Have you ever noticed that all algae turf scrubber threads which number in the literal thousands are collections of wads of green balled up algae that were voraciously scraped off the screen... a harvesting is celebrated, the regrowth. its an action sequence or it doesn't work
ATS setups depend on export in the way cotton farmers have to move white out of their fields as the endpoint... in one school of thought any time a tiny set of algae tufts are viewed in a challenge tank or the water tested they have scrubbed all the waste without re harvest work somehow/the reason the nutrients in a constant-production system are zero is because a set of partial growths unremoved have commanded them all, without constant removal to mirror the input, claims one school of thought.
the ATS crew school of thought should only require a few rocks infested with algae in the display tank to attain the 0 measures, but true zero requires being a plant pump.
an active ATS screen is a volleyball's worth of coil every two weeks, then they get the true zero sustain
The nutrient profiles wont change much in a tank removing or allowing some pretty decent stands of algae, its the sinks like live rock pores, sandbed stores, that need to be free of measurable waste (not clouding when disturbed) so the water can have clean food passed through it (then exported) like it does in the ocean...so that animals eat well but storage of waste is low. To me, that's the true measure of nutrients in the tank (waste stores we could find as whole matter) not how the algae growth registers on a test kit of dissolved matter.
I would fix the tank with a proven spot kill action, and make sure the sandbed isn't storing detritus and if it is, cleaning that up too
