[APD] "Hair" algae firmly entrenched

["Mark R" <oldsan at gmail_com>]

Hi list,
I'm at a loss and need some help from the experts on this one...

I recently returned home from a 2 week holiday/work-related absence, during
which time I had someone else looking after the basic needs of my tanks. I
returned to find my favourite tank covered in bright green, long, flowing
algae which I'm assuming is a type of Hair algae. Turns out the CO2 had
stopped flowing at some point and the tank was basically high light, high
nutrient, no CO2 for possibly the entire time I was away. The person I had
looking after the tank isn't knowledgeable about planted tanks and was
basically just feeding pre-measured portions of fertilizer and fish food.
This tank has been my most succesful and I've never had to deal with serious
algae problems before aside from the intial few weeks after setting it up.

I manually removed as much as I possibly could with a toothbrush and my
hands, daily water changes, made sure CO2 was running steady.
Looked manageable for the first day. Now 10 days later, I've got the stuff
spreading at an alarming rate through my once beautiful Glosso. It is so bad
that only the newest leaves are free of it and some of the oldest are
beginning to turn yellow (or is that from the lack of CO2 for so long and
the algae just a secondary symptom?). New leaves are still appearing and
they look healthy. I removed most of the algae-infested leaves but there
aren't many left and the algae is still spreading.

My question is, what are my options once this algae has taken a firm hold?
Black out? Keep removing it by hand and be patient? Start over??? What do
you folks do once this algae is established?

Some tank info:
76 liters / 20 gallons
80 watts total fluorescent light, 10 hours
pH: 6.4
KH: 40 ppm
CO2: ~26 ppm by above
GH: 5 degrees

NO3: ~10 ppm
PO4: ~1 ppm, hard to tell with my kit
NH3/4: Undetectable
I dose KNO3 and a chelated trace mix daily, a phosphorous supplement every
three days, as well as Flourish at water changes. So far this has worked
great and I've never seen a serious deficiency as far as I know. 3 Otos and
~10 Amano shrimp as algae eaters.

Anyway, thanks for reading.
Mark
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