Well, I always try to discourage people from having pearling as an objective. Pearling plants are always a good sign but it's better to have good plant health and zero algae. If your objective is to have an algae free tank, and if you achieve that objective, then you will find that pearling will occur automatically as a result of reaching this objective.
Food production in plants requires:
Light + CO2 + water + nutrients
The food production rate and subsequent Oxygen production rate will depend on the quantities and combination of these four. Without being present at the tank it's difficult to say exactly how much more of each you need. We can take water out because you have lots of that. Now it's down to Light + CO2 + Nutrients.
If you increase the lighting you will always increase the demand for the other two, but your current lighting might be on the lowish side so it's entirely possible that simply increasing the lighting will increase the food production rate sufficiently to cause pearling assuming that there is sufficient CO2 + Nutrients. The danger here is that algae love it when you increase the lighting.
The safest path is always to increase CO2 and/or Nutrients first. That's because we know that most tanks suffer from poor CO2. The fact that you have some algae though, is a warning sign that you may have either a CO2 or Nutrient deficiency.
So instead of aiming for more pearling, a better objective would be to try and optimize plant nutritional health by determining what kind of algae you have. The kind of algae you have will tell you what kind of deficiency you have. You can then make the adjustments.
I know this sounds convoluted, but my point is that if you get tunnel vision about pearling, you could easily find yourself in a situation where you have both pearling AND massive algal blooms simultaneously.
Hope this makes sense.
Cheers,
