I once spilled a liter of water on my keyboard and all I did was dump it out and kept typing. That was almost 2 years ago and it is still going. It is probably due for a clean, though.

Years ago, a Popular Mechanics story reported that NASA used a household dishwasher to clean circuit boards. A picture showed a technician posing with a Kitchenaid, among the scientific equipment.

And, as Thomas says, I know a TV repairman who would keep his eyes open for old, broken, grungy TVs that folks were willing to simply give away. He, too, just opened them up and hosed ‘em down on the back patio, let ‘em dry for a week, and diagnosed and fixed them.

The only downside? I once put a stack of boards in on a Friday afternoon and completely forgot about them. When I got to work on Monday morning, my boss pointed out that an entire batch of circuit boards had gone rusty.

I was surprised to learn how many electronic components can rust!

Oh, and Miss C – the reason your keyboards stopped working when they got water spilled on them was probably because they were powered at the time.

To be honest though, I wouldn’t recommend this technique for your keyboard either – water can get into the strangest places in a pre-assembled product, where it will sit until conditions are just right for it to cause a short.

To be totally safe, you need to strip the keyboard down to its component parts, and if you’re gonna go to that effort, you might as well clean it all by hand, using soap and water on the plastics and alcohol on the electronic components.