Beginners mistake

[doode]

I posted this in another forum but then it wasn't there so not sure what happened, I might be making a second beginners mistake!

So basically my 38l tank has been going for about 4 weeks but I forgot to clean the gravel before I put it in. The water is always murky and I had a bit of a high ammonia reading the other day so been doing small water changes since then which has made the water even murkier!

My questions is, can I take the gravel out and clean it under tap water without compromising the good bacteria, or will it re-start the cycle? when I siphon the water out there is heaps of dust coming out of the gravel.

Any help would be great!

[SanityChelle]

Hello!

It seems a bit strange that water changes are making your tank murky. Is it like dirt brown murky, or like white cloudy-ness? If you're having high ammonia readings, you'll need to be doing large water changes until you're reading 0 Ammonia, 0 Nitrite and low Nitrates.

Cleaning the gravel shouldn't really affect your cycle at all, as gravel holds very minimal beneficial bacteria. What is your filter like? IE what media, and do you ever touch/clean the media when you do water changes? Do you have fish in the tank yet? If so, what are they? If you do, you'd be surprised how much fish can poop (and it can look like dust in the gravel when you're siphoning).

Do you have any pictures of your setup?

[doode]

After the water change this afternoon it was a brown murky but now it's more of a white cloudy-ness. Sometimes I do wonder if it's the wall behind it making it look a bit brown, I might get a background pic and see if that changes it at all.

When you say large water changes how much do you mean? I've been doing 25% water changes for the last three days and am going to get my water tested tomorrow.

It's a Aquaone Ecostyle 38L. I changed out the carbon in the filter for fluval noodles (I think that's what that is called). I haven't cleaned the noodles at all as I thought I wasn't meant to, is this right? Also there seems to be a lot of algae build up. Is it normal to expect a bit of algae/slime looking stuff on the ornaments etc? I do rub the algae off with a algae sponge when I do the water changes.

I have a school of tetras (6) in the tank at the moment, along with a siamese fighter. So all the stuff that looked like dust could have just been all the poop? I'll try and take some pics later on to post.