in there at an angle that will allow you to scrape. This way you can scrape the algae and syphon it at the same time...non gets away from you. ***This only works with glass tanks...you will scratch acrylic doing this***

The stuff on the rocks I use the net like Krish suggested.