Could you do a part 3? Where you fully clean some manuals and game arts that has tiny mildew spots on it. I've been following your method of vinegar (50/50 mix) and a lot of sun, but some games, I can still feel and see a bit of spores in the paper. I'm new to this stuff, just started collecting ps3 games last month, and I'm shocked with the amount of dirt and mildew/warm spots present in half of the games that I buy online. Thanks for your fantastic work!
Oh man oh man. This is so depressing. I have had everything from my childhood on in my parents closet upstairs in TX for the last 30 years! sigh. I didn't have room for all of it in my house and that is why they are there. They do not keep the AC on all the time because they are mostly downstairs. I am going to go get them. I live in a bigger house now with a basement in a dryer climate. I have a very bad feeling about this. I am probably going to lose a lot of stuff. Oh man. So bummed. :( My question is, how do I know that the uvc light is working?
Hey, thank for the wonderful series of videos about game preservation and restoration. Your work is vital and knowledge invaluable, especially to long term collectors like me who didn't expect to be dealing with these kinds of problems in their vast physical media collection. Keep up the great work. I have a question as I'm going through a situation that's resulted in my stuff being affected by what I believe to be mold/mildew. My collection has been stored on badly designed shelving for the past 12 years in our habitable, mostly dry cellar. The airflow, especially around the back of the cases, has been poor, as the shelves were touching the wall, and the height between shelves was barely 1cm to maximise storage space. As a result, a lot of the items stored on my lower shelves have a mold/mildew on them, very similar to the mold you're cleaning off the manual in this video. Thankfully, I haven't found anything that looks too intimidating on any of my items, and the overall size of the stuff I have found is probably less than 2mm. Nothing in my collection is even anywhere near as badly damaged as that GTA Vice City Stories cover from your other video. 1) At 6:51, you mention that the smaller manual sat in a bunch of different powders. Do you have the recipe and a guide on how to use them? I've attempted to clean the manuals and art of one of my PS1 games after following the advice you've given with the 50/50 and 75/25 vinegar solutions, as well as a UVC light (which I tested using a banana, leaning the light on it to see if the skin turned brown. A test recommended by Big Clive). However, my manuals are smelling bad even after attempting to clean. 2) If the art and manuals cannot be redeemed, would you recommend I scan the artwork and manuals on a scanner? Do you have any advice on how to do this safely? Should I put the items in a plastic wallet and scan that way to avoid spreading the mold to the scanner? or do you know of a good way to efficiently clean a scanned/device that has handled something with mold on it? Would it be even something I should be concerned about? As I say, the mold I've got seems to be the white dusty stuff you've got in this video, not the multi-coloured starring stuff from your GTA Vice City Stories video. 3) I have 99.9% Isopropyl Alcohol, too. Before discovering your channel, I have used it to clean things. But I've heard that 99.9% is ineffective at killing mold and it should be used at 70% instead. The impression I've got from you is that you don't recommend IPA at all. Do you have any information as to why? as there seems to be a lot of conflicting information out there and most places covering it are talking general purpose cleaning, rather than specific game/media cleaning. Sorry for the giant essay!
