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
Short answer: because water conducts electricity but alcohol doesn’t.
The real danger water poses to electronics is that it creates shorts between electronic pathways. If the device is turned on while these pathways are shorted, you end up with the wrong voltage or current getting to sensitive parts and damaging them. These pathways are very small and often quite close together, so it only takes a tiny droplet to create a dangerous short. Since alcohol doesn’t conduct electricity, it can bridge these pathways without danger.
That’s pure alcohol, of course. In practice the alcohol you’re using probably has some water in it (pure alcohol is hard to produce and thus very expensive). I’m not entirely sure here, but in assuming this is okay because (a) the amount of water is very small, and (b) alcohol evaporated w very quickly in air taking at least some of that water with it.
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