It pains me to see a successful tank switching away from a method that produced results for experimental reasons, but I understand why you guys are doing it. My advice for everyone's personal tanks however, is "if it ain't broke, don't fix it".
I just don't understand the obsession people have with reducing or eliminating water changes. It would be one thing if there was a simple solution - but installing extra tanks and plumbing (i.e. 20% fuge), more high powered lighting, expensive versions of basic 2-part supplements, paying for lab grade testing, then more supplements to correct those imbalances uncovered... I mean come on people, is this really easier than just changing 10% of your frickin' water once a month? My strategy, which has been "perfected" over the last few setups, is just to make water changes super easy. I have a 55g barrel plumbed into the system (these were readily available to me and I have the space, but certainly could use something smaller depending on the system). The barrel circulates system water through it (tee'd off return, similar to how an external fuge or frag tank would be plumbed) and when it's time to do a water change, I shut a ball valve on the inlet to isolate the barrel, open a ball valve on the bottom to drain the barrel, and then turn on the RODI to refill the barrel (float switch will shut off when full). Dump a bag of salt in, wait a few days, and then open the ball valve and the barrel is now once again circulating with the rest of the system. This is an extreme example of a significant infrastructure investment (although no more than a typical 20% system volume refugium...) up front to have almost zero headache/tasks during actual maintenance. You could certainly make water changes easier in other ways, like having a dedicated tee off your return pump which you can attach hose to for pumping water to drain, and/or simply placing your saltwater prep container above the sump so that once water is removed, you can open a ball valve and let gravity refill instead of lugging buckets...
As for the removal of the rollermat - is the idea here that the zeovit system fed the corals, so now you are hoping the additional detritus in the system will fill that gap? Is "no mechanical filtration" recommended for the Triton system? Although corals likely eat detritus if made available to them in the water column, I don't think it's a simple swap of removing your mechanical filtration to provide the same food type/quantity that zeovit did. Bacteria are orders of magnitude smaller than detritus particles. And the idea of draining a tank directly into a refugium makes me squirm - that sexy clean sump is going to have piles of detritus all over it.
I also understand the urge to use the Kessil H1200, but I worry that if the point of this experiment is to show results of using a refugium and Triton in a realistic hobbyist environment, this will always be an asterisk next to your results that you have to defend. Yeah it was successful, but you used a ridiculously overpowered crucial piece of equipment that now makes this system an outlier, not a typical approximation. (Side note - seriously, have you guys sold any H1200s? lol).
