Lights on or off during cycling?

[Gina]

Hi! I'm new here and to nanotanks and although I've been reading everything I can get my hands on, I'm still confused. When I bought my tank (a 5 gallon hexagonal Eclipse), I was told to leave the lights on while it was cycling. Now I've read here that I should leave the lights off. Please help. On or off? Thanks much.

 

[sadielynn]

Hi and welcome :welcome
Lighting during a cycling period is not required other than to peek inside , running your lights during cycling will fuel algea blooms .... so I would say leave em off other than to quickly peek inside :mrgreen:

 

[Gina]

Thanks much sadielynn. I'm learning so much from this board. Appreciate it.

 

[Aquai]

I personally left my lights on, after i had my live rock in that is...

But, i didn't get a bloom for some reason, maybe cos i scraped the glass most days? And also my first livestock was snails... so meh...

 

[Anonymous]

if you have a seperate actinic light then i would run that several hours a day during the cycle period to help promote coraline algae growth. if you cannot seperate the white and actinic then i would do as sadie suggested and leave them off for the most part and slowly build up to a normal light schedule by one month

 

[skipm]

:welcome to nanotank.
I also say to leave the lights off other than to take an occasional peek (its hard enough to wait on the tank to cycle, you may as well take an occasional look at whats going on). The reason is that any die-off you have on your liverock adds fuel for algae growths, by taking away the light you are helping to keep these growths to a minimum. This is especially true with uncured LR where there are a lot of organics present due to die-off.