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Are Keyboards Dishwasher Safe?
i_like_spam writes "Computer keyboards are a breeding ground for bacteria. Studies have shown that keyboards often contain more bacteria than toilet seats. Common cleaning methods, such as pressurized-air canisters and damp rags, help remove some of the dirt, but they also leave behind plenty of grime. National Public Radio describes a recent experiment by a reporter who used a dishwasher to clean her keyboard. Following the advice on Plastic Bugs, she placed her keyboard in the top rack, didn't use the heated dry cycle, and air dried the keyboard for a week afterwards. Her keyboard is now squeaky clean and functions perfectly. Has anyone else tried this or any other alternate keyboards cleaning methods? For those not willing to air dry for a week, dishwasher-safe keyboards are now available. Would you ever do this to your peripheral? "
Post it again in a week!
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
My wife put a keyboard in the dishwasher and killed it dead. Never did work again.
Contrary to popular belief, water isn't the real danger to the keyboard here, it's soap. The soap is conductive, and if it isn't fully rinsed, could short out contacts and render the keyboard unusable.
So the modified checklist is:
1. Keyboard you can afford to lose.
2. No soap
3. Shake empty of water, then air dry.
I've done this before. You can air dry it for only 24 hours in most climates, and a lot less if you're willing to take it apart after. If you use it before it's fully dry the worst that seems to happen is keys behave weirdly -- if that happens, it's not done drying yet.
At my current job I have access to an ultrasonic alcohol bath cleaner; that was quick and simple, and dried out even faster.
Compressed air nozzles also work well, though that's more for dust and debris and doesn't do much about the grimy stuff.
What about laptops?
-- rm -rf / tells you if you have root or not
Wash you damn hands!
The third most important thing I have learned in life: Squeeze anything hard enough and it eventually makes a noise.
seeing as my keyboard is a bit attached to my laptop, most people in my situation probably would not.
and air dried the keyboard for a week afterwards
A week? That's probably more fossil fuels consumed than a new keyboard would be.
Table-ized A.I.
"Studies have shown that keyboards often contain more bacteria than toilet seats."
Don't you get tired of hearing how things are cleaner than a toilet seat? As proven on Mythbusters, almost everything is dirtier than a toilet seat, the floor, the counter, your mouth, your hands, all contain more bacteria than a toilet seat. So people, stop with the toilet seat analogies, they are meaningless!
I keep holding onto my keyboard because if I buy a new one, some kid in Asia is going to be roasting this one over an open pit coal fire to get the gold out of the capacitors.
At my university (Sherbrooke) we work late, drink coffee and eat things like chips or our diner in front of the computer. Keyboards get dirty quickly because the security guards cannot enforce the law.
What IT does to clean the keyboard is much the same but probably less damaging. The have a big plastic box they fill full of water. They just immerse the keyboards for a few hours, lt them dry for 72 hres.
Everything is clean and they don't brake often with this method.
Good point about F6. It hasn't even been loved enough to be given a Function function on my Thinkpad T60.
Turns out it moves between focusable frames in Windows, and in Firefox, can be used to focus on the task bar - and hit again to focus on the page! Useful, yet unloved.
Someone needs to start a F6 fanclub. That key will get a complex.
I just lick mine clean.....kinda like the family cat. Sometimes the cat and I take turns licking the mouse, too. Never got sick, though I did get a second taste of some cashew chicken from last month. Mmmmmmm.
An emphatic yes, given what else I'd do to my peripheral!
"Would you ever do this to your peripheral?"
Nope. But then I don't share the [seemingly] common pathological fear of bacteria that's been created in the last decade or so.
Ae keboas ishashe safe?
o.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
I use to shower keyboards all the time, since the late 80s, when they'd been peed on or drooled on by special needs children. Give them an isopropyl alcohol rinse, let'em dry, and you're good to go. Also works with Apple ][ motherboards, joysticks, and the occasional 5-1/4" floppy that had jello shoved inside it (don't ask...). A few rules apply; no mechanical systems (there's a special cleaning solution for those), no power systems, no monitors (unless you LIKE grisly death), no headphones, no speakers, et cetera. Just solid state components and key switches only please. Q-tips, Vaseline, canned air, and isopropyl alcohol are all still tools of the trade. It's amazing what you can do with them even on modern hardware.
Wow! How many times do you have to refresh the post reply page before you get a captcha you can type?
Better question: Why are you wasting 200 proof Ethanol on a $30 keyboard?
The road to tyranny has always been paved with claims of necessity.
Ten years ago my step-brother was doing it often
I did it once. I dumped most of cup of coffee into my Microsoft Natural Keyboard a few years back. I took the whole keyboard apart...the keys come out in groups, and there's a dimpled plastic thing underneath the keys. Since I had it apart, it didn't take a particularly long time to dry...I waited a few hours, I think. Washing it didn't hurt anything, but the keyboard was never quite the same. Some of the keys were harder to press down for some reason, like there was more friction or something. I tried putting a little bit of Teflon lubricant on those keys, but it didn't really feel quite right after that. Over time it's improved, though.