You never have to apologize for a giant essay, considering that I make hour long videos about cleaning one disc! hah! Ok, first of all you should get a humidity/temp gauge. Thermopro makes one for $10. That'll get you a better understanding of what the temps and humidity is in the space over a period of time. Which will tell us how to fix that. Warm during the day but cool at night? Needs more airflow during the day. Warm at night? Airflow at night. Cool all the time? Doesn't need as much airflow but does need rotation. We can absolutely get into all of that. Thankfully with mold/mildew the sun is the best tool. Have some manuals or art that looks a little sketchy? Toss them into the sun for a bit, just to be sure! Sun fading happens long after mold get killed off, so you'll kill off the mold before anything fades. The powder is baking soda! That's really my go to. Make sure the baking soda is fresh, room temp, and dry and you can absolutely douse manuals in it. Leave it in for a few hours (8 preferrably) take them out and gently brush them off. Let it sit in air for a few hours and the smell will be reduced. How reduced? Depends on the age and how strong the smell was. but you can repeat the cycle (with new baking soda) as many times as needed. Just make sure to clean it off completely! If the manual and art can't be recovered, let me know. I'd love to have some absolutely odrous manuals that are "beyond repair", we have ways to fix those too. ozone machines, compression, soaks, lots of tricks. But for scanning and preservation I'd recommend hitting up Video Game Preservation Collective! They have a website with scanning instructions (and I'm on there discord as well!) In my research and findings, UVC and vinegar works waaaay better than alcohol does to kill mold. Mold has a tough outer shell that requires UVC to really break up and the mold works as the final killing blow. A vinegar soak to a manual is significantly easier to fix than an alcohol soak. For IPA in general I don't recommend it often since it's negatively impactful to polymers (my day job is in a metals and polymers lab). I could go on and on and on (and I do over in the GAMEYE discord), but for me and my suggestions I encourage people to stay away from any alcohol to clean items. It's a whole giant essay on it's own. But the negative imapcts to gaming are many. Reduction of polymer strength, fading of colorind and texturing, lots of stuff. Heck look at the back of an NES cart, it clearly says to not clean with alcohols or solvents. I'll do an entire video on alcohol with game cleaning, but I imagine 50% of my viewers will disagree with it. It's a fairly hot topic nowadays. Not to mention that IPA is difficult for some people to find. So I try to find universally available tools and chemicals that people can use!
@@RestoreAndReplay Thank you very much for taking the time to respond at length to me and sharing your knowledge and expertise. It is greatly appreciated. I live in the United Kingdom so sun is a rarity here! Would I just open the manuals at the centre and lie them flat to bask in the sun? Would the sun penetrate through the pages? Would I use the vinegar solution first before doing this or would the power of the sun alone handle everything? Thanks for the tips on Baking Soda, I’ve purchased a few boxes. You’ve inspired me to try and salvage the manuals. I’m going to try cleaning the with the vinegar solution first, then use my UVC wand to kill anything on there. If the sun is good I’ll throw them outside too. Then I’ll douse the manuals in them and hope for the best. Thank you also for your knowledge on IPA. I’ve heard about the shell thing before, from a different source, so it makes a lot of sense. I will try it out. I’ve got 2 empty travel bottles I can use to store a solution in. Would you recommend a 50/50 vinegar to water ratio in 1 bottle, and 75/25 vinegar to water in the other? I actually cleaned many of my Blu-Rays and Playstation games with IPA prior to contacting you, over the past few months, and hearing about it’s affects on plastics, I’m worried I’ve now doomed my collection… The website you recommended was excellent. I’ll be using the information to scan my stuff in case I can’t salvage the manuals. With regards to my cellar, I noticed there was a problem in 2020 when I saw what looked like mildew growing on the walls. I bought a mould killer product back then and removed it, then spent an extensive amount of time learning about mould and damp, especially in old Victorian properties like mine. One of the recommendations was to buy a hygrometer! So I have thankfully been monitoring the situation and making changes for several years now. Basically, in around 2017, the extractor fan on the only window in my cellar broke. I didn’t know anything about ventilation or mould back then so I considered it a waste of money to fix. Despite this, the room stayed in decent shape during this period, occasionally smelling during the hot summer days, but otherwise, fine. After discovering the mould/mildew, cleaning it, then learning about how and why it happens, I