Record Cleaner Advice?

I had an old nitty gritty that I thought did a good job. Then I purchased a Degritter and the improvement is clearly audible. I’m cleaning old records that I thought were clean but didn’t sound so good so rarely played them.  after using Degritter they now are wonderful. At first I used the included cleaning solution that came with the machine and was very happy with results. Now I’m trying Tergikleen to preclean records then using Degritter with just demineralized water. Not sure if it is better than the included solution but trying on different records. Highly recommended 

Yes....there is a sonic difference, but too much of a Pia for me.   I have a Nitty Gritty that I use occasionally.   I use a brush before playing....

@lxgreen - your response raises a number of good issues, none of which are confined to the Nitty Gritty machine. One is multiple cleaning methods and steps, which I have found to be synergistic. Despite your delight with the results of the Degritter, you may want to keep your Nitty Gritty around as a pre-cleaner for records that aren’t effectively cleaned with an ultrasonic process.
The other issue is whether you want to use a surfactant as part of the ultrasonic cleaning process. We are told (and have seen photos showing) that the surfactant in the bath enhances the cavitation process by lowering the surface tension of the bath water.
The question then becomes how one effectively removes the residue of that surfactant in completing the cleaning process. Forced air drying will not do so; I had that experience when I owned the AD and could see how records cleaned with it exhibited a different behavior when wetted than a record that had not been run through the AD.
This suggested to me that some surfactant remained on the record surface, though frankly, I never heard a sonic signature from it. (I used little more than a capful of the AD fluid, rather than a whole bottle, based on comments from some early adopters).

I know the Degritter allows you to change out water containers which means you could conceivably clean with a surfactant, then change the water "cartridge" to a "pure" water container for a rinse cycle-- but that "pure" water bath is going to get polluted pretty quickly with surfactant residue.
Distilled water is certainly cheap enough in the States to enable you to change out the water constantly, but you’d probably have to clean the inner walls of that container (and Lord knows what the innards involve in terms of removing any surfactant traces from the inside of the machine itself).
Am I being a bit anal about this? Sure. One solution is to finish the record using pure water and a vacuum process, but the Nitty Gritty may not be conducive to that.
I also wonder if not doing a "pure" water rinse step when you were using only the Nitty Gritty resulted in less than satisfactory results- that is, there was residue of the cleaning solution along with other contaminants (that you were trying to remove) that were still bound to the record surface.
Good luck with your Degritter- in the current market, that seems like the unit to go for "one button" LP cleaning. I’ve only heard good things about the unit, including from @albertporter, a longtime Audiogon member who has owned and used virtually every high end RCM.
I’m still thinking of a design for an industrial level ultrasonic that might accomplish it all for less than 10k Dollars. :) In the meantime, we soldier on.
Bill Hart

When you are using surfactants for the final clean step, and you are not going to do a final rinse, you can do it, but the surfactant and its concentration has to be near perfect to get a near residue-free surface.  In my discussion above, 0.01% tergitol which is equal to 100 ppm (or 100 mg/L) will achieve a surface tension of 30 dynes/cm.  If  you were to leave 2 mL on the surface to dry, you would leave a residue of 0.2 mg which is essentially insignificant.   Now this assumes a clean tank, but most good DIY setups are filtering the tank.

But, if you are using who knows what at  who knows what concentration, you are asking for trouble if you are not going to rinse.

This has been quite a technical tour de force.  One surprise is the respect the old Nitty Gritty units still garner.

It has me wondering if I should do my deep cleaning with my old NG 1.5 (using Tergitol or distilled water) and acquire a VPI 16.5 or 17 for pre-listening treatments.  (I don't care about noise during cleaning.)

None of this would be ultrasonic, but would it do the job?  Also, would I still need an anti-static brush?