I'm glad you had the balls to shut your skimmer off. Did you notice improved growth in colors? Did you notice improved fish behavior? I notice you said none of your corals lost color, did you notice them growing faster?
Useing cheato like an ATS has been like a gift from the gods for me. I just add food, remove cheato and do nothing else. When I skimmed, I had algae and all the other problems that peoples reefs have. My SPS are all holding brilliant color, and everything grows very rapidly.
I had a long talk with Mike O'brien about this at his house last weekend, and he said that he understands why I dont like skimmers, since all my experience with skimmers was in high flowing situations useing venturi type air inlets. He called this "freight train" skimming, and he said you loose way too many good things, while not takeing the bad things that take much longer to combine with a surfactant to bond with the surface tension of a bubble. He showed me his MONSTER skimmer, easily holding 30-50gal of water volume inside it. He showed me how it just had a little hose for a trickle feed in and out in a cross current fashion. He has about 6 HUGE airstones sitting in the bottom driven by a huge air pump.
He actually has me considdering skimming as a good tool for reefkeeping if its done on perhaps a once a week basis, and just cycles the tanks water volume perhaps one time and then shuts off. I'm estimateing his skimmer turns over the volume of his tank perhaps once a day, but likely only 2-3 times a week. Maybe he will chip in an tell us.
That guy is really impressive, and his tank contained the most healthy SPS corals I have ever seen in any tank in my life.
