Aquarium resurrection!

Argh, so my aquarium's been overrun with algae for the last couple months. I think I got this strand when I got one of my best deals picking up a royal gramma and my two shrimp from a local reefer (that's what they call us on these forums). Then I also picked up a coral from him on a piece of rock that had a few strands of red fern-like stuff growing that I got. That turned out to be the worst. I can't even find the ricordea (the specific coral) in my tank anymore and I think that introduced the algae that I've been seeing:



About a month ago, I pulled out every piece of rock, yanked out the algae, tried to use a toothbrush to scrub them, and then stuck it back in. Unfortunately, this stuff is pretty nasty and grows like weeds, so this was the state of my tank about 12 hours ago:



To try and help with the cause, I purchased a hang on refugium, basically a place where you can specifically try to nurture some life; in my case it's to grow some algae in this location to take the nutrients out of the water and prevent the algae growth in the main tank by targetting the refugium with additional lighting. It's supposed to look something like this:



So I set it up yesterday and put a little bit of this algae called chaeto in it. It's also pretty nice because it serves as a moonlight at night... some light creeps into the tank and creates a pretty nice effect. So hopefully as this algae starts to grow, it will prevent it from growing elsewhere. In the meantime, the tank was a mess, so I started yanking out as much as I could. With any luck, I'll only need to do that a couple more times before the refugium starts taking over. In any event, it looks somewhat presentable again: