Plastic buckets ever really clean?

[prairiecreekmaple]

Last year at the end of the season I stacked my plastic buckets in the garage for a few days until I had time to wash them. Bad idea. The weather was warm and when I got them out to wash them they all had an orange/pink mold on them. I washed them good and soaked them in diluted bleach and dried them and they look and smell really nice. I am wondering if I am going to have trouble as soon as i start collecting sap this year. Is the mold ever really gone from plastic? Do I need to chuck all my buckets and replace them? Or will they be fine as long as I clean them and dry them right away each year?

[WESTVIRGINIAMAPLER]

They are fine and shouldn't cause you any problems. I'm amazed you were able to get them apart stacking them wet.

[Daveg]

I would have given them a final rinse after the chlorine. They shouldn't smell like bleach, fragrances or the like. Sap is notorious for picking up latent smells from containers. The mold is gone most likely.

[Russell Lampron]

If there is any mold that gets into the sap it will be killed when you boil it. There would be such a small amount of it that it shouldn't cause any off flavors in the finished product. Get the bleach smell out of the buckets and you should be good to go.

[adk1]

Same goes for your sap tank. I have a 275 gallon cage tank. Clean and disinfect it every year. It still gets green and brown through the summer. I never got to rinse it in the late fall like I typically do. Now everything is all froze up and I have no way of washing it. Will most likely carry down 4 of my 5 gallon buckets of hot water and just do a quick scrub out with that. Like others have said, everything will get boiled

[Michigan Maples]

I've been using household chlorine bleach, and it's worked well on all but two buckets that had previously had pickling spices in them. Use cool water to disinfect with bleach, then rinse with hot water, as hot water dissipates chlorine bleach very quickly. Dave