Can't imagine why I would wash my keyboard often, though. People always get so scared when they find out there's germs around. That's why I have an immune system. My keyboard hasn't hurt me yet, so I'm not too worried about it hurting me in the future. Maybe if I get some sort of keyboard-born illness someday, I'll change my ways...assuming it doesn't kill me, I guess.
ZuluPad, the wiki notepad on crack
"I would write a better reply, but why keep my computer on and waste the electricity" says a voice in my head. Not just any voice- this one sounds like Al Gore.
How do you know it hasn't hurt you? Have you never been sick? At this very moment those bacteria may be evolving sentience and soon they will plot to destroy your brain with laser beams fired from bacteria-proportioned starships.
I was shaving one day and knocked my treo 700w into a toilet, I grabbed it out immediately and took the battery out, ran clean non chlorinated water through it, put it in the oven on 150F for about 5 hours, put the battery back in and it worked fine for months. I eventually moved to an xv6700. It still worked fine though.
Freedom is fragile and must be protected. To sacrifice it, even as a temporary measure, is to betray it.
I can personally attest to the validity of dishwashing keyboards - I have seen it done (successfully) first hand.
About 10 years ago, my friend's mom complained that her computer was acting strangely. It would keep typing the same letters over and over again after a single initial keypress. My dad did some investigation and noticed that this happened on every program, not just the DOS prompt where she noticed it.
He pressed her on the subject of her keyboard, asking if anyone had spilled anything on it - to which she fervently replied "No". Being the problem solver he is, my dad had brought along his own keyboard to use in testing and lo and behold, everything worked just fine.
It was about that time (faced with evidence that it was a peripheral problem) that she admitted that there may have been some iced tea spilt on the keyboard a few days prior - but that she didn't think it was any big deal.
Since my dad had a spare keyboard anyway, he gave it to them in exchange for the tacky one. Once home, he did the very experiment described in the article. He ran the keyboard through the dishwasher (bottom rack) on low heat so as not to melt the keys. Then he propped the keyboard up in front of a floor vent to let the dry, air-conditioned air work on it overnight.
The next day, he plugged in the keyboard to discover that it was fixed! Back then keyboards had less gadgetry (no numeric side-pad or soft "media" buttons up top), but hey - a win's a win.
I once dropped a water balloon onto the keyboard of my Apple ][+. That keyboard isn't just powered, it's attached to the computer. Water was all over the motherboard and everything else. And, being a little kid, I was bright enough to switch it on "to see if it still worked." It didn't.
But you know what? It lived. Dried it out as best as I could with a hair dryer and left it overnight, and it worked fine.
Breakfast served all day!
Hi,
I have done this a bunch of times except I take the keyboard apart so you can really get the water out. Here is my web page detailing the process I use:
http://dkdk.homelinux.com/keyboard/
Water itself doesn't conduct electricity.
water doesn't hurt electronics contrary to popular belief.. its powering them up when wet that does. and its not even shorting that does the damage when you do.. it electrolysis that kills them by damaging the circuit.
when we assemble printed circuit boards the last step is to wash them in warm water to strip the flux used in the soldering process.
also when i get a gadget thats been dropped in the toilet (pagers are notorious for this) we tell the customer to pull the battery, put it in a bucket of fresh water.. and bring it over to the shop.
i have a 99% success rate reviving drowned electronics this way.
$0.02 from a electronics tech in the field..
... But it don't work with cats.
God Be Gone
Every two months I disassemble my keyboard and run the plastic bits through the dishwasher. I hand-clean the little metal chachkis, and dust off the electronics. Then I reassemble. Works pretty well, I think.
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Printed circuit boards are normally washed in something like a dishwasher after soldering. A few components can't tolerate that, mainly some speakers, and they have to go on after the washing step.
But you have to use water with low dissolved solids, since, when the water evaporates, it's going to leave solids behind. Leaving streaks of iron behind is definitely a Bad Thing. So use distilled or de-ionized water.
when we assemble printed circuit boards the last step is to wash them in warm water to strip the flux used in the soldering process.
The fancier way, apparently, is to wash it in hot water, THEN in almost pure alcohol (to absorb the water), THEN shake it *really* hard, to get rid of (now less pure) alcohol droplets. When late one night our (very experienced) electronics guy got to the last part I (more of a software kind) had to try to look the other way, you know, with the sickening feeling that this beautiful half-gold-plated thing will crack right there and then -- but it did survive just fine.
Paul B.
