Would you ever use second hand brewing equipment?
What's the best way of making sure it's absolutely clean?
Ordinarily, for something like this, I'd just buy new (so you know where it's been), or for things like glass bottles (which are hard to find new) I'd soak them in bleach and then use the oven to sanitize them completely.
However I recently won an auction for a bench-top bottle capper, which came with a whole pile of other stuff like a heat box, and 3x30 litre plastic fermenters. I was originally just going to throw them away, but now I'm thinking it might be kind of handy to have a couple of extra barrels around for bulk priming etc.
I'm concerned though with how best to make sure they're safe to use given you can't know the history of second hand gear (and I obviously can't use the oven for plastic =).
Is soaking in a strong bleach solution enough to remove pretty much any thing left on the inside? (chemical residue etc) Is there anything else I should try?
Or would I be best to just turf them and buy another fermenter that's new?
Cheers Dave