I just feel like a sump will help me manage the tank better in general. Reactors, rollers, fuges the whole nine. I am gonna be patient with this. Im just making plans for when I do switch because I really do want too. I have done the rock scrub method a multitude of times. It fixes It but not for enough time for me to get rid of my nitrates.
Camden,
A sump can be nice to have as it can help hide equipment and give you more room for equipment but equipment is never the answer for basic tank problems. A saltwater tank can run quite well with nothing more than an old-fashioned under-gravel filter, a power head for flow, some rock, and light (and a heater depending on the temperature of the room used for the tank). The penchant for equipment is understandable, we all fall into it but the answer is never a piece of equipment, it is always observation, manual intervention and basic husbandry.
Where the equipment comes into play is to allow you to overload a tank with livestock or to make certain tasks easier. Reefing is an expensive hobby but don't let glistening new equipment overshadow the basic hobby. Places like BRS are in the hobby to make money off of you. They will gladly help you spend all of your hard earned money on equipment you don't need. I kept reef tanks for over thirty years before I had my first AIO or sump tank. I used HOB, canister and in-tank. Those were, in retrospect, some of my favorite tanks because they were simple and basic. None of them had protein skimmers or fleece rollers or reactors or controllers or any of the 'fancy stuff' that has nothing to do with how a saltwater aquarium survives.
It can be daunting and depressing to clean rocks yet again but removing the algae is the only way to get the nutrients out of the tank. When you kill the algae most of the nutrients that were in the algae are released back into the water column. A self-defeating methodology. When you pull a rock to clean it, go over it with straight hydrogen peroxide (the standard 3% solution from a drug store) on a toothbrush. That will kill a lot of the remaining algae on the rock and reduce the possibility of its return for a few weeks. Check how much you feed and what you feed to see why your nutrients are so high, but mainly manually pull algae. It will remove the nutrients from the tank. Yes a protein skimmer will help but it can only remove the dissolved organics that are in the water column. Once an organic protein is absorbed, the protein skimmer has no effect on it.
-- edit - had to change a word that R2R's filters didn't like because of an alternate meaning too bad the filters don't understand context --