Not every keyboard is ready to get cleaned in a dishwasher. In some cases you have to disassemble them and clean all the parts separately. Here are guides to take apart a computer keyboard and clean it for keyboards made by almost any manufacturer.
Your irresponsible lack of keyboard sanitisation will lead to the deaths of 2/3rds of the population of this planet - they will die from a disease caught from a dirty keyboard. The other 1/3rd, consisting of hairdressers and keyboard sanitisers and the like, will be shipped off to another planet where the answer to life, the universe and everything will be discovered.
hot water will dissolve the protective layer of grease on the contacts (it's gets runny when hot). You severely degrade your keyboard's life by washing it in a dish washer.
I've washed keyboards before in the shower by hand (usually in response to spilling beer on them). this is preferable in my opinion. But some keyboard designs do not tolerate washing very well. For example my fairly pricey Sun keyboard was damaged with water because the watered corroded all the contacts (there were wide black streaks, making many of the keys unreliable). it took a good two hours with a pencil eraser to rub the corrosion off the contacts. although the stress or rubbing the corrosion off cracked one of the traces on the very fragile design, forcing me to buy a $15 conductive pen to repair it.
if you are going to washer it i would also recommend rinsing it with distilled water before letting it dry, a jug of that stuff is like a dollar. and possibly accelerate the drying process with a hair dryer on cold. not hot, unless you want to melt your keys, hair dryers usually get too hot too quickly.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I have a KeyTronic basic keyboard from 2001. What I do I unscrew the 4 screws that hold it together from the bottom. Then I wash just the plastic parts, the top, the keys(which I remove one by one) and the bottom. I leave the electronics untouched, or just wipe the rubber cover with a damp cloth. Works 100% of the time, with minimum downtime(no airdrying for a week, the plastics are all dry in one hour).
She: Hey, are you a traitor? Me: No, I'm atheist.
I would question the actual point of the cleaning. Everything that makes it onto my keyboard is either my own skin particles or foodstuffs or dirt/dust out of the air. Sure if you pop the keys off its pretty disgusting in there, but its also fairly cheap to buy a new keyboard every few months (haha until I get a wolf-claw). For me, at least, I know I'm the one person in my house who rarely gets sick... this could just be an immune system thing or it could be my disgustingly grotty keyboard/mouse combination.
My $0.02 AU
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
indeed this process of rinsing with water, then alcohol, then evaporating the alcohol (not specially shaking, not specially cooking either, or not too hot just to accelerate drying) is really the standard in electronic board cleaning.
The only issue you may have is, in general you'll have *non-electronics* parts around your board, e. g. an LCD display whose nifty plastic surface may well crack when in contact with alcohol: this is the main issue to take care of.
Alcool is technically said to "reveal constraints" in ordinary plastics, so beware about this...
Herve S.
But but... where would all the calculators go?!
It's funny... I had that same voice in my head... but my fingers wouldn't let me type the command to shut this box down...
Me failed English...
FreeBSD over Linux. If my comments seem odd, this may explain...
My Saitek Gaming Keyboard has a top that separates from the bottom by simply removing a few screws, and the top has no electronics and is sealed from the bottom part. So the top (key part) can be washed without the need to spend a week drying it. Pretty cool design in my opinion.
A friend of mine recently dish-washed the white keys of his iMac G4 keyboard. They are now clean but also very yellow! So watch out for discolouring.
Most keyboards have their leads printed on flexible plastic sheets that are screwed together with a metal backpane. If water gets inbetween these, it *will* lead to shorts and burnt leads, and your keyboard *will not* function.
Ideally, what you want to do is take the front part of the keyboard off, remove the keyboard controller PCB (Usually just three screws and you can pull it and the cord off,) remove the plastic sheet and the metal plate, and then just scrub the thing down with whatever you're comfortable with. Dry it off traditionally with a hairdryer or similar device (being plastic, it doesn't take more than fifteen minutes,) and screw the sheets and the controller back into the keyboard.
Voilá. Clean keyboard in twenty minutes tops.
I definitively agree : open it and wash only the plastic part ie keys and outside case. I have done that from time to time - and the results are awesome. And , BTW, you DO need soap to clean it (contrary to what a later post claims) ; but if you are washing only the plastic and keeping the electronics dry, then it is perfectly fine.
A-ha! You said "pouring," implying that it wasn't an accident! Wait til your boss hears about this!
It is sensible to clean keyboards because the dirt sometimes interferes with proper action. Your instructions are excellent for people who haven't cleaned electronic circuit boards before.
However, it is not sensible to worry about bacteria. There are bacteria everywhere, all the time. Whether there are 100,000 bacteria on every key or 1,000,000 makes little difference.
Slashdot editors seem to easily believe science fraud articles. Maybe they played with their Nintendo Game Boys in biology class, physics class, and, judging by the number of spelling and grammar errors, English class.