immediately got the fan repaired. I also opened up an air brick that had been boxed up. My collection, which sits down there on the previously mentioned bookcase, remains mostly untouched. Some items haven’t been picked up for over 10 years. It’s only been in recent months since I decided it was time to clean the collection and rebuild the bookcase using a slotted shelving system (to allow airflow to the back of the cases) that I noticed that many of my items had been afflicted with mould/mildew. Thankfully, new items to my collection that I’ve gotten since doing the repairs haven’t started to smell or show signs of mould. So I don’t think I have an active mould situation any more. Just a clean up operation. Although I’ve had the hygrometer for several years, I haven’t got an extensive record of the information it’s logged, but I know that: - The cellar is typically between 18C and 20C most of the time. - The relative humidity usually sits between 50% and 60%. - The highest and lowest temperatures recorded since 2020 are 26.6C and 15.5C - The highest and lowest relative humidities recorded since 2020 are 31% and 71% I have a dehumidifier, now, too, to use in case of high humidity weather (like we’re experiencing now in the UK). When this device is on, the air temperatures sit between 23C and 25C and don’t clear for several hours after the extractor fan is on. So I think air struggles to escape. We have had some issues with water ingress too. We’ve had problems with a leaking gutter joint that kept breaking. It was pouring water on the wall and pavement that’s butted up against a wall my cellar uses. This issue was resolved a few weeks ago when our new contractor installed a new piece of gutter, removing the joint completely. So now I’m just waiting to see if it’s made any impact to the environment. So far, it seems warmer, due to the walls not being as cold from the damp, but it’s still to be determined. We also have an issue with the ground outside the back of our house sloping towards the house, causing rain to trickle down into the foundations behind the staircase that leads down to the cellar. This has potentially being going on for years. The bookcase with my media collection on is at the bottom of this staircase. The walls are evidently damaged by damp, so I imagine this is most likely not helping with the situation and potentially part of the root cause of problems. It will be addressed as soon as I can get some concrete and time to fix it. In neither of these cases was a puddle of water discovered nor flooding of any kind. Just damage to the walls.
Now I gotta go get some sweet blacklight posters. One with a wolf, another with a unicorn, vikings maybe.
Could you do a part 3? Where you fully clean some manuals and game arts that has tiny mildew spots on it. I've been following your method of vinegar (50/50 mix) and a lot of sun, but some games, I can still feel and see a bit of spores in the paper.
I'm new to this stuff, just started collecting ps3 games last month, and I'm shocked with the amount of dirt and mildew/warm spots present in half of the games that I buy online.
Thanks for your fantastic work!
Love all your videos man but the TH-cam algorithm. I've got a lot of catching up to do!
I live in Pittsburgh so it's always cloudy...
Oh man oh man. This is so depressing. I have had everything from my childhood on in my parents closet upstairs in TX for the last 30 years! sigh. I didn't have room for all of it in my house and that is why they are there. They do not keep the AC on all the time because they are mostly downstairs. I am going to go get them. I live in a bigger house now with a basement in a dryer climate. I have a very bad feeling about this. I am probably going to lose a lot of stuff. Oh man. So bummed. :(
My question is, how do I know that the uvc light is working?
You can tell the UVC light is working because you'll see a faint aqua color glow coming from it!
Hey, thank for the wonderful series of videos about game preservation and restoration. Your work is vital and knowledge invaluable, especially to long term collectors like me who didn't expect to be dealing with these kinds of problems in their vast physical media collection. Keep up the great work.
I have a question as I'm going through a situation that's resulted in my stuff being affected by what I believe to be mold/mildew.
My collection has been stored on badly designed shelving for the past 12 years in our habitable, mostly dry cellar. The airflow, especially around the back of the cases, has been poor, as the shelves were touching the wall, and the height between shelves was barely 1cm to maximise storage space.
As a result, a lot of the items stored on my lower shelves have a mold/mildew on them, very similar to the mold you're cleaning off the manual in this video. Thankfully, I haven't found anything that looks too intimidating on any of my items, and the overall size of the stuff I have found is probably less than 2mm. Nothing in my collection is even anywhere near as badly damaged as that GTA Vice City Stories cover from your other video.
