Wow, I had no idea when I gave a general thumbs up to US cleaning that this would turn into such a long and educational thread.
First, my thanks to those who contributed to my efforts and in particular
@terry9 @slaw @whart
FWIW I took a slightly different slant with my efforts which I’ll mention here.
Our hobby tends to be an obsessive, but in this case my obsession took a slightly different tack. While most of you/us are concerned (quite rightly) with the science and the SQ, I became obsessed with how I was going to get through my entire collection in some reasonable period of time and how my early, sloppy US cleaning might differ from the more refined efforts that came after input from this thread.
My early efforts WERE sloppy, I was putting 6 records on my Cleaner Vinyl machine and used a mix of alcohol, dish soap, photo flo and distilled water. Then I vacuumed the records dry with a Record Doctor and figured that was all I needed.
Then the coaching started on this thread and over time I switched to Versaclean, less overall chemicals, higher temps, 3 records at a time (arguably still less than optimal based on what I’ve read). And thought I was good.
Then the subject of "Heroic Rinsing" (love that) and steam cleaning came up and I got curious about that.
But introducing a rinse step was going to slow down the overall effort and that thought was killing me...
So, I bought a second tank (cheap one) and a second Cleaner Vinyl. To speed things up.
The new method is 15 min cleaning in a 6L tank at standard speed, using a solution of 1 ounce of Versaclean and an ounce of Photoflow followed by 5 min in a rinse tank with distilled water and an ounce of Photoflo.
Compared to my earlier crude efforts, I now used more refined chemicals but less of them. And I incorporated a rinse step which most agreed was a good/required step. I included Photoflo in the rinse step after trying to rinse a few with no additive and noticing that the water seemed to be pooling on the surface of the record and not penetrating the grooves.
Using two Cleaner Vinyl’s and vacuuming them dry allowed me set up a little assembly line where I was able to constantly clean, rinse and vac dry and move swiftly through my collection (it’s modest only about 1000 records). At the right pace I had two tanks going and some vacuuming all going on near simultaneously.
After I got through the rest of my collection using this new approach I then went back to the first group of albums I had cleaned sloppily and with no rinsing and did the following.
1. Set up two rinse tanks - both distilled water and 1 ounce of photo flow
2. Proceeded to rinse about 50 records 5 min at a time in each tank
(this group of records had been cleaned w alcohol and dish soap and had been vacuumed, by not rinsed)
3. Looked at the contents of the tanks
The first rinse tank was pretty "murky" and had noticeable particulate in it, while the contents of the second was reasonably clear.
4. Changed the solution
5. Rinsed 50 of recently cleaned and rinsed records in each tank
(recall that this group had been run through both a US cleaning step and a rinse step and also vacuumed)
6. Looked at the contents of the tanks
The first tank was reasonably clear, the second really clear.
You can draw your own conclusions, but mine were two.
1. Take it easy on the chemicals and be far more careful with cleaning solution than I was in the beginning.
2. Rinsing (or maybe some type of pre cleaning) seems essential.
So, if you are concerned like I was about the time and labor required to move swiftly through your collection I can recommend the two machine, vac dry / assembly line approach to speed things up.
But based on observations, (not listening) I highly recommend taking it easy on the chemicals and rinsing. If you want to go fast, but get even better results then it seems like better tanks with slower rotation speed might be a couple of valid steps up from what I did.
One last thing. I did incorporate a 1 micron filter into the cleaning tank. My observation is that it does a good job with the particulate, but the solution still looked murky to me even after letting the filter run for a while.
Thanks again to everyone contributing to my education on this and particularly those mentioned above.
