Can you clean keycaps with dish soap?

You can clean your keycaps by soaking them in a container of soapy water. It's as easy as filling up a container with water, squirting in some hand or dish soap, and scrubbing your keycaps with a small brush or rag once they've had a good soak.

pcmag.com - How to Clean Your Computer Keyboard | PCMag

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These days, our desks are multi-purpose battle stations. We eat lunch or snacks as we respond to Slack messages or play PC games after hours. We also let our desktop setups gather dust once we retreat to the couch (or, let's be honest, bed) with our laptops. Dirt and food crumbs can make for a messy keyboard, which is unhygienic but can also disrupt your peripheral's functionality. Don't let Dorito dust wreak havoc on your typing tools. As spring—and two-year WFH anniversaries—approach, it's time to wash more than your hands. If it's not a standalone keyboard, we can help you clean your entire laptop. Otherwise, it's time to gather your cleaning supplies and learn how best to spruce up a keyboard.

Turn It Upside Down

The easiest, and most obvious step, is to turn the keyboard upside down, thump the underside, and shake out all the yuck you can. Unplug the keyboard from your computer or turn off its wireless function, then pick it up and flip it so the keys are facing a surface you don't mind getting dirty for a moment. Tap the bottom (not too hard), holding it at a variety of different angles. You should be able to get the bulk of the loose stuff out this way. Expect a cascade of crumbs, poppy seeds, and the like, depending on your favorite snacks. If you're using a keyboard with removable keycaps (mechanical keyboards, especially, tend to feature these), take those off and shake out the keyboard without them in the way. Tap the underside of the keyboard to ensure that it's free of anything clinging onto the surface. The final step here would be to sweep the dirt and debris bit off the desk or table with a brush and dustpan...and try not to get too queasy while you reflect on snacks long past. If things still look grungy, keep reading. There are a few other things you can do.

Brush Out the Muck

Dirty keyboards are such a plague that specially designed keyboard brushes(Opens in a new window) exist in all shapes and sizes to help you sweep out the crumbs, hair, and other forms of crud you'll find amid your tainted QWERTY layout. Available in cleaning kits or on their own, nylon cleaning brushes can resemble a small handheld duster, an ink pen, or even the brush on a car-window ice scraper. If you don't feel like spending money on a dedicated brush, you can use household replacements, such as a standard toothbrush or a discarded baby-bottle brush, to clean up your keyboard—no fancy, specialized tools necessary. Simply run the brush through the space between your keys and—voila—your keyboard is as clean as the day you bought it.

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That assumes the gunk isn't stuck to the sides of the keys themselves, as is often the case. If so, you may need a stiffer brush. (Toothbrushes are pretty good for dislodging that caked-on stuff.)

Blow Out Your Keyboard

For PC users, canned air(Opens in a new window) is an essential purchase, whether you want to clean out your keyboard or your gunked-up case fans. For keyboards in particular, it can blow much of the dust out of your way without much effort. All you have to do is insert the straw-like plastic hose inside the nostril of the can, and you're ready to blast away. You just can't start blowing compressed air across your keyboard willy-nilly, though. Take some precautions first. Canned air won't eliminate all of the dirt under the keys, but it will blow away everything that's visible, and the debris will scatter across your desk and floor in a nasty cloud. It's best to do this outdoors, or perhaps over the bathtub. Removing the keycaps will make this more effective, so do that first if it's possible. Just don't push the straw right up onto the surface you're blowing on because canned air tends to create condensation when you do that, leaving pools of moisture or frost behind. Experiment, but keep a little distance to prevent harming your keyboard. Another tap-and-shakeout session is worth doing after your air blasting. You've probably dislodged debris and pushed it into other places within the keyboard body at this point. These pieces may shake out more easily now than before.

Take Out the Cleaning Gel

Want to be Steve McQueen in The Blob? One icky-but-effective way to clean your computer keyboard is to invest in some of the gooey, often bright-colored stuff known as cleaning gel or cleaning gum. (Cyberclean(Opens in a new window) is one widely found brand.) This gelatinous adhesive picks up dust and dirt by squeezing between the smallest cracks of your keyboard (including between the keys) and suctioning up any crumbly bits or dirt it touches. You can reuse the blob until it turns a dark gray, or until you can't bear to look at or touch it anymore, which will probably be sooner than that. Note a handful of caveats around using a product like this to clean your keyboard. For one, some kinds can leave oily residue behind, a counter-intuitive outcome. You might need to use a pipe cleaner or a cotton swab to soak that up. Also, the gel itself gets dirty, so you have to keep replacing it, and even if it's still technically usable, the half-used wads of it are very gross.

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Give Your Keycaps a Bath

If you have a mechanical keyboard with removable keytops, you're in luck because these keys are easy to clean. Before you take off any of the keycaps, be sure to take a picture of the keyboard so you know where to replace them all when you're done. You can clean your keycaps by soaking them in a container of soapy water. It's as easy as filling up a container with water, squirting in some hand or dish soap, and scrubbing your keycaps with a small brush or rag once they've had a good soak. After that, sit them out to air-dry completely, so you don't short out your keyboard's electronics with dripping-wet caps. If you want to go the extra mile, you can disassemble some keyboards to their bare frame so you can get out every last crumb. You might need nothing more than a small screwdriver. If you take the keyboard apart, take some pictures as you go so you know how to put it back together. Wipe down the non-conductive parts with a damp cloth. Make sure, however, that in doing so you don't get any soap or water on the key switches or any circuits.

Clean All Your Electronics

Now that the keyboard is out of the way, it's time to move on to your other electronics that may have become dirty after regular use. We can help you correctly clean everything, including your phone, tablet, headphones, laptop, desktop, TV, smart speaker, game controller, smartwatch, and fitness tracker.

Gabe Carey contributed to this story.

pcmag.com - How to Clean Your Computer Keyboard | PCMag

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