Cleaning Your Mechanical Keyboard

Cleaning Your Mechanical Keyboard

Mechanical keyboards tend to be extremely popular with desktop computer users, particularly games, programmers, writers and even just people who enjoy the sound and feel of these keyboards.

However, mechanical keyboards are expensive and you will want them to last as long as possible so you don’t have to be consistently buying a new keyboard. One way to do this is to make the time to clean your keyboard on a regular basis.

In order to be able to do this, here are some tips for cleaning out your keyboard so that it remains viable as long as possible.

To start out, you should take a picture of your keyboard so that you know what it looks like when later reassembling the keyboard. Once that is done, you need to gather your cleaning supplies.

What you will need depends on what you are cleaning off. If it is any kind of liquid that you are cleaning, you will have to have several coffee filters, several tissues, a can of compressed air, cue tips, a brush and a small bowl of cleaning solution.

If, on the other hand, you are not cleaning out liquid but only junk that has fallen into your keyboard such as loose strands of hair, small pieces of chips, dandruff and so on then you will only need the canned air, cue tips, and brush.

Cleaning Liquids

When cleaning liquids, you start out by unplugging your keyboard. You DO NOT want to try and clean a keyboard that is still plugged in. Once the keyboard is unplugged, hold it upside down to drain out as much liquid as possible and clean off as much of it as possible using your coffee filters and wait for it to dry.

Once the keyboard has dried off, remove all of the keycaps. Here, it is highly recommended that you have a keycap remover for this step. However, you don’t require one and it can be done by hand if you are careful. Just don’t force the keys off and pull straight up and you should be fine.

After this is done, you want to place all the keys in a colander and thoroughly wash off all the keys. Once they’ve been washed off, dry them with paper towels or coffee filters. At this point, you want to spray the keyboard with compressed air and dampen a cue tip with water before running it through the gaps in the housing and clean the keys themselves. Rinse and repeat with a new cue tip as needed.

Once it has been cleaned, wait 2-3 days for your keyboard to dry. Once it has dried, put on all of the keycaps on again and test to make sure it works and plug your keyboard back. If all goes well, it should be working again.

Cleaning Solids

However, if you are instead cleaning out solids, you will start out in basically the same way: by unplugging the keyboard. The main difference here is that you can skip the parts involving spraying your keyboard, washing the caps and so on. You start out by wetting the cue tip on one side and running it through the gaps between keys and on them to get up any free junk that is taking up space between your keys. Once this is done, wait 2-3 days for the keyboard to dry and reattach your key caps before plugging it back in and testing.

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