[Doug]

I ran my 170 that way for a bit last year. I had a 55 gal. tub, with a deep sandbed and calerpas, plus lots of coral cuttings. No mangroves though.

After the calerpa died & turned my tank into green pea soup, I changed direction. :eek:

I say whats working fine, dont change. Yours has been for over a year. Excellent. I dont buy into the story that sps does not do good in algae based filtration systems. I know several aquarists running algae based filtration systems, with nice acropora growths. There are however a few species of acropora, that seem not to be to fond of that style, but only a few.

My ATS, although algae based is a different type. It depends upon turf algaes for filtration. My sps did fine with it also. The different monti,s were fine. As Darren mentioned, perhaps thats a good place to start.

Get some fragged montipora digita from someone, to see how it does. My acros also grew well, that is until the toxin incedent when I moved. I needed a longer run with them. My pink birdsnest colonies loved the surge dumping on them and also did well with scrubbing. Others that seemed to be fine, was a yellow porites colony and monti caps.

In all fairness, I needed more testing to give long term results. I gave the scrubber to my friend at an lfs. Its cleaned up the green hair algae in his show tank, in only a month.

My current tanks feed to a common sump. Its skimmer only by my Euroreef, which is perhaps a litle small for almost 400 gals of water. I may add the scrubber back to the system or I may purchase one of Jaysons honkin big beckett,s. :D

I also, always ran carbon 24/7. Did it help? I dont know? It for sure helps in the chemical interaction between soft corals and sps corals. Do you have many leather types? The large umbrella type leathers seem to be fine, but some of the finger types can be terrible with sps. Others like colts, also get their "snot" all over other corals. I seen an acropora bleach from colt "snot".