Rickresource Rickenbacker Forum

I made a couple of these things via the soap dish & sponge method, but the sponges can get moldy pretty quick. Anyone else have mold problems with their case humidifiers? And subsequent solutions... would adding a little bit of bleach to the water before soaking the sponge and wringing it out help?

I'd be worried to lock up some bleachy anything with my guitar's finish.

I've been using a sponge in a plastic baggy leaving the zip mostly open. So far no mold. To keep the schooner water tanks fresh I use a less than a cap full of bleach to fifty gallons of water, I wouldn't think you'd need very much. The other trick I've heard of is micro waving the sponge to kill bacteria and mold spores (never tried it).

I would definitely be careful about using too much bleach or allowing the bleached water to come into direct contact with the guitar. Last night I noticed that the sponge was smelling moldy again, so I did the microwave trick after soaping and wringing out the sponge thoroughly. I used "Anti-bacterial soap" and left a bit of it in the sponge before wringing it out again, putting it back in the holder then into the case.

Yes, I seem to recall that it's been mentioned in the past that chlorine is particularly detrimental to CV finishes...

The microwaving trick that Ted mentions is probably a good way to go.

There's something that is sold at health food stores called GSE, (Grapefruit Seed Extract) and it has a lot of applications; it's plant-based, safe for human consumption, and is a natural antiseptic. I use it in the bedroom humidifiers to curb microbial growth, as a mouthwash, as an additive for nasal irrigation, and I have also used it in those water filtration pitchers to keep them from growing algae. Using GSE in the humidifiers has significantly reduced cleaning frequency, and when I do clean them: there's virtually no growth to clean-out. The same goes for our drinking water pitcher, which used to turn green if the sun was on it for a couple of days before we started adding 2 drops of GSE per fill. The bottles seem kind of expensive, but they are pretty economical, considering that just a few drops will do for most applications.

I'd suspect a sponge soaked in a small dish of water containing maybe 5-10 drops of dissolved GSE and then wrung-out would do well to curb microbial growth, but I haven't tried it myself. It's got to be better than bleach, considering it's just seed extract suspended in vegetable glycerin.

GSE is interesting stuff. One of my good friends is about to finish her PhD showing its efficacy in treating late-stage colon cancer. In my department, we look on stuff like GSE like snake oil because most of it is... and yet GSE has by and large lived up to a lot of the hype around it. I can't think of too many other herbal products that have done that besides the cannabinoids.

There is also this type product:

http://www.cigarsinternational.com/sear ... erpage=all

Use distilled water!

Your sponge will last a lot longer before it molds up.