Check the Terminals

[jducoeur]

Reminder to self: dead electronics aren't always dead.

Last week, my good Oxo food scale (generally agreed to be the best on the market) stopped working. I realized that the batteries were antique, so I changed them -- but still nothing. Humph.

I was just about to order a new one from Amazon this morning, when it occurred to me that I hadn't looked carefully in the battery compartment. Sure enough, on closer inspection, one of the batteries had died, leaked, and corroded one of the negative terminals. A minute or two with a knife to clean off the terminals, and now it's working again. Yay!

Moral of the story, which applies to any battery-powered thing: batteries sometimes die messy, leaving gunk on the insides of the device. That gunk tends to interfere with the proper workings of the gadget. Cleaning it out is often the fix.

Comments

[cellio]

Cleaning it out, and if you know you're not going to use a device for a long time, taking the batteries out. (Not the case with your food scale, but can happen with other things.)

[jducoeur]

Additional note from Aaron: vinegar is apparently good for cleaning this sort of thing...

[cvirtue]

I've had good luck with spit on whatever rag I'm using to try and clean the contacts. If that doesn't work, yep, vinegar, and then up the chain of other things.

[ilaine]

The other extremely common thing is to blow a fuse, especially with an electric thing that gets washed from time to time. The manual should suggest where the fuse is kept and what the correct replacement type is.

[elusiveat]

I found this post useful because somewhere along the line I picked up the idea that leaked battery fluid was dangerous and stuff with dead battery damage needed to get thrown out regardless. I wonder if I have any lurking electronics that could be rehabilitated.