A Worthwhile Untrasonic Cleaner

Anovak,

I received the Tergitol 15-S-9 and have worked out a good manual cleaning process.  Manual clean with a brush, and then two rinses, first with tap water to remove cleaner, and then rinse with distilled water from a spray bottle, overall, uses very little cleaner and very little distilled water.  The Tergitol has the consistency of a light weight oil, and at about 0.35% mixed very fast.  When sprayed on the record, it wets the surface almost instantly, very little foam, and under flowing water rinses very quickly.  But, for an ultrasonic tank where you may not be doing a follow-on water rinse, a 0.5% solution will be way to much.  The product will achieve lowest surface tension with margin at 0.1%, so for your tank size, 5 ml may be all that is required, but as I said, 0.5% will be way too much, even for manual cleaning.  The Tergitol is way more efficient than Triton X-100.

Thank you antinn, I will give it a go.....appreciate your follow up and look forward to comparing results. 

So I wanted to follow up on this discussion as I have received feedback on another forum that I trust will be helpful here as well.  The kind chemist of whom I have spoken previously responded that while a simple solution is indeed convenient, it may not provide the best results.  He states "There is no ONE solution for every record as they vary in types and levels of contamination."  I believe this makes a lot of sense but am still going to give the Tergitol a go as well.  I have many records cleaned now with my present formulation using Triton X-100, Hepastat and IPA in distilled water so it will be interesting to see how those fare compared to some that I will clean with just a Tergitol 15-S-9 in distilled water mixture.  Stay tuned!

The chemist is correct for aqueous cleaners; years ago, CFC-113 was a near perfect solvent, but the Montreal Protocol put an end to that.  But, let me counter that there is no one cleaning method for all types and levels of contamination.  If you are trying to use UT for all types of contamination, then you will need a variety of chemistry.  BUT, there are limits to the power that UT can apply before it damages the record surface.  BUT, if you use multiple cleaning methods, then one chemistry may work.  As I said earlier in this thread, if you buy a Goodwill record that is just gunky, pre-clean it first.  Use the VinylStack record label protector, and use the Tergitol to brush/scrub the surface.  In manual cleaning with water rinse, you can use a slight higher cleaner concentration.  If you use a Record Doctor nylon record brush, the bristle diameter will cover the groove width, but not penetrate the groove which is protective, but it will drive the Tergitol deep into the groove, and the brushing action along with the Tergitol low surface tension will cause a lot of agitation.  However, if the record has dried glue or similar dried and hardened contaminant, you are going to have to move to a much more aggressive (potentially damaging, and likely hazardous) chemistry, but why buy the record anyway unless very rare and you are will just try.  Otherwise, trying to use a UT in one step for all types and levels of contamination is mis-application of the technology, it was never intended for that.  If you want to better understand UT check out the blog https://techblog.ctgclean.com/2019/11/the-purpose-of-this-blog/.  John Fuchs has been active in UT cleaning for decades.

All,

For those of you that are using UT and using large quantities of distilled water, something to consider is a demineralizer, and this is the best value I have found, https://dirinse.com/product/d-i-rinse-pro-50-unit/.  It kind of expensive (but for this crowd, maybe not 😁), but if your tap water is of reasonable quality, it can produce about 2000 gallons of demineralizer water at a cost of $0.20/gallon, and it can be refilled ($200 for 2 refills), and the valve arrangement can make a very convient install.  If you have a source of readily available cheap DI water, then you don't need to worry about bath life or filters/pumps etc to extend the bath life. And, you could easily add an effective rinse step as follow:

Step 1.  Clean records in UT tank with aqueous chemistry
Step 2.  Drain tank to household waste drain.
Step 3.  Refill UT tank with only DI water and using ultasonics, perform rinse/final clean to remove any cleaner residue and any remaining very fine particulate.
Step 4.  Remove records to dry.
Step 5.  If cleaning another batch of records, just add cleaner to the existing DI bath and begin at Step 1.

Quick analysis with a 1.5 gal UT tank volume.  There the demineralizer should provide enough for 1333 tanks, and assuming you are cleaning 3 records/batch, that is 4000 records.  The initial cost is $0.30/tank for DI water, and for the Tergitol at 6 ml/tank, is $0.28/tank for at total of $0.58/tank or about $0.20/record.  After the first 1333 records, the DI water cost drops to $0.07/tank, so the total per tank cost drops to $0.35/tank, and the per record cost drops to $0.12/record based on the assumptions of this analysis.  Clean more than 3 or less than 3 records per batch, and the per record cost adjusts proportionally.