nasty picnic taps

I've been kegging for a while and keep having a reoccurring problem of nastiness growing in my picnic taps. i can't afford faucets just yet, so what are some tips to not have jelly in my beer? i was thinking about keeping a small bowl of bleach water in the kegerator and storing the taps in there. but would that be a good idea to keep the plastic in bleach that long? any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

What type of nastiness?

One thing I've noticed with picnic taps is that they are prone to getting stuff up inside. They are very easy to disassemble, and you might consider doing that on every keg swap.

i have some faucet tap covers that i use on my kegerator. they seem to work pretty well. like this: Beer Tap Faucet Cover.. i got them at my LHBS for $1/ea

I just take the whole thing, connectors, tube and all off, and disassemble. Then, I rinse them out with hot water in the sink and let them soak a little while in some starsan water.

I've been meaning to get a little spray bottle of vodka to keep them fresh.

I clean them out between kegs and dunk them in sanitizer. Its more of mold and what not building up while I'm using the same keg. Maybe the Vodka would be my ticket. Or those tap covers. Thanks.

Cpt_Kirks said:

I just take the whole thing, connectors, tube and all off, and disassemble. Then, I rinse them out with hot water in the sink and let them soak a little while in some starsan water.

I've been meaning to get a little spray bottle of vodka to keep them fresh.

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Why not use some no-rinse sanitizer rather than bleach?

You may also consider keeping a keg of sanitizer handy and flush the lines every couple days.

every couple days is overkill. Cleaning the lines between each keg is fine, unless you've had a keg on tap for months. Every few kegs you should flush the lines with a beer line cleaner to break down beerstone and other nasties. If I had your problem I would think having a jar with starsan to dunk the faucets in after serving would be handy, even if it's just a dunk and let it drip dry. FWIW I have to remove and rinse the spout on my stout faucet because it retains about 1/4 oz of beer which dries into a jelly and sometimes attracts fruitflies, etc. My standard taps don't have this problem.