Note to parents: Never store singing stuffed animals in the basement without taking the batteries out of their bellies first.
It’s a lesson I learned the hard way—four times over.
I thought I was doing myself a favor by placing my six-year-old’s battery-powered toys in storage after she lost interest in them. I threw them in a large plastic storage bin and went about life. However, my battery removal oversight came back to haunt me right before Christmas when I was looking for missing tree ornaments and stumbled upon the bin with the electronic toys.
Rather than finding the ornaments I was after I found myself dealing with an alkaline battery mess. The batteries’ potassium hydroxide oozed out in a thick paste and hardened inside the toys. I’m no mad scientist, but I knew that dousing the electronic innards with soap and water was not a good idea. Instead, I headed to the Internet to figure out a way to salvage my daughter’s singing, dancing, talking toys. Here’s what I discovered:
For starters, it’s a good idea to load up on cotton swabs when cleaning battery stains from electronics. You are going to need them to clean the toys’ conductors. Mix some vinegar and a little lemon juice with water to make an acidic liquid. Next, soak one of the cotton swabs in the mixture and gently clean any battery gunk that has oozed onto the conductors. Keep in mind that you should be working with a damp, not a soaking wet, cotton swab. You don’t need a ton of the acidic mixture to remove the battery leak mess.
Once the mess is removed, be sure to thoroughly dry the battery compartment before loading new batteries into it. This is especially true for video games, which are extremely sensitive to moisture.
If the battery mess is severe, don’t even bother trying to clean it up. Rather, contact the battery manufacturer. Companies such as Duracell guarantee their batteries’ performance and offer compensation against defects.