Deep Cleaning Records With Steam?

S: Enjoy & good night.

But what about folks like me with 5,000 + LPs or friends that own 15,000 or more of the rarest LPs in the world. How about them? I have several friends (including me) that pay for music advisors to search the world for only the most significant recordings.

I have to ask, do you also pay someone to clean your records?

If you spent 2 hours a day every single day cleaning records and took 10 minutes per record it would take over 3 years to clean 15,000.

If a typical record is 40 minutes long and you somehow manage to listen an average of 4 hours a day every single day it would take about 7 years to listen to 15,000 if you never repeated.

I do have a steamer and clean special records, but at some point the effort outstrips the reward. I find it impossible to believe that anyone would clean 5,000 records much less 15,000, and who can ever expect to clean 100,000 or ever listen to them.

I have probably over 3,000 myself but would never consider cleaning all of them. The time it takes to do so takes away from the limited time I have to listen. The amount of time spent in this thread on the minutia of the process is time wasted that could have been spent listening. I propose that you have become so eaten up with the process of cleaning that you have detracted from the joy of listening.

Herman your distorting what I ment but you have a point, even if your needle is gouging into the vinyl . Had I understood how far reaching & insiteful you are I would have never given you the time of day much less taken 100's of hours of my time to carefully doctument the process & testing Steam Cleaners to save YOU money. Herman, I plead guilty for misunderstanding the creatant thinking. You have a perfect right to be a lug and your right again. Responding takes away from my precious time that I NEED TO STEAM !! So why waste your time sending me tripe? Oh Herman thanks I think I'll listen to the needle slaming into the label full tilt , thanks again, Hey gang what a guy...Oh Doctor, Doctor do you have any little green pills to make him go away ? Thanks, Doctor I FEEL so much better...Herman get a life. Ha, Ha Ha .... Ah, just one question before I go ... What have you ever done to advance the SOTA in record enjoyment besides writing this ? Now, I'll have another pill Doc... All the best & don't be too insulted , you already did that to me.

Rsrex,
I think it can be debated whether plain distilled water is good enough for the steamer. It probably is. As far as the rince goes though, I think it's best to stay as pure as is feasible. I accidently splashed some of my reagent grade water on my bathroom mirror, didn't wipe it off and when it dried it left no trace of water mark at all. This little incident gives me the peace of mind that after a double rince the residual water after vacuuming is leaving as little residue on the surface as it dries as possible. Try leaving some of your RO water on glass to dry and see if it leaves a residue. If it doesn't it's probably as effective as the reagent grade for the purpose of cleaning records. Of course, the sonic effects of any residue left by water may be another area of debate.

Well, aren't we a little full of ourselves. St. Crem spreads the holy gospel of steam cleaning and gets his feathers ruffled when asked a perfectly logical question. Were you drunk? Your other posts have been well constructed with few if any grammatical or spelling errors. This little rant is chock full of them.

You stated that this process was important to collectors of valuable records like yourself who have upwards of 100,000 records. I am simply pointing out that the task of cleaning such a collection using your method, or any method for that matter beyond a simple dusting is beyond the realm of any reasonable human being. That means that the process is no more valuable to somebody with 100,000 than to someone with 500 since the former would never be able to implement it.

I also think my observation is valid that at some point the hours put into this thread and the hours spent cleaning could be better spent listening. There must be a reasonable balance between listening to dirty records and spending an inordinate amount of time cleaning records and talking about cleaning records.

If that pisses you off as it clearly has I fail to see the reason why. I appreciate your input and thanked you early on in this thread for bringing this process to my attention. I think my observations yesterday were valid, well reasoned, sincere, and in no way flaming you.

I apologize if it seemed otherwise but I must say your response was completely unexpected.

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