My lights are on ~2 hours in the morning, then from ~2pm to ~8pm, to kind of mirror when I'm there to look at the tanks. One tank has almost zero algae, another has some green spot and a bit of brown, but nearly all in back and hard to notice. A third has noticible greenspot and brown, but it's still a newly set up nano and has only plants and no heater (yet). Each tank is a different size (2.5, 6 and 10G) and each has a different lighting set up. So in thinking about your question, I suspect that timing is only one factor in whether or not algae growth is encouraged or discouraged. If everything else were to be equal, an experiment using different times on various identical tanks might have interesting results.