algae scraping

I visited one of my favorite LFS'es today and learned that they are so happy with the algae scrubber they built that they removed all protein skimmers and their NO3 is below or about 1ppm. Can this be true ?

My tank is going through the the green algae phase and every day there is algae on the rocks and glass. THere are currently only 3 large turbos in the tank. I scrape the front glass every day but wonder if I should leave it for the snails to eat as my scraping is just spreading it in the tank...