Refugiums: Yay or Nay?

[Animal-Chin]

Originally Posted by albert_dao

IMO, a well thought out reef aquarium should never require the services of a refugium. This off the back of the hundreds of setups I've down over the years.

Funny thing is I've seen this same comment made in the past about skimmers, algae scrubbers, carbon, phosphate reducing media, you name it. Everything we seemingly can add to our tanks have positives and negatives but do the positives outweigh the negatives?