Filter Spitting Out All Bacteria?! Help!

[callaghan]

I have a Tetra Whisper PF10 filter

heres whats happening
instead of going in the "wonder tube" and transferring over to the filter, going through it, then going back in the filter.. it just seems its overflowing on the side where the wondertube is, and its not going over to the filter side, except behind it. The cartridge is about a month old, and I have the timer thing on it and its not red at all yet so I figured I had time.

This is causing a type of "backup" in the filter and it constantly sucks up the bad stuff, and spits it back out into the tank.
Please help, I don't want my fish getting sick from it.

It seems a little bit gets through now, I took the cartridge out and rinsed it with my hand.
Still not working how it originally was.

Possibly just a new filter?

 

[LauraFrog]

Hard to know without seeing it but it sounds like the cartridge might be full of gunk and blocked.

What media is in the filter? Can you replace it bits at a time or do you have to replace the whole cartridge at once? If so this is a BAD design because you'll have to re cycle the tank every time you clean the filter unless you can bodgy it up... there are usually ways to modify filters like this, some photos would help us a lot.