The longer you work on computers, the more weird tricks you learn. Over the years I’ve straightened the pins on IDE hard drives, made temporary jumpers out of paperclips, bypassed BIOS passwords by removing the CMOS battery, and used rubber bands to remove screws with stripped heads.
And then there are the really weird ones, like sticking a failing hard drive inside your freezer as a last ditch attempt to save it. While a lot of people (myself included) seemingly had success with this trick, more recent analysis has determined that there’s a much greater chance of this making the drive worse (best case scenario is that it doesn’t do anything at all).
Another trick I’d heard, but never personally tried, was running a computer keyboard through a dishwasher. Over the years I’ve heard of people trying this, many of them swearing it worked. Up until last Friday I’d never had a reason to try it myself. That was the day I dumped a bunch of salad dressing directly into my keyboard.
Once upon a time computers came with keyboards attached, and replacing a keyboard was so incredibly expensive that nobody — especially kids — were allowed to bring food or drink within five miles of a computer. Over time, the price of keyboards dropped — so much, in fact, that one time I accidently bought 300 of them. It happens. The point is, I have five spare USB keyboards out in my garage. With little to lose and knowledge to gain, I decided to try the ol’ “computer keyboard through the dishwasher trick” for myself.
Before putting the keyboard in the dishwasher I decided to rinse it off first. After letting the keyboard fill up with water, hair, a few fingernails, skin cells, and dandruff began washing out and into the sink. Once all the stuff that used to be a part of me stopped flowing out of the keyboard, I turned off the water, turned the keyboard upside down, and let it drain. Then I scrubbed the sink real good because… skin cells.
Surprisingly my dishwasher does not have a setting for “$10 USB Keyboard,” so following the advice of someone named MetalliHunk138, I put the keyboard in the top rack and let ‘er rip on a normal (not “pots ‘n pans”) cycle. I also turned off the drying cycle because I only wanted to wash the thing, not cook it.
When the dishwasher finished, I removed the keyboard and placed it outside on a table. Within ten minutes the keyboard seemed pretty dry, but I let it sit for about two hours, just to be sure.
The biggest problem with this entire experiment is that as I previously mentioned, I had five spare USB keyboards out in the garage. Now I have four. Instead of waiting for the keyboard to fully dry, I just went and got another keyboard from the garage and hooked it up. Still, I was curious what the outcome of the washed keyboard would be.
Two hours later, I connected the keyboard to my laptop. The end result was… a keyboard that constantly sends the dash key to the computer. (I wasn’t completely sure what it was doing until I opened Notepad.) Without the ability to add dots and spaces, it won’t even work to send Morse code.
Later that evening on Twitter someone suggested I should have let the keyboard dry for a full twelve hours before using it. By the time I read that tweet, the keyboard had been out of the dishwasher for two hours, and in our garbage can for four.
Verdict? Inconclusive. The next time I find myself eating a Wendy’s salad and I go a little crazy with the salad dressing, I’ll give the dishwasher trick another spin. I have four more spare keyboards to practice on.