1) At 6:51, you mention that the smaller manual sat in a bunch of different powders. Do you have the recipe and a guide on how to use them? I've attempted to clean the manuals and art of one of my PS1 games after following the advice you've given with the 50/50 and 75/25 vinegar solutions, as well as a UVC light (which I tested using a banana, leaning the light on it to see if the skin turned brown. A test recommended by Big Clive). However, my manuals are smelling bad even after attempting to clean.
2) If the art and manuals cannot be redeemed, would you recommend I scan the artwork and manuals on a scanner? Do you have any advice on how to do this safely? Should I put the items in a plastic wallet and scan that way to avoid spreading the mold to the scanner? or do you know of a good way to efficiently clean a scanned/device that has handled something with mold on it? Would it be even something I should be concerned about? As I say, the mold I've got seems to be the white dusty stuff you've got in this video, not the multi-coloured starring stuff from your GTA Vice City Stories video.
3) I have 99.9% Isopropyl Alcohol, too. Before discovering your channel, I have used it to clean things. But I've heard that 99.9% is ineffective at killing mold and it should be used at 70% instead. The impression I've got from you is that you don't recommend IPA at all. Do you have any information as to why? as there seems to be a lot of conflicting information out there and most places covering it are talking general purpose cleaning, rather than specific game/media cleaning.
Sorry for the giant essay!
You never have to apologize for a giant essay, considering that I make hour long videos about cleaning one disc! hah!
Ok, first of all you should get a humidity/temp gauge. Thermopro makes one for $10. That'll get you a better understanding of what the temps and humidity is in the space over a period of time. Which will tell us how to fix that. Warm during the day but cool at night? Needs more airflow during the day. Warm at night? Airflow at night. Cool all the time? Doesn't need as much airflow but does need rotation. We can absolutely get into all of that.
Thankfully with mold/mildew the sun is the best tool. Have some manuals or art that looks a little sketchy? Toss them into the sun for a bit, just to be sure! Sun fading happens long after mold get killed off, so you'll kill off the mold before anything fades.
The powder is baking soda! That's really my go to. Make sure the baking soda is fresh, room temp, and dry and you can absolutely douse manuals in it. Leave it in for a few hours (8 preferrably) take them out and gently brush them off. Let it sit in air for a few hours and the smell will be reduced. How reduced? Depends on the age and how strong the smell was. but you can repeat the cycle (with new baking soda) as many times as needed. Just make sure to clean it off completely!
If the manual and art can't be recovered, let me know. I'd love to have some absolutely odrous manuals that are "beyond repair", we have ways to fix those too. ozone machines, compression, soaks, lots of tricks. But for scanning and preservation I'd recommend hitting up Video Game Preservation Collective! They have a website with scanning instructions (and I'm on there discord as well!)
In my research and findings, UVC and vinegar works waaaay better than alcohol does to kill mold. Mold has a tough outer shell that requires UVC to really break up and the mold works as the final killing blow. A vinegar soak to a manual is significantly easier to fix than an alcohol soak.
For IPA in general I don't recommend it often since it's negatively impactful to polymers (my day job is in a metals and polymers lab). I could go on and on and on (and I do over in the GAMEYE discord), but for me and my suggestions I encourage people to stay away from any alcohol to clean items. It's a whole giant essay on it's own. But the negative imapcts to gaming are many. Reduction of polymer strength, fading of colorind and texturing, lots of stuff. Heck look at the back of an NES cart, it clearly says to not clean with alcohols or solvents. I'll do an entire video on alcohol with game cleaning, but I imagine 50% of my viewers will disagree with it. It's a fairly hot topic nowadays.
Not to mention that IPA is difficult for some people to find. So I try to find universally available tools and chemicals that people can use!
@@RestoreAndReplay Thank you very much for taking the time to respond at length to me and sharing your knowledge and expertise. It is greatly appreciated.
I live in the United Kingdom so sun is a rarity here! Would I just open the manuals at the centre and lie them flat to bask in the sun? Would the sun penetrate through the pages? Would I use the vinegar solution first before doing this or would the power of the sun alone handle everything?
