Dominique,

 

    Don’t want to scare anybody about this problem  – but I would be VERY careful – with using a hair dryer on your expensive AP Keypad. 

If it helps momentarily by cooking the oil, perhaps bubbling it away from the carbon contact, then it might also do the same for the rubber button tops. Those are very thin skinned rubber tops, which you don’t want to become stretched, floppy, or torn.

 

    Whenever I took a “marginally working” keypad membrane out of some misbehaving “remote controller case”, the circuit board pads were “quite slimy”, almost dripping, when I got it on my fingers.

 

    For example, zoom in very tightly on my attached  picture of my old Panasonic Cordless phone circuit board cleaning, when one of the keypad digits wouldn’t make a good contact for me to dial out. You can see fairly large, round drops of oil at the far left edge of the circuit board, especially next to the FLASH key pad,  and “puddled islands of oil”,  where pressing the other buttons, squirted  away some oil between the circuit pads in other places. Since we hold such devices “upright” during use, I think the oil eventually accumulates more toward the bottom edge, as seen in my picture – and this one wasn’t really bad yet, with just one button losing connection.

 

    The dark backside (buttons) of the membrane itself is a bit harder to see how wet it was, but it was all a big mess. It is NOT an “intended” button lubricant ! – I have seen circuit boards & keypads  bone dry, on newer devices I have taken apart to check.

 

    I haven’t needed to wash the oil from my AP-900 & 1200 Keypads yet, since I rarely use them, so I can’t speak about any difficulty of doing the same procedure there. But, this will give you some idea “what really goes on, under any”  of our common household Remote devices. Most people aren’t aware of such things, and simply throw away the device, and (hopefully) can still buy a new  phone handset, TV Remote, or a substitute etc.

You don’t want to do that for the AP Keypad, and nobody warns us about this “common” problem.

 

Joe Z.