How I Do My Tank Lighting

I keep my aquaria so that I can enjoy viewing the fish and live plants when I'm relaxing in my den in the mornings and again in the evenings. The den is where we do most of our socializing. So my tanks really must look pretty good most of the time. One of the problems I deal with has to do with the fact that I'm usually up at 7-8am and go to bed around midnight.  So to have the lights on 17 hours daily will just blow up the algae population and ruin the aesthetics of the tanks, not to mention, cause me extra work to keep them looking nice.  

My most active viewing times are in the mornings and evenings. So what I do is put all my tanks on automatic timers and set them to come on around 7am and off about 11am, then back on again at 5pm, and off again at 11pm.  This gives them 10 hours of light a day and that seems to be sufficient for my low-tech planted tanks ( I don't have any high-tech ones! )

I fertilize with Seachem Flourish Comprehensive, Excel, and root tabs.  Water changes?.....I try to keep them on a 2-week schedule, but range between 2-3 weeks. Otos and dwarf bristle nose plecos inhabit most of my tanks too.
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How do others of you manage to keep algae low in your tanks?

PS...Seattle_Aquarist taught me much of what I've learned.  Thanks Roy!

For some reason I get very little algae in my 140gallon tank. About every 6-8 weeks I'll go over the glass with one of those magnet scrapers to rub out some hard green algae dots. I just got done with an ANNUAL razor blade scrape because a slow growing hard red type algae started dotting the glass. Its an odd algae that scrapers won't clean...

My 30g and 9.5 gallon I am still trouble shooting balance. I am getting all sorts  of weird stuff growing in them.

As for lighting, A.M.lighting on the weekdays is irrelevant to me but they begin to phase on around 9am. 10pm is when the last of the lights shut down. That's usually when I go to bed

What kind of algae is it? Usually algae in planted tanks is caused by too much nutrients and not enough plants to eat it. I would suggest backing off on the fertilizers and get MORE plants I've been told that floating aquarium plants are good at using up the extra nutrients in the water and they reduce the light, Good Luck!!

I got mine all on timers as well. 9:30am to 9:30pm. 12hrs gives more than enough lighting to make everything EXPLODE! It's mainly the guppy grass and floaters that I have right now, but the crypts and java ferns are growing exponentially! I found the smallest baby java fern the other day doing a water change! The only tank I have problems with is a single 10gal that gets algae on the walls.