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

[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.