I often work with circuit boards at my job. I don’t do anything special, I mainly just clean them and screw them into their housings. But when we clean them, we completely soak them into alcohol over and over again until they are spotless. How does this not damage the circuit board or the components on the board? Yet if I drop my phone in water, it will ruin it.
In: Chemistry
You can clean electronics with water too. The important thing is that they’re not powered at the time, and that the board is completely dry before power is applied.
Alcohol evaporates very quickly, so cleaning a board with alcohol ensures it’s going to be dry very fast.
Water tends to hang around for a very long time and to dissolve all sorts of junk on the board that make it more conductive. And that’s where you run into trouble. Modern devices have all sorts of nooks and crannies that are very good at keeping some small amount of water in, so if you spill water on a device it’s likely that water is going to remain inside it for days.
[You can put a keyboard through a dishwasher](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pgnF42ZoRSw) for instance, if you make sure it’s well dried after that before plugging it in.
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