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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.
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
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.
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?
Or in some cases, stray bits of marijuana and tobacco and ashes and dead skin cells and... (you get the point)
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
"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.
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 agree. In fact, I am internally equipped with various defenses to fight and defeat those evil bacteria. The bacteria on my keyboard was probably originally attached to me anyway.
After I use someone else's keyboard, I wash my hands. Maybe I should write an Ask Slashdot topic:
"I recently discovered it was possible to wash my hands. After looking up various hygiene-related articles (link to Wikipedia) I found out that hand-washing has been associated with greatly-lessened likelihoods of getting sick. And disease outbreaks have been shown to be limited among populations of folks who wash their hands. Finally, after I heard that Al Gore washes his hands (link to Al Gore), I started doing it myself. Has anyone else tried this? Where do you wash them? Do you live near a fast-moving river where you can wash them? I wash mine in the toilet, but I'm starting to think that's not helping as much as the online articles suggest. There are other fixtures in my bathroom, but I don't know what they do. Has anyone ever tried using these other fixtures?"
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..
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.
110100 1101000 1101000 1100110 0 1101111 1101000 1100011 1
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.
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 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...
i've done this plenty of times, to several different keyboards (ps2, usb, whatnot)
my brother does it. as long as you rinse it properly to get rid of the soap,
and then give it some time to dry, it'll be fine.
some keyboards are based on several layers of transperent sheets for connecting the keys.
if that's the case, it's an advantage to seperate the layers slightly, to get more air through.
This doesn't only apply to keyboards, but to all electronics,
you can wash them if you remember to rinse them, and give them time to dry.
Also, never do it with a battery still attached, it's the electricity AND the stuff OTHER than water that kills the electronics.
Blah blah sig blah blah blah irony blah blah
This doesn't only apply to keyboards, but to all electronics, you can wash them if you remember to rinse them, and give them time to dry.
This is largely true. I'm a retired US Navy Electronic Technician and we used to have a dishwasher in the shop solely for washing electronic circuit boards taken from electronic test equipment. Most equipment is not harmed by exposure to water IF there's no electricity applied. That being said, take care and use common sense, especially if you're dealing with an entire piece of gear and not just a circuit board that's been removed from the equipment. In addition to batteries (and that includes small one's like computer CMOS batteries, which are sometimes soldered to the circuit board), be aware of speakers and other components which can be damaged by water. Some equipment may contain ferrous materials, which will rust or corrode. If you're comfortable with disassembling the equipment, it'll sometimes help both the cleaning and the drying. Even if you don't want to disassemble it completely, it might be advantageous to take the outer casing or shell off the gear after washing to aide in drying. (Be careful not to partially disassemble before washing if there are small or loosely installed parts that can be dislodged by the spraying water.) A heat lamp or bright sunshine will also speed drying, as will a fan. You can even place some boards in an oven at low temperatures. Again, use common sense! A strong heat lamp placed too close to the item or a hot oven can melt or deform some plastics. A couple of hours in the sun doesn't guarantee that all the water is evaporated from all the little nooks and crannies.
"The legitimate powers of government extend only to such acts as are injurious to others." Thomas Jefferson.
I don't think I'm the first knucklehead (I hope), who's dropped his cellphone in the toilet. You know, One minute it's in a shirt-pocket and the next...splash.
My neighbor, who's a retired US Navy communications guy and possibly an ex-spook, convinced me not to either put it into an autoclave or throw the (rather nice) phone away.
So, a couple days later, he gives the phone back to me and it's working perfectly. Same battery, everything. He told me later that he'd simply disassembled the phone, hit it with his wife's blowdryer and a sun lamp and voila! He started telling me stories of electronics that had been rescued from much worse than just a dunking in a loo.
Even though there was nothing but water in the toilet when the phone fell in, I had a slight hesitation putting it to my ear for a week or so, but it worked just fine.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.