I was going to start a new thread about this to help cure the obsessive but I might as well put it here... Lots of posts about going away and what to do regarding ferts and fauna but IME we all obsess too much. I've recently been through a "conscious uncoupling" for the want of a better description which is fair to say wasn't too acrimonious
The tank has been knocked off for 5 weeks, that's totally knocked off from the power, no filters, no lights nothing. The tank contained 2 Rams, 6 Corys, 6 Embers, 9 ottos and about a dozen Amanos.
I've managed to liberate the tank down to my office on Wednesday and to be fair although some plants look a bit leggy its in great shape. The tank is totally algae free which I've never seen before in the history of this setup.
Granted a couple of days before it being knocked off I did a large water change, cleaned the filter and I had been dosing at EI levels prior. I set the tank up again by removing about 70% of the water and emptied the water out the filter canister, never even cleaned the media as it clearly hadn't been dirtied, the top floss was as new as it went in. The tank usually runs at about 24 deg and when I picked it up it sat at 19 deg. It would have got some ambient sun light from a nearby window and that's it. Sitting last night I observed that I think I'm three embers down (one I lost transporting, got stuck on top of MC carpet) and possibly a couple of ottos. No doubt the Amano and possibly others had a feast on a corpse or two and luckily I had some oak and almond leaves in which were just veins. Other than that everything is fine.
So yes I would agree, slowing things down with temp and lighting certainly helps and I wouldn't fret if I was away certainly for less than two weeks. We over feed our plants and fauna at the best of time constantly pushing for growth. This experience has learned me that a heavily planted aquarium is far more robust than we think and not as fragile as we are led to believe. In fact with just a little bit of light and a nutrient rich substrate plants need very little encouragement from us to look after themselves. The issues arise when we start putting too much light on them driving up their needs... I think we already knew that anyway but I had to witness it myself to see how much my plants didn't need me and I will be keeping that in mind the next time I miss a dose or a WC and save a lot of fretting. Will also be looking a lot closer at my dosing regime going forward.
On the other hand, as you can imagine the fish are really happy to see me