How to Clean a Mechanical Keyboard?

Mechanical Keyboard is love ♥

I love Mechanical Keyboards, and due to this, I thought to write a few blog posts about it. In the last post, I wrote about the difference between Mechanical Keyboards and Regular Keyboards in which I also mentioned what exactly a Mechanical Keyboard is and what are its benefits. If you are still unaware of these keyboard types, you must read that post.

In this blog post, I am going to talk ‘How to clean a sticky Mechanical Keyboard.’ Cleaning is important because every day a good amount of dust goes into your keyboard through the gaps between the keys. If you don’t clean ever, they may stop your keyboard to work smoothly. Therefore, the best ways to clean a Mechanical Keyboard are what we need to implement so that our Keyboard turns out to be very clean.

Before, I share my views on ‘How to clean a Mechanical Keyboard,’ let me tell you that everyone has his/her own ideas and tricks for cleaning their keyboards. I am sharing the ways which I use.

Ways to Properly Clean a Mechanical Keyboard

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1. Turn Upside Down

Keyboard’s keys have visible gaps between them, and that’s the reason dust and other particles always go into it, and the best way for getting them out a bit by turning it upside down. This is not enough to clean it thoroughly but the very first step I take is to turn upside down and thump it from its back so that a little bit of dirt comes out.
Make sure; you turn your keyboard upside down above paper, so the dirt falls onto it, and don’t get scattered here and there. One more thing, always start the cleaning after removing the Keyboard wire from your computer.

2. How to clean mechanical keyboard keycaps?

If the dirt is too less, you can just clean the key gaps with a brush but if it is very dirty and you haven’t cleaned it for a long time, remove the keycaps from the keyboard first. This could be the best way to clean a Mechanical Keyboard as keycaps of a Mechanical Keyboard are easy to remove. You can easily remove them with anything, but I would suggest you get a Keycap Puller to remove the caps easily and safely.

Important Note => Before removing the caps, capture a pic of your keyboard so that when you refit the caps, you don’t forget the actual arrangement. If you forget, you can check out that pic, and correct yourself.

Photo credit: preater.com

After removing all the caps, keep them all in a container. Put warm water in the container and you can also put white vinegar or detergent there. And, soak the caps for few hours. Later do check those caps; you will see they look cleaner a bit. Now, take a brush probably a toothbrush, and clean each cap separately with it. Once done, clean with clean water, and then dry them with a cotton cloth. Now, keep those caps separately on a table and let them dry for a night to make sure there won’t be a single drop of water left there in any of the caps.

Photo credit: preater.com

This is how we can clean the caps.

Now, since caps are removed, the board is all open to clean.

Photo Credit: daskeyboard.com

Most of us use earbuds to clean our ears; now we can use that to clean the Keyboard. Since the caps are removed, you can easily clean the gaps between switches with the earbud. After that, use a small handheld vacuum cleaner to get all the dirt out from there (Try USB Vacuum Cleaner). If you still think there is some dirt, then again turn the keyboard upside down as we did in the 1^st point above.

Also, put a cotton cloth and spray some cleaner and wipe the whole keyboard (mostly the edges and the key-less parts) with that. You will see everything looks much cleaner now.

Now, check the keycaps which we kept to dry; if they all dried up, fix them all to their positions on the Keyboard.

Now, look at your Keyboard, it must be looking clean.

Removing the caps from keys is easier in Mechanical Keyboards as they are designed that way. However, some Membrane keyboards’ keycaps are also easy to remove but not in all. Therefore, the cleaning process of Mechanical Keyboards is more fun and easy.

3. Make use of a Can of Compressed Air

You can easily get a can of compressed air which you can regularly use to blow the dirt from your Mechanical Keyboard.  You can blow a strong stream of air to the keyboard, and you will see that the dust is pushed out. The only drawback of this method is that it pushes out the dirt outside of the keyboard and spread around.

4. Use Cleaner Jelly

You can find out Cleaner Jelly Online, and get for you because it helps you clean your keyboard effortlessly. You only need to put the jelly on the keyboard and flatten it, and then after some time, remove it.

You will notice that the keyboard looks newer than ever. You can watch the video to know how you can clean using the Jelly.

In this video, it is shown that the jelly applied on the keys. Moreover, you can apply it after removing the keycaps as well for better cleaning.

Conclusion

As I said at the beginning of this post, different people may have different tricks to clean their Keyboards but these ways mentioned above are the basic ones, and almost all type of Keyboard cleaning revolves around these only. Moreover, the best way to clean a Mechanical Keyboard is what gives you a neat and clean Keyboard.

Now, I hope you guys know how to clean a Mechanical Keyboard and even you have learned how to clean mechanical keyboard keycaps by removing them and then cleaning.

If you still have any questions, do write in the comments.