Logitech G15 Keyboard Spill and Cleaning

I managed to spill less than a mouthful of Coke on my fabulous Logitech G15 gaming keyboard yesterday. I immediately unplugged it to avoid electrical damage, but then I did exactly the wrong thing: I turned it over to try to drain the Coke out.

It turns out my beloved keyboard has raised mounts on which each keycap sits, and while the initial spill couldn’t penetrate them, by turning it over, Coke went into the keycaps, then down the mounts when I turned it upright again.

After the initial drying, all the keys worked fine, so I thought I had dodged the bullet. But later, as I was playing LOTRO, I noticed that the “I” key was hard to press and slow to come back up. Of course, “I” is inventory, so it is used all the time. Then I noticed, as I was chatting with my kinship members, the period key was even worse than the I key!

This morning, I looked at all sorts of resources that involved taking the keyboard apart and removing the circuits and LEDs and such and putting some pieces in the dishwasher. While that sounded awful, I was resigning myself that I should at least take the darn thing apart and take a look.

Then I saw a post that said the keycaps are easy to take off and quite robust and hard to damage. This is a change from the old days when my wife would spill her soup into her Apple Extended Keyboard and I really did have to take it apart to clean bits of carrot out of there.

So I took a picture of it to make sure I put all the symbol keys back in the right places:

and started prying a wedge of keys off between the Alt below the period up to the I key. I used a small flat screwdriver and it was pretty easy, though I was very careful.

The area between the key posts was disgusting so I used slightly damp Q-Tips to clean the area. I also cleaned the inside of the key wells for the I and period keys using very little water. Once I was done, I put it back together and checked that all the keys popped up well again.

I plugged it back in and it lit up and works:

I am now using the keyboard to type this. The I key is back to about 95% of its old feel, but the period has been getting stickier as I type. Maybe it needs to come off yet again…………………….