Record Cleaning Fluid?

I’ve always wondered how some Jet Dry would affect the performance of a KL Audio US machine. In theory, it seems like an ideal additive. Borrowed from another site…

Finish Jet-Dry rinse aid has a bunch of stuff in it, but it isn’t complicated, really. Here’s a rundown of the contents:

• Water is necessary to dissolve all the other stuff.
  
• Alcohol ethoxylate is a nonionic (uncharged) surfactant that helps the water slide off your dishes better and thus helps them dry faster. This ingredient is probably the most important bit in rinse aids; more on how it works in a minute.
  
• Sodium polycarboxylate is an anti-redeposition polymer that wraps itself around the crud that the dishwasher just washed off so that the bits don’t get stuck again on your dishes.
  
• Citric acid, which RB (the company that makes Jet-Dry) calls a complexing/sequestering agent, is really good at grabbing calcium ions out of hard water. Calcium can bind with surfactants and keep them from cleaning and rinsing dishes, so citric acid acts as kind of a sacrificial lamb to keep calcium from interfering.
  
• Sodium cumene sulfonate is another surfactant but with an electric charge, so it’s a bit better at breaking water’s surface tension on your dishes than alcohol ethoxylate, but it’s also more foamy (PDF). Foam is bad in a rinse aid, so that’s why such products use both kinds of surfactant.
  
• Tetrasodium EDTA is a chelating agent. EDTA is short for ethylenediaminetetraacetic acid. It’s this funky-looking molecule that wraps its four arms around dissolved minerals in the water (such as calcium). The word chelate comes from the Greek word for “claw,” so you can imagine this molecule sinking its claws into minerals and whisking them away, similar to what citric acid does.
  
• Methylisothiazolinone and methylchloroisothiazolinone (aka MI and MCI) are both preservatives, meaning they keep bacteria from growing in your bottle of rinse aid. Both are capable of causing skin allergies and are sensitizers, meaning that if you’re exposed to them over and over again, you can develop an allergy. But since rinse aid doesn’t sit on your skin and washes away completely from your dishes, I wouldn’t worry about it here.
  
• CI Acid Blue 9 is dye. It makes the rinse aid blue. Why does it need to be blue? I have no idea, although colored solutions are easier to see in that little rinse-aid compartment.

@stringreen,

Your welcome to join the "Thumbs Up For Ultrasonic Record Cleaning" thread.

( let's let by-gones be by-gones)

Cheers!

I use distilled water plus 2.5% VersaClean (Fisher Scientific) for US cleaning. Distilled water is my final rinse. Plain old drug store distilled.

@nrenter - fascinating. I usually regard using things like toilet bowl cleaner and magic eraser as not good for vinyl LPs, but I re-read your post and am curious. (Not that I’m gonna go stick one of those things in my KL any more than I’d eat a Tide Pod). Do you have a background in chemistry or materials science? Can one buy those chemicals (sans the blue dye, say), without going all Walter White? And how would one determine that something like that (which we use in our dishwasher as well although for some reason, i think the detergent and rinse aid are a single ’pod’) is ’safe’ for LPs?
When I look at the CVs of folks in a chemistry or material science department at a major school, I rarely see anyone who would be familiar with applications involving vinyl, let alone vinyl records unless it just happened to be a hobby in addition to their profession. Pray tell....

Jet Dry is just a rinse aid liquid - you’re thinking of those Finish tabs. I’d never consider putting one of those in my US machine. A few ml of Jet Dry? Perhaps. You can find Jet Dry at any grocery store here in the ‘states. 

No chem degree here. Just thought Jet Dry would bring a few missing elements to the US party - surfactants, chelation agents, and a touch of preservatives. Now I’m waiting for someone to try it out and report the results. ;)