Gravel Cleaner/Ammonia Build Up - Recommendations Please

The ammonia is mainly due to the fish, it's their version of urine. Your first fish will have been excreting it from the moment they went into your tank. Unless you added ammonia in the 5 weeks before you got the first fish, you are still growing bacteria to deal with the ammonia and then the nitrite that the first bacteria make from the ammonia. Do you have a reading for nitrite as well as ammonia?
The fact that you have ammonia in your water suggests the tank hasn't cycled yet, that is it hasn't grown enough bacteria to remove all the ammonia made by the fish. And you may well also have some nitrite, which is why I asked about it.
You need to do a lot of water changes whever there is ammonia and/or nitrite in the tank - maybe even once a day, and more than 10%. Then once there is no sign of ammonia or nitrite, the usual water change regime is 25 to 30% once a week.
And if you don't have your own test kit, ask the shop to tell you the exact figures for both ammonia and nitrite. Just telling you 'a bit high' isn't very much help, you need to know exactly how high.

The algae isn't causing the ammonia, it's the other way round. The ammonia is causing the algae to grow.


Uneaten fish food and fish poo collect in the gravel and do decompose to make more ammonia. Those siphon tubes can take a bit of getting used to, though I never had a problem with them sucking the gravel up. Is this what you have? It looks like the kind with a wide plastic tube with a valve at the top inside the blue bit and a length of plastic hose pipe attached to the blue bit. You immerse that wide tube totally in the tank (with the end of narrow hose in a bucket) then move the wide tube up and down quickly till the water starts to flow. You could always fill a bucket with water, stand it on some thing outdoors so it's off the ground and practise starting it with that - no fish to frighten.
The other way to start it going is to lower the entire thing into the tank slowly, starting with the wide end and making sure the water goes all the way through the tube and hose. Then hold the wide tube under the water with one hand, put the thumb of your other hand over the end of the hose, lower it into the bucket and take your thumb away. But once you get the hang of it, shaking the plastic tube up and down to start it is quicker.

How big is your gravel? When I had gravel (got sand now) it was quite fine but it didn't get sucked up. It would go into the wide plastic and swirl around but it didn't go into the narrow hose. To clean the gravel, I started the water flowing then pushed the wide end right down into the gravel, watched the gravel swirling round and the muck going into the narrow hose, then when no more muck came I lifted it up slightly so the gravel fell out and moved the tube along an inch to the next patch of gravel. Doing this every week meant I kept the muck to a minimum and could do the whole tank bottom in one water change. If you haven't cleaned the gravel properly you may find there's too much muck to get round the whole lot in one go at first - but you need to be doing lots of water changes to get the ammonia (and possibly nitrite) down to zero, so you'll soon get it all done. Once you've got rid of what's there now, it'll take less time to keep it clean.


I have never used an electric or battery powered siphon tube as the kind like the interpet one are so cheap. I did find the blue bit broke after a few years with 3 tanks to clean, but they are very cheap to replace.

Sponges should only be changed when they literally fall apart or lose their shape. They last for years. The only reason instructions or a shop say to change them is to make you spend money. Changing some of the white sponge will indeed remove some of your bacteria which will make the ammonia situation worse not better.

As for carbon, you don't actually need to use that on a routine basis. It is a chemical medium that is used for removing the brown colour that leaches from bogwood, removing mediaction after treatment has finished and getting rid of any odd smell that might occur. It's a hangover from decades ago when fishkeepers only did water changes every few months and the carbon removed the yellow colour that built up. I haven't used carbon for several years since I found this out. I just fill the space where the carbon is supposed to go with more sponge or a ceramic medium.
If you do want to run it full time, carbon does need changing as it gets full. Depending what it is you are removing it could need changing in as little as a few days (eg when removing old medication).


Something that's just occurred to me - how deep is your gravel? I suppose if it is very deep, that could be why it blocks the tube, there would be a lot of it sucked into the wide end. My gravel was very shallow, maybe half an inch if that, because I'm useless with plants (I just have java fern and anubias growing on the decor) so I didn't need it deep, and shallow gravel is easier to clean.
I changed all my tanks to sand a couple of years ago, that is much easier to clean  It is a different technique though.

I have a small suction cleaner as well as my large one. I also find the gravel clogs the tube. This is because it is only 1inch in diameter and the suction is too strong for the gravel to fall down again in the available space. Try reducing the suction by having the pipe/bucket higher (just below the bottom of the tank) orppinching the tube. I've also contemplated, but not tried, covering the bottom of the tube with a mesh that would let muck through but not gravel. This wouldn't 'wash' the gravel, just move it around to disturb the muck.