I have heard people who are selling whistles on here say “Whistles are sanitized.” How does one go about sanitizing a whistle–beyond just soap and water? Do you wash the whistle with alcohol, or is there some kind of special spray you can buy? I’d like any info anyone has, please.
Thanks!
A dilute chlorine bleach solution will do the trick. A couple of tablespoons in a quart should sanitize pretty much anything in a couple of minutes.
I’ve used bleach on all of my whistles except the wood ones. I haven’t given any aluminum whistles a very long soaking; Al is weakly reactive with bleach. I’ve never had any problems.
Things like alcohol, peroxide, or iodophor might work, but I’d be concerned about soaking some whistles in these.
Charlie
A quick dip in a pool of lava works wonders.
Wiping with alcohol would be ok, but I would not recommed soaking soaking a whistle with any plastic components in alcohol. Alcohol will leach the resin out of many plastics and weaken the material over time.
You might try soaking your metal and plastic whistles, for short periods, in the kind of solutions that are used for sanitizing babies’ bottles and such; I’ve recently started to use Milton Fluid to sanitize my whistles, but I don’t know if this is available outside the UK or not. Another possibility is using water-purifying chemicals as used for cleaning up water taken from rivers and lakes on camping trips, to make it fit for drinking. You will probably find that these methods leave a smell of chlorine in your whistles, but the smell isn’t that bad, and it does diminish after a few days.
Mick
I find that a regular diet of Kilbeggan’s Irish Whiskey during performance precludes the need for sanitizing…I challenge any microbe to set up shop in the bore of one of MY whistles!