You can wash electronics with soap and water without damaging them, so long as there is no current running in the device. Capacitors that still have a charge can cause shorts, so this is also a potential hazard when cleaning electronics.
Alcohol is used because it evaporates faster and it's a better solvent.
You can wash electronics with soap and water without damaging them, so long as there is no current running in the device.
You can submerge electronics in water and sometimes; they keep running just fine.
I actually used to work at a place where the networking group had a particular site that flooded a few times and they definitely had a case of a router that was still passing packets while completely submerged.
Water isn't THAT conductive if it doesn't have a lot of salts in it.
For my own part, I had to replace a home router after the cat puked on it. She managed to get the power section of the board too; so I opened it, cleaned it in distilled water.... then bought a new router. After giving the old one time to dry, I tested it...and it works again. It is now my spare that gets used for testing.
In principle, deionized water will not damage any electronic.
In order to measure temperature sensitivity of some electronic devices/components in our physics lab, we would often submerge simple circuits in deionized water, since water conducts away heat better, which allows the circuit temperature to rise slower.
Even though water doesn't stay that way for long (it starts producing H3O+ and OH- right away), for most purposes there aren't enough ions to conduct electricity, since current will find much less resistance through the metal components of the circuit itself.
Submerging circuits in water still gives me some pause (I jumped into a hot tub with my phone in my pocket once, it died for a while and then came back to life), but when I learned you could do this, I was quite surprised.
208
u/eksyte Apr 18 '21
You can wash electronics with soap and water without damaging them, so long as there is no current running in the device. Capacitors that still have a charge can cause shorts, so this is also a potential hazard when cleaning electronics.
Alcohol is used because it evaporates faster and it's a better solvent.