Features:

  • Cleans, protects, lubricates, and improves conductivity
  • Reduces intermittent connections, arcing, and RFI as well as wear and abrasion
  • Safe for use on all metal connectors and contacts and will not harm plastics
  • Dispensing Type: Spray
  • Volume: 5 oz
Miracle worker on electric guitars

I rarely review products like this, but since this quite literally saved a portion of my dwindling sanity, I’d be remiss if I didn’t sing its praises publicly so that others might also benefit from the magical powers of Hosa contact cleaner. Background: I bought a beautiful electric guitar recently that I love dearly. However, the pickup selector switch has been causing me a lot of problems, almost since day one. Pickups were or dropping in volume or cutting out completely at random. So I bought a replacement toggle switch and brought the guitar to a luthier for installation. They fixed it temporarily, but the problems quickly returned. I brought the guitar back and once again, they fixed it temporarily before the problem returned again. I decided to try another luthier. Same results. Three visits to two separate luthiers (and over $100 later) and my guitar was still malfunctioning! Enter: Hosa Contact Cleaner The package arrived from Amazon last night and I immediately opened it and got to work. Blasted the toggle switch a couple times, waited a few minutes and plugged her in. No pickup volume issues. No static. Flawless performance. My guitar is singing beautifully and performing exactly as it should. Furthermore, I used the spray on another guitar’s volume pots which were crackly. Instantly, the issue was resolved. This stuff is seriously a miracle-worker. It could have saved me over $100 in luthier fees trying to diagnose this problem. I can’t recommend this enough for guitarists. Buy it even if you don’t need it yet just so you have it on hand. It’s worth it. Thank you, Hosa!

I Use It All Over

Love this stuff! I use it where and whenever there is an electrical contact to be made. From speaker jacks, guitar cables/input and pots, put a little on car and household light bulb threads. Whenever there is a crackly tuner or switch or even a sticky lock I have used it. Can be shot directly on the offending oxidation or more conservatively applied with a swab. Not a big fan of the new spray head, the simple old fashioned spray head with the little plastic hose is tried and true, new sprayer seems less responsive and you get too heavy of a spray.

The product just flat works!

I have a well with an older style pump pressure switch. These switches use a pair of 110V legs with a set (total) of four contacts (two per leg) and anyone who has experienced issues with such things (well pump not running) is familiar with going outside, unscrewing the cover and running sandpaper or an emery board between the contacts to clean them. This usually does the trick for a long time. Replacing the switch (only way to replace the contacts) is a pain and the price varies on your type -but mostly it's just a pain and you have no water until you do (bad contacts can burn up your pump). My switch was not old, and the "fix" was not lasting for more than a week. I purchased this product because it was the closest to the "contact cleaner" I used to be able to find back in the '70s or '80s. I hit the contacts with this stuff, worked the contacts back and forth, hit it again, and the switch has worked like new. I'd definitely recommend it again.

Put that soldering iron down! You may not need to replace those parts.

Wow does this stuff work. It's a tad messy ... imagine spraying WD40 into the somewhat sealed cavity of your average potentiometer and the resultant splatter and you'll have the idea pretty faithfully. For what's it worth, it cleans up just as easily though. As for it's electrical performance, I've never used anything like it in my 30 years of playing with electronics. I bought this after having put my electric guitar away for over 15 years (due to tendinitis issues). Upon pulling it out for use after this long time of disuse I found the pots to all be very noisy when passing over the spot where they were parked all that time. I followed the directions and gave each a tiny squirt followed by several sweeps back and forth and then one more squirt each. All are now totally silent throughout their entire sweep. Prior to this I had used my traditional method of just exercising each pot a whole lot. Despite ~100 sweeps on the volume (much less elsewhere) I wasn't able to eliminate all the noise though I had improved them. Still the pop on the volume was just to loud to suffer with so I did some research and learned of this awesome liquid. It's so good I'm likely to buy more in the other forms. I'll likely never use even this one can in the rest of my life since a minuscule amount can do so much good, but when something is this effective I'm always afraid I won't be able to get it in the future.

A superb electrical contact cleaner that lubricates, improves and protects SWITCH and electrical connections for YEARS to come

I'm an electrical engineer and for over 30 years I have relied on Deoxit for cleaning, rejuvenating, lubricating and protecting electrical connections. It is very close to being magical - cleaning noisy switches, intermittent relays, and potentiometers (volume controls). Once applied, you will get many more years of additional service. Craig (aka Hosa/the name of their distributor) Deoxit is the very best electrical contact cleaner available and it also improves electrical performance and protects contacts for years to come. However Craig makes a dizzing array of cleaners/contact shields so their products are rarely used by non-professionals. Yet, for decades, these products have been and remain the platinum standard for cleaning/improving/lubricating and protecting any type of electrical connection. Often these products seem almost magical in their ability to rejuvenate switches, relays, potentiometers (volume controls), etc Despite a confusing array of products their most universal product is what Craig or Hosa (Craig's distributor) calls its D5 series. If you see D5 in the product number you've likely got the most appropriate product! In fact, a D5 series cleaner is required for any connection that is NOT new or already perfectly clean. The most universal product is a DeOxit D5 series SPRAY. It cleans contacts