For what it’s worth, in the last few months I actually started to remove pellets from my reactor over time. In the last week or so I turned my reactor off completely.
My water is always phos-0, nitrates 0 (with the exception of a recent snail massacre by hermit crab which led to a fluctuation. I have always battled the snot-like algae the reactor created and assumed it might have led to some algae outbreaks around the system at times... simply for pumping excess nutrients into the tank.
Some months ago I put quite a lot of matrix in the sump along with a few litres of those marine-pure balls. One day I decided that I would just take out most of the bioepellets. They were always added in the way manufacturers instruct, not too many and gradual increases... by I wanted to see what would happen if I went backwards. I’ve always wondered if they really caused more problems than they were worth (aside from the initial massive reductions to Ultra Low levels). There were probably only 50-100ml in there over the last month. The pump became insanely noisy and probably needs replacing, so I had been turning it off when I needed some peace, before I swapped it with another pump. Turning that on gave me some clear evidence that the reactor was indeed instigating bacterial blooms. So I turned it off a week ago and it hasn’t gone back on. Everything is coping, my recent Cyanobacteria and hair algae issues have settled right down and the tank is mostly content. I do have a couple of phos-zorb pouches in the sump. I believe our council adds silicates to the water supply and it comes through the RODI system in small amounts. They actually just flushed the water mains here last week. The water had become very smelly and tasted unpleasant. We’re in a slightly elevated region so there is a large water tank near our house that all our water is apparently coming from... God knows what state it is in. The pouches help keep that in check anyhoo.