Turn off your lights for a couple days

Has anyone tried this? I saw a thread on another reefing site about it and it seemed intriguing. Lots of people posted about how they tried it with great success.

Mostly the purpose of it was to get rid of cyano but it also helps with other algae and overall tank water clarity. I guess it's too late to ask for my own purposes, because I'm on day 2 of this. The other thread said 3 days but I'm only doing 2 and tomorrow I'll have only my PCs on and no MHs. Then Wednesday will be back to normal lighting schedule. I'll post an update of my results over the next few days.

Someone also said that natural reefs only receive something like 85-90 days of unfiltered sunlight per year - compared to our 365 on our tanks. So I guess this doesn't seem as unnatural and it may sound at first.

So what do you think? Have you ever tried this? Think it's crazy?

 

I tried it for 3 days to get rid of cyano. And the and of 3 days there was no cyano, but it came back with a vengance.

 

When it comes to Cyano, lighting is not the only problem, so this alone wont cure it. However, I also read the same post on RC, and Ive been doing for about 2 years now.......it works out great! Every three or four months, I turn the lights off for 3 days, and you can really tell the difference. Sometimes, Ill even get creative and wrap a towel around my tank for the first day or two, just to keep out any room light.

 

What are the effects on your other algae (if any)? What have you noticed as the biggest positive from doing this? This is my first try so I'm a little nervous (very little, actually, but still...), which is why I'm doing 2 days and not 3.

 

Mission what were you doing it for? Just because it's a little more natural or was there a problem you were trying to fix?

 

I wonder if my yellow wrasse would stay buried for three days?....That would be my only concern! : ) lol... as soon as lights out, shes in the sand bed.
LG

 

A week!! OMG! You say early stages, how much coral did you have?

 

I have not tried this exactly. But I did notice at 12 hours of lights (12 for actinic and 10 for daylights) I got algae. So I started backing it off 15minutes a day per week (each week, I would knock 15 minutes off the daily schedule).

in the end, I'm at 11 hours 15 minutes actinics and 8 hours day lights. I did this to fix GHA and it hasn't come back. Everything seems fine. This is *my* magic number... I would guess yours to be different

On what I quote above - I thought this was like full days... so 90 days of sunlight is in reality 180 days (with a day = 24 hours in this thinking) if each day gets a full 12 hours. Our 365 days of light (assuming 12 hour schedules) is only 182.5 days of sunlight.


But if the natural reef only gets 8 hours today, 10 hours tomorrow and 6 hours the day after, it would have taken 3 days to get 1 full day of sunlight... like that... does that make sense? I think that's how 85-90 is arrived at. I don't think most days are really really cloudy.

Anyway, that's just how I take that to mean - not sure I'm right.