My first reef (90g)

[Rikotek]

Originally Posted by jslaney

Thanks for posting your setup,

Is it possible to cycle your tank with the lights off? I mean not indefinitely but once your live rock has been in there for three weeks you could then switch them on. It would probably reduce your chances of getting nuisance algae.

When I had a breakout of green hair algae, I turned the lights off for 2 weeks (I only had some snails in the tank and whatever was living in the live rock at the time). Over the course of the 3 weeks I hand plucked as much of the algae as I could. Having the lights off greatly reduced the rate of growth and I was able to get it under control

-Eric