5 Useful Tools to Properly Clean Your Devices

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Although electronic devices help everyone in their daily lives, it is not a one-way street. These electronic devices may provide a service, but you must provide a service to them in turn, particularly in the form of regular cleaning and maintenance. While there are a few gadgets you can find around the house to help you with this endeavor, you should also keep a few specialized, multi-purpose tools and supplies on hand, like microfiber cloths, compressed air, and isopropyl alcohol.

You can’t clean an electronic device the same way you can a picture frame hanging on the wall or a rotating fan. Modern devices have many sensitive components and ports, and if misused, they could malfunction or break completely, leaving you with an expensive paperweight. By keeping the right tools on hand and knowing how to use them, you can safely maintain all kinds of devices, including smartphones, headphones, PCs, game controllers and consoles, and much more.

The first tool for virtually any electronics cleaning business is a large stack of microfiber cloths. Unlike a regular cloth or towel, which may be made with thick, rough fibers that can scratch sensitive components, a microfiber cloth is made from a series of smaller, softer fibers, making it much more effective at capturing fine particles like dust and crumbs. The external surface of almost any device can benefit from a few quick passes with a microfiber cloth, and it’s also great for cleaning delicate screens like your smartphone screen or computer monitor.

To clarify, there are different types of microfiber cloths intended for different cleaning purposes. Larger, thicker cloths are intended more for household or automotive cleaning, while smaller, more delicate cloths are better suited to detailed electronics work. You can use a thicker cloth to clean the exterior of PCs or game consoles, but it should not be used with screens. Something like MagicFiber Microfiber Cleaning Cloths, which are also soft enough to use with glasses, would be best for cleaning screens.

The difficulty with cleaning electronic devices is that dust and small particles tend to accumulate both in places that you cannot physically reach with your hands or that you should not physically touch. How are you supposed to get rid of all that gunk if you can’t or shouldn’t touch something? The answer is surprisingly simple: just use air. Specifically, use compressed air, a simple can that sprays air in a high-pressure jet, perfect for blowing away dust and dislodging stubborn crumbs.

Whether you’re cleaning the internals of your PC, blowing dirt out of your phone’s air vents, or dislodging particles from the edges of a monitor or TV, compressed air is a great way to remove dust and debris from any electronic device in your home. There are a few small problems with air bombs, however. First, they eventually wear out and need to be replaced.

In addition, their use of aerosols and bittering agents can be problematic from a health and environmental point of view. To solve both of these problems, you may choose to use an electronic dust collector instead. Various devices, such as the O2 Hurricane Airless Duster, generate comparable airflow for cleaning with an internal motor. As long as you have somewhere to plug it in, it will never run out of air to spray and you won’t have to worry about aerosols or bittering agents.

One thing you might not like to think about is how much of yourself you leave behind on the devices you touch regularly. The human body produces a variety of oils and waxy substances that tend to build up in and on things you touch, like earwax in headphones, stains on keyboards, and clumped accumulations of skin and dust in phone charging ports. Frankly, this is precisely why you should clean your keyboard more than your bathroom.

It’s not pleasant to think about, but luckily there is a way to deal with sticky messes in particular. Just use a little cleaning putty and fight stickiness with stickiness. Electronics cleaning putty, such as Stikki Electronics Putty or Colorcoral Cleaning Gel, is a sticky substance designed to be squeezed into ports and tight spots on and around your devices and to capture stuck-on messes.

You can insert some into your phone’s charging port to catch a large chunk of dust, into the speaker of your headphones to clean wax, and into the grooves and corners between your keyboard keys to clean skin oils and sticky crumbs. These types of sealants are specially formulated to leave no residue and are generally gentle on the ports and speaker grills of your devices. So as long as you press gently, you don’t have to worry about them damaging anything.

Water and electronics don’t mix, period. Even a little too much water on any type of device, even from ambient humidity, could cause dangerous sparks that end up easily and irreparably breaking your computer or other devices. Unfortunately, sometimes you need a little extra cleaning power that you can’t get from a dry microfiber cloth or cotton swab alone. If there’s no more water on the table, the next best option is something that can provide additional cleaning prowess without leaving dangerous wet marks. Something, perhaps, like isopropyl alcohol.

Isopropyl alcohol (IPA) is probably one of the only appliance cleaning tools you already have around the house. It’s a great all-around cleaning solution, but what makes it particularly useful for electronics is that it dries quickly on its own and leaves no streaks or residue, unlike water, which can hang around and seep into places you don’t want.

You can use IPA to clean stubborn stains on all kinds of devices, including keyboards, phone screens and monitors, game controllers, and exteriors of laptops and PCs. You can get generic 99% IPA at most supermarkets, or buy it in bulk from Amazon and load it into a dedicated dispenser. Remember to wear nitrile gloves while using it, as it can be slightly irritating to the skin.

If you have a device that particularly needs cleaning, you may need to take it apart partially or even completely so you can actually access the internal components with compressed air. Even if you only remove a few components, you can’t just drop them on the floor; they could roll and bounce behind something, or start to accumulate dust and dirt, becoming unsafe to reinsert them into the device when you’re done. If you plan to do detail work, you should get a parts organizer mat and carefully place each part you remove on it.

Something like the iFixit Magnetic Project Mat gives you a clean, flat surface to place any parts you remove from your appliances during a deep clean, with its magnetized surface preventing anything from rolling around and getting lost. Even if you’re not cleaning anything metal, it’s still a great tool for things like the plastic buttons on your game controller or the plastic casing on your headphones. Plus, these mats are made with easy-to-clean materials, so you can simply wipe them down once everything is put back together.