I have been reading over on RC about doing three days of darkness to help with nusiance algae. Was wondering what your thoughts were on the subject. If you have not read it, people seem to be having good results from it.

http://www.reefcentral.com/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=1078532

I was thinking I may do the same thing the last few days of every month.

I tried it to see what it would do with a red macro. Results, less than notable. Coral were fine, algae still there.

Bought 3 mexican turbos and 2 of the zebra (belize?) turbos...

gone in 1 week lol

I do not recommend it, but I went 12 days of lights out. This was the only way I was able to rid myself of dinoflagellates after months of fighting it. All the corals (all SPS) that were still alive on day 1 of 12 made it through just fine. However, lights came on very slowly.

0.5 hr Actinics 1st day
1.0 hr Actinics 2nd day
1.5 hr Actinics 3rd day
And so on until I got back to the standard 12 hrs.

Then I turned the halides back on in the same fashion, but I'm only running them for 4 hours a day now. Corals have more color and are in a period of growing faster than anytime during the previous year.

I did lose a small clam during the 12 days. I probably should have moved it to another tank being it was <3", but the 2 larger clams made it just fine.

The four tangs all did fine eating in the dark. By dark I mean only lights out. I didn't wrap the tank with paper or anything.

So yes I believe lights out will work, but I think to be effective it needs to be more than 3 days and you have to manually remove what algae you can, run your skimmer wet and keep it clean, and make sure you put in fresh phosban on day one.

My copepod population seem to do quite well with the 3-days of no light.   Unfotunately I didnt watch some of my SPS corals close enough.  My Acro Gomezi had tissue die off on some of the tips.