The mistake is pulling every keycap off at once and dropping them into a bowl of water with dish soap. It feels like the thorough option, and it is the one that most often ends with warped spacebars, dissolved stabiliser grease, and a dead controller from liquid that ran down the switch stems before everything was dry. Keycaps are the easy part; they are also the part most people ruin first.
What counts as mechanical
A mechanical keyboard is one where each key sits on its own discrete switch — a self-contained housing with a spring, a stem, and metal contacts — rather than on a single rubber dome sheet that spans the whole board. That distinction is the entire reason cleaning advice differs. On a dome board you can often rinse or replace one moulded sheet. On a mechanical board you have dozens or hundreds of independent moving parts, plus a printed circuit board underneath that does not enjoy water.
Worth clearing up a common confusion while we are here, because people search these two things together constantly: a mechanical watch is unrelated. It is a timepiece driven by a mainspring, gears and an escapement rather than a battery and quartz oscillator, and a mechanical keyboard shares nothing with it but the word. If you arrived looking for how to wind a mechanical watch properly, the short version is: wind it fully at roughly the same time each day, stop the moment you feel resistance, and never force past that point — over-winding a modern mainspring is less of a risk than stripping the crown by cranking against a full spring. How a mechanical watch works is a separate article. Back to the board.
Dry cleaning first
Ninety percent of dirty keyboards need no liquid at all. Unplug the cable — or flip the wireless switch off and, if the board has a removable battery, pull it — then tilt the board and use a can of compressed air in short bursts, or better, a rubber bulb blower, which does not spit propellant or condensation onto the PCB. Hold the board at an angle so debris falls out rather than settling deeper between the switches.
For the space between keycaps, a soft-bristled brush — a clean paintbrush or an unused makeup brush — does more than air alone, because skin flakes and dust mat together and air just skates over the top. Work along the rows, not across them. A vacuum with a brush attachment on low suction is fine for the case surface but never for the switch openings, where suction can pull the stem and spring out of alignment.
If you are dealing with crumbs rather than dust, turn the board upside down and tap the underside gently with the heel of your hand. You will be surprised how much comes out before you have touched a single keycap.
Removing the keycaps
Use a wire keycap puller, not the plastic ring type bundled with cheap boards. The plastic ones grip the cap sides and can scratch or crack thin ABS. The wire type hooks under the cap and pulls straight up with even force.
Pull one cap at a time, and photograph the board before you start if it is your first time — layout mistakes are common on boards with non-standard bottom rows. Larger keys are the ones to be careful with:
- Spacebars, Shift, Enter and Backspace usually have stabilisers underneath — metal bars clipped into plastic housings, often with a dab of grease. Lift these slowly and straight up. Twisting will pop a stabiliser wire out of its clip, and on some boards that wire is genuinely fiddly to reseat.
- Some stabilisers are screw-in and can unscrew as you pull. If a cap feels like it is fighting you, stop and check from the side before applying more force.
- Novelty and artisan caps are frequently resin or metal and may be tighter than the rest. Warm them slightly with your hand first; cold resin is brittle.
Set the caps somewhere they cannot be knocked onto the floor. Losing one obscure key from a group-buy set is a genuinely annoying afternoon.
Washing the caps
Keycaps are usually ABS or PBT plastic with legends that are either double-shot (moulded through, effectively permanent), dye-sublimated (dyed into the plastic, very durable), or printed and coated (the fragile kind). Hot water is the enemy of all of them, and it is specifically the enemy of ABS, which warps at temperatures that feel merely warm to your hands.
Use lukewarm water — comfortably below what you would use to wash your hands — with a drop of mild dish soap in a bowl. Drop the caps in, agitate gently with your fingers, and let them sit for a few minutes. Do not scrub with anything abrasive, and do not use alcohol or acetone on printed legends; alcohol is fine on bare plastic but will haze some coated caps and will attack the finish on the case if you use it there.
Rinse in a colander under running lukewarm water, then spread them face-down on a towel. Air-dry for several hours, ideally overnight, and shake each cap before reinstalling — water trapped inside a stem will drip onto the switch when you press it back on. Never dry caps in an oven, on a radiator, or with a hairdryer on hot. All three warp ABS.
The board itself
The case and plate can be wiped with a barely damp microfibre cloth — damp, not wet, and wrung out until it stops dripping. Isopropyl alcohol on a cloth is fine for the case exterior on most boards, but keep it away from any printed or coated finish until you have tested a hidden corner.
Do not pour or spray anything onto the board. Liquid reaching the PCB causes corrosion that shows up weeks later as keys that chatter, double-type, or stop registering entirely. If something does spill, unplug immediately, tilt the board to drain, and let it dry for days rather than hours before powering it on.
If you have a hot-swappable board — one where switches pull straight out of sockets without soldering — you can go further and remove switches to clean the plate properly, then reseat them. On a soldered board, do not attempt this. Cleaning individual switch internals means desoldering, opening the housing, and relubricating, which is a hobby project, not a cleaning task.
Reassembly and aftercare
Press each cap back on with firm, even pressure until it seats — you should feel a distinct stop, not a soft squash. Test every key before you plug in and again after, particularly the stabilised ones; a spacebar that rattles or sticks is almost always a wire that is not sitting in its clip.
Going forward, the cheap habits matter more than the deep clean. Keep drinks on a different surface. Cover the board when it is not in use if you have pets. Wipe the case and the tops of the caps with a dry cloth every week or two, and do the full keycap wash maybe once or twice a year — less often than most people assume. A mechanical keyboard's real advantage is that it is repairable and individual switches can be replaced, but that only helps if you have not drowned the PCB first.
One last thing, since the two topics keep colliding in search results: none of this applies to a mechanical watch, and none of it applies to a mechanical hard drive. Different objects, different failure modes, different cleaning rules entirely.