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
There’s two pieces to this.
First: alcohol doesn’t conduct electricity as well as water does, so it’s less likely to transfer any static electricity on the board into something important.
Second: presumably these boards are powered off, so that really wouldn’t be a concern in the first place. Alcohol evaporates quickly and completely, where water might lay damp on the board long enough to cause rust or other damage.
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