Thanks for the tips on Baking Soda, I’ve purchased a few boxes. You’ve inspired me to try and salvage the manuals. I’m going to try cleaning the with the vinegar solution first, then use my UVC wand to kill anything on there. If the sun is good I’ll throw them outside too. Then I’ll douse the manuals in them and hope for the best.
Thank you also for your knowledge on IPA. I’ve heard about the shell thing before, from a different source, so it makes a lot of sense. I will try it out. I’ve got 2 empty travel bottles I can use to store a solution in. Would you recommend a 50/50 vinegar to water ratio in 1 bottle, and 75/25 vinegar to water in the other?
I actually cleaned many of my Blu-Rays and Playstation games with IPA prior to contacting you, over the past few months, and hearing about it’s affects on plastics, I’m worried I’ve now doomed my collection…
The website you recommended was excellent. I’ll be using the information to scan my stuff in case I can’t salvage the manuals.
With regards to my cellar, I noticed there was a problem in 2020 when I saw what looked like mildew growing on the walls. I bought a mould killer product back then and removed it, then spent an extensive amount of time learning about mould and damp, especially in old Victorian properties like mine. One of the recommendations was to buy a hygrometer! So I have thankfully been monitoring the situation and making changes for several years now.
Basically, in around 2017, the extractor fan on the only window in my cellar broke. I didn’t know anything about ventilation or mould back then so I considered it a waste of money to fix. Despite this, the room stayed in decent shape during this period, occasionally smelling during the hot summer days, but otherwise, fine. After discovering the mould/mildew, cleaning it, then learning about how and why it happens, I immediately got the fan repaired. I also opened up an air brick that had been boxed up.
My collection, which sits down there on the previously mentioned bookcase, remains mostly untouched. Some items haven’t been picked up for over 10 years. It’s only been in recent months since I decided it was time to clean the collection and rebuild the bookcase using a slotted shelving system (to allow airflow to the back of the cases) that I noticed that many of my items had been afflicted with mould/mildew. Thankfully, new items to my collection that I’ve gotten since doing the repairs haven’t started to smell or show signs of mould. So I don’t think I have an active mould situation any more. Just a clean up operation.
Although I’ve had the hygrometer for several years, I haven’t got an extensive record of the information it’s logged, but I know that:
- The cellar is typically between 18C and 20C most of the time.
- The relative humidity usually sits between 50% and 60%.
- The highest and lowest temperatures recorded since 2020 are 26.6C and 15.5C
- The highest and lowest relative humidities recorded since 2020 are 31% and 71%
I have a dehumidifier, now, too, to use in case of high humidity weather (like we’re experiencing now in the UK). When this device is on, the air temperatures sit between 23C and 25C and don’t clear for several hours after the extractor fan is on. So I think air struggles to escape.
We have had some issues with water ingress too. We’ve had problems with a leaking gutter joint that kept breaking. It was pouring water on the wall and pavement that’s butted up against a wall my cellar uses. This issue was resolved a few weeks ago when our new contractor installed a new piece of gutter, removing the joint completely. So now I’m just waiting to see if it’s made any impact to the environment. So far, it seems warmer, due to the walls not being as cold from the damp, but it’s still to be determined.
We also have an issue with the ground outside the back of our house sloping towards the house, causing rain to trickle down into the foundations behind the staircase that leads down to the cellar. This has potentially being going on for years. The bookcase with my media collection on is at the bottom of this staircase. The walls are evidently damaged by damp, so I imagine this is most likely not helping with the situation and potentially part of the root cause of problems. It will be addressed as soon as I can get some concrete and time to fix it.
In neither of these cases was a puddle of water discovered nor flooding of any kind. Just damage to the walls.
Where is part 1? Lol
I legitmately thought I forgot to make a part 1. Which would fit in with how I do things.
Link below!!
th-cam.com/video/KyBw8DP6saE/w-d-xo.html