Iodophor in a spray bottle?

Hello,
I've read few posts about people using spray bottles to sanitize various peices of equipment and was wondering if this would work with a properly mixed solution of Iodophor. It was my understanding, from the information on the bottle that I need either 3 or 5 minutes of contact time depending on the brand to properly sanitize. My assumumtion was, based on this and home brew techniques I have seen that the only way to get this much contact time was to fill a sink or large container and let equipment or bottles soak in it for the alloted time. This means that I use an exsesive amount of water, 6.5 gallons ever time I do my carboy, more than that for my bottling bucket, and probably another 5 gallons that I let hoses and my racking cane and funnell etc. soak in. If I could put some in spray bottle and spray the inside of my bucket a few times and get a properly sanitized bucket that would make a world of difference. Any other suggestions you might have to reduce my water usage and still have properly sanitized equipment, short of switching to Sanstar(just bought a new bottle of Iodophor then found this forum) would be greatly apreciated.

Thanks in advance for your help.

By contact, there just has to be iodophor on the bucket, it doesn't necessarily have to soak. For example, I usually fill the bucket or carboy up to 1 gal. with the appropriate dilution of iodophor, then slosh it around, wait a couple minutes, and I'm good to go.

My bottle of iodophor says 30 sec of contact time.

Yup spray bottle sanitizer rocks! It makes it soooo much easier and you use much less. Just make sure everything is nice and clean and give it a good spray. For carboys and buckets I still slosh about a gallon or so just for good measure but everything else gets a spray down.

The problem with Iodaphor versus say star-san is that its half life is much shorter, and exposure to sunlight and heat cause it to become a less effective sanitizer over time.

I personally wouldn't put Iodaphor in a spray bottle because I would not trust its ability to sanitize after a week of sitting diluted in the bottle, but that is just me. I have a star-san sprayer that I swap out the liquid every 2 months.

This podcast from Basic Brewing Radio is well worth a listen with regards to Iodophor.
http://media.libsyn.com/media/basicbrewing/bbr03-22-07.mp3

Thanks for all the feed back guys. Other than the half life issue it sounds like a pretty good idea. As long as I mix a new solution on each day that it is need, there is realy no problem with it right? Sounds like I just cut my water usage dramaticaly. A gallon for the bottling bucket sounds way better than 7.

STUNTx2 said:

... As long as I mix a new solution on each day that it is need, there is realy no problem with it right? ...

Click to expand...

Yep, that's what I do. And you only need to slosh ~1.5 gallons or so around your carboy real good to get it nice and sanitized.

Here's a great tip I got from a homebrewer years ago. Take that ~1.5 gallons of Iodophor in the carboy and pour it into one of these:

It's a wallpaper tray. Any hardware store will have them for ~$3.00 each. It will hold my tubing, autosiphon, beer thief, hydrometer, airlock, stopper, etc., and not take up a lot of space. Get a couple and stack them together for extra strength.

Yup thats a good point...I just use the iodophor solution THAT day and make up a new batch as needed

Iodophor diluted will sanitize for about 8 hrs before you'll need to mix up a new batch. That wallpaper tray is a great idea for tubing, siphon, thief, etc., since it's kind of tough to spray the inside of those. The spray bottle is nice to have to give something a quick spritz if you just want to be doubly safe.