I agree with Ryan about the puffers doing the same thing as triggers. I also have a large stars and stripes/hispidus puffer that blows the sand as well.
Let me take the opportunity to address a couple different types of filtration methods (very briefly):
Wet/Dry or Trickle Filter: hosts large quantities of nitrosomas bacteria (could have the name wrong, but they're the ones that work aerobically), knocks are that they have been termed "nitrate factories" because they typically only house aerobic bacteria and very little to no anaerobic bacteria, bonuses are they can be modified to add the anaerobic bacteria through the introduction of DSBs to the sump area and also, they handle large biological tank loads.
DSB: serves as a host for aerobic bacteria in the top layers of sand, and anaerobic bacteria in the lower levels of sand, benefits are that it eventually will maintain your water quality by processing waste from the time it exits your livestock through the time it bubbles out as gas and exits your tank, almost like the concept of a landfill where the gas seeping out of the decaying garbage is burned as methane gas (hence the bad smell of a landfill), negatives are they can "bond" together if you do not have a good supply of detrivores and other sand creatures to keep the sand particles moving around (it's the bacteria that will fuse together and take the sand with it basically creating cement), and it is subject to being ruined by fish (which is why Mike Milz' idea about eggcrating an inch below the surface is a great idea to protect the integrity of your DSB).
Berlin or Live Rock: LR houses a host of aerobic and anaerobic bacteria, and live rocks value is determined by how porous it is and therefore, how much life it can support inside it, some live rock is much less dense and is therefore a better filter, while some (I think Puerto Rican LR is basically like buying hunks of granite, which is pretty useless for filtration) is very dense, and hosts very little bacteria, bonuses are it can maintain water quality (not as well as DSBs) through total filtration, it is easy to aquascape, it comes covered and filled with interesting life (although I have my doubts about how effective extremely coralline encrusted LR can be at filtering if you reduce its surface area by covering it with dense coralline), negatives are that it can come with some undesireable life and it needs to be cured at some point in time as a lot of life dies off during its dry shipping from where it is collected to the wholesaler, and from the wholesaler to your LFS, and from there to you, you need a lot and it's EXPENSIVE!
Plenum: don't know much about this, but it is similar to a DSB with the exception that you create an anaerobic zone of water under the DSB by elevating your bed a bit (I think) which creates an area for water to gather and be filtered, I have heard they are relatively sensitive, but I don't know much about them and I could be wrong about the system and how it's set up.
UG Filter: filter plate which pulls the water down through your substrate (needs to be larger size to allow the water to flow through) which collects waste in your substrate and hopefully below the filter plate, or, you can reverse the flow, and keep your substrate clean, although waste can still accumulate from the bottom up as you're pumping water up through it from the tank, bonuses, it keeps your surface substrate relatively clean, negatives, it offers almost no anaerobic filtration, and you need to vacuum out your substrate and clean under the plate periodically. Side not, UG Filters can easily be converted to Plenums by capping off the lift tubes.
External filters: offer areas for mechanical and chemical filtration, but very little area for biological filtration, will keep your water very clean, though. Some canister filters offer biological, mechanical, and chemical filtration, like the eheims, but I don't know how effective they are, although they are very convenient (I used to use the old eheim canister filters for chemical filtration, now my sump is in my stand versus in the other room so I just use my wet dry).
UV Sterilizers: will kill off bacteria and anything living in your water that is filtered through it, excellent for inhibiting disease outbreaks and algae blooms, but also will kill off plankton in your water column, just like the name suggests, it creates a sterile environment for your fish (I run one on my reef as well, but there's so much life there, it doesn't have the chance to kill it all off, it's just used as an aid to prevent too much stuff in the water).
Rules of Thumb: the larger your substrate, the more likely it is to collect detritus/waste; fish can disturb your substrate so be careful about which fish you choose for what kind of substrate (some also require certain types of substrates); the deeper your bed, the more creatures you will need in it to keep it from sticking together (unless you are using larger substrate materials, which I have used in the past, although it doesn't hurt to have them there anyway); fish like great water quality, so do the most filtration you can!
Finally, you'll find different advocates and opponents of different systems everywhere you look, so do the research, figure out which one sounds the best for what you want to do (or even combine them all together!) and do it! Also, if you are creative, you can design your own concepts (I did a lot of that in college to the chagrin of the people who lived below us as I created filters that would leak and crack and flooded them a couple of times) that will maximize the biological load you can house.
Well, I guess I wasn't so brief, but I think that I gave a pretty simple explanation of the major types of filtration, so hopefully it helped when taken with the advice given above in other posts.
