I’ll be straight with it. I’m a smoker, I smoke inside, I have a PC that is also inside. I want to clean my PC thoroughly to buy it a few more years. I know about the q tip method, and the compressed air, and general methods of cleaning out gunk and junk from PC parts. But this boy is way too gunked up for a regular cleaning. So, I reckon, the easiest way to clean it is to dunk the dirtiest parts in a bath of isopropyl alcohol. I was considering acetone at first, but it’s way too strong of a solvent, and alcohol should be better at dissolving organic residues. Is this a good idea?
I hereby submit this query to the council, and await judgement.
Extreme case story here…
I had a fella bring his computer into our shop for diagnostics and hopefully repair after a house fire. The case was originally light grey, but it was covered outside and even inside with nasty stinking black soot and the front panel was mostly melted.
We checked it out though, the PSU had failed. So we pulled out our test PSU and tried that, and the nasty stinking computer actually booted up!
Well, the boss didn’t want to be responsible for this mess, so he told me I could take it as a side job if the customer really wanted it fixed. He already knew that I’ve successfully salvaged flood damage computers, so why not?
Anyways, I took the motherboard and expansion cards out and took them to our local car wash. I soaked the boards with tire/engine cleaner, then pressure washed the crud away with plain water. Then I used an air compressor to dry it as best as I could, and then left it on the roof of my car in the hot sun for like 4 hours.
Everything worked fine after all that, so I hooked him up with a spare computer case I had laying around to replace his nasty half melted case.
You can actually pressure wash the circuit boards as long as there’s no power (do NOT pressure wash the PSU at all!), as long as the boards are completely dry and clean before reassembling and powering it back up. Just, be careful around any sensitive parts, and do not pressure wash the CPU socket, unless you like all your precious pins bent. Also, don’t pressure wash the fans or mechanical drives or such.
This technique isn’t for the faint of heart though, and I usually only reserve such drastic measures for boards that have already failed due to spill damage, corrosion, or other extremes where the board would otherwise end up in the scrap pile.
This is wild because my coworker was just telling me about his parents’ desktop that was in a house fire plus all of the water from fighting the house fire. After a week of drying off it booted up without issue.
That’s cool 👍
I’d still end up cleaning it, both to avoid future corrosion, plus that soot freaking stinks!
Water only causes and issue if there’s a charge and or minerals in the water making it more conductive. Plain water is actually quite a good insulator.
I washed a drone flight controller in deionized water after a lithium battery exploded on it and it got it back up and going