Hi everybody,
Thanks for all of the advice in this thread. I picked up my first real set of chips in the Cleveland HS sale, and definitely didn’t want to clean over 500 filthy chips by hand. I thought I’d provide a review on Harbor Freight’s ultrasonic cleaner, since I haven’t see that one reviewed on PCF yet.
The Harbor Freight ultrasonic cleaner is $80 (although the 20% off coupons bring it to $64 before tax), and is listed as a 160W machine. That said, it’s my understanding that only 60W is due to the single transducer in the machine, and the other 100W is due to the heater. This means that the ultrasonic portion of the cleaner is much less powerful than most of the other units discussed in this thread. I knew this going in, but given that I’m really not planning on buying many more chips beyond this one, I was loath to spend any more money on a nicer unit.
So how did it do? Overall, it worked pretty well. The first couple of batches of 1s took a fairly long time to clean until I got the proper method down. I was pretty sure that the salad spinner listed in the original post wasn’t going to fit in this unit, and so I opted to put about 30 chips in the cleaner (using the plastic basket which comes with the unit) and agitate them with a spoon. This produced mixed results. Some of the chips came out really white, but others still had some gunk on them. By reducing the batch to 10 chips, and running the cleaner for about 2.5 minutes, I was able to get pretty good results. A couple of them looked a little grey compared to the really white ones, but another 90-second run got them looking much better. Apologies for the bad camera work--I was in the middle of cleaning stuff and didn't want to spend a ton of time on taking pictures. The clean chips in the lower-left is an example of a chip which came out a little grey at first.
The 5s, 25s, and 100s went much easier. 10 chips per batch at 60 seconds were enough to leave them looking nice and clean, with no gunk in any part of the mold.
Overall, I’d say that if you’re just looking to purchase this unit for a one-off set of chips, this cleaner is a viable choice. If you think you’re going to be doing multiple sets over time, though, one of the multiple-transducer options is probably a better bet for you. I’m happy with the results I got, but the small batches took a lot of time.