Washed and dried my TS10, and it survived.

Helikon Tex UTP cargo pants = lots of pockets. I chucked a 40C wash in and went out, came back and threw the lot in the dryer. I thought I heard something banging in there but didn’t investigate and went out again to walk the dog. Just unloaded the dryer and saw a faint orange glow in the drum. All is well apart from very slight ano wear on the ends.




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Just another example of how robust flashlights can be. Really impressive. To be fair, however, it must also be noted that washing and drying can also be the death of a lamp (I have already experienced this myself with a Ti3, where the coil on the driver board was torn off, luckily this wasn’t an expensive light).

Although there’s no charge port, I’m still surprised that water wasn’t drawn inside going from hot water to the cold rinse. I had that with a Steeldive watch where I hadn’t wound the crown in really tight and went from sunny chair into cold swimming pool. Only later did I see some condensation, but again, it’s been fine since.

I was also amazed some time ago after my Sofirn SC21Pro went thru the laundry. It still works. I can’t say it received any more signs of wear as it is well worn after a year+ in my pocket EDC.

I think this has mainly to do with how quickly the change from hot to cold happens. This doesn’t happen within seconds in a washing machine and the housing should also have a certain thermal mass and slow down the cooling process.

And a thousand dents on the inside of the machine drum :stuck_out_tongue:

Glad light survived, I’d be most worried about the lithium cell and the heat of the dryer!

We’ve got a heat pump one now which operates for longer at lower temperature…the old one used to make the metal buttons of jeans etc really hot!

I always wanted a nice clean beam…

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Water does not destroy electronics on contact. It may short something out while wet but after it dries they come back to life.

When you are really lucky…

When I used to get tossed-out but perfectly working dumb-terminals, I’d literally strip them down and wash/scrub them with detergent and a paintbrush. All the plastic exteriors would be scrubbed clean of every bit of caked on grunge. Keyboards would be disassembled into caps, springs, etc, and the resulting boards scrubbed down as well. CRTs would float in my utility sink like a rubber-ducky. (Definitely a “wtf??” moment if you never saw that before.)

Only things I didn’t soak were mechanical switches and pots. I’d wrap those in baggies and “seal” with a rubberband stretched a brazillion times around the wires going to them, and wash the rest.

Dried 'em out physically by shaking, paper-towelling, then air-drying for however long was needed. Reassembled, powered on, and everything worked perfectly. Never had any go bad doing that.

Only casualties were my hands, which’d get so dried out from the endless stream of detergent and water that they’d dry and even crack.


Had: Lear-Siegler ADM11s, a ADM42, TeleVideo TV910, TV910+es, TV920, Zenith Z100 (real POSes, tossed it), and one I forgot, actually had a disk drive that could run CP/M as well as function as a dumb terminal. Probably a few more over the years that i forgot about.

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