Just Bought A Power Vacume Cleaner!

[goldfinger]

Hey you, all good my end!
All I did was rinse the net cloth and parts under normal cold water dried it with a new cloth and prime the unit.
The water will pour out of the overflow because the net bag needs to hang over the plastic instead of bunching it up into the unit.(unless you have added another filter pad then just raise the filter pad until the over flow just drips)
If your water was getting murky after hoovering the gravel, its the gravel thats causing the murkyness. Mine was not crystal clear until about 4 days after, but I did the whole gravel at once as mine was really bad TBF.
To get around this murky issue I suggest you hoover only 25% area of the tank and stop until the main filter clears up the water and then do another 25% over the week.
The idea is that if you disturb the gravel too much you raise some bacteria that lives on the gravel that temporly causes symptoms like a bacteria bloom until it settles again.
Plus to be fair try and not go too deep into the gravel just surface waste and left over food will help as you will want some of the good bacteria in the gravel to stay there and help with breaking the Ammonia down from waste and left over food.
 
Hope that helps you?
I'm still new at this myself so I welcome any comments from the Pros on this subject! 
Jay

 

[Mamashack]

The water was actually flowing over the top of the filter bag casing so that some of it wasn't even going through the filter bag just heading over the top and straight back into the tank.
I'm hoping the majority of my bacteria are in the filter as I did go quite deep into about 75% of the gravel. Like yours mine needed a really good clean

. 
I didn't add another filter pad - do you think it would have made a difference? Am hoping it will work as it is - don't want to start adding things to make it work properly.
The tank has cleared now tho my filter sponge will probably need a really good rinse tomorrow when I do a water change. Glad I hadn't done that first!

 

[goldfinger]

mmmmm okay seems you have a really good flow rate you had the filter back plate the right way around as it should sit very flush and its marked back and front on the plastic?
The only other things it could be is the hanging of the hoover where its tillting too much forward try sticking a cloth over the edge of the tank to make it sit more straight it might be leaning to much forward hence over flow of water is at a fast rate.
Could be it just needs to run a bit as its brand new?
The extra pad is not needed as I wanted to see what kind of particles it would pick up TBF. The extra pad would make the water over flow more as it acts like a bottleneck and flow builds up creating higher levels of water in the units volume. To solve this all I did was raise the extra pad so flow was less restrictive so less likely to cause overflow. 
If you cant stop this issue then you could try a longer tube pipe so the flow takes longer to reach the unit itself?

 

[Mamashack]

I think it was the right way round but to be honest I didn't see the front and back markings until I'd taken the collection bag off to clean it. The bag was already fitted to the frame and I just placed it with the bag at the front as per instructions. I've replaced it so it will be facing the right way next time if it wasn't this time.
The water is crystal clear again now and I'm glad to see there's no apparent fish distress this morning. I'll be doing a water change so I can clean the filter sponge which I'm sure will be full of gunk!
I'll try it again next time and see what happens before making a full judgement.

 

[goldfinger]

I think if it continues to drip on the overflow you should return it and exchange it they mass produce these so if you have a bad one its no different from leaking filters TBF.
Let us know how you get on though?
Jay

 

[Mamashack]

Will do and I still think they are a brilliant idea. Maybe I was a bit too rigorous with it for the first time. Will do another gravel clean next week and see how it goes.

 

[goldfinger]

Great Mamashack sorry don't know your name?
Just let you know I let the unit run over night for at least 15 hours and it was fine for continuous running, picked alot of stuff TBF.
Jay

 

[Skies]

This is my next investment O.O

 

[Mark300zx]

Looks like to a good piece of kit, I always use to time my gravel cleaning with my filter clean, and then just hook up my gravel cleaner to my filter in pipe, then clean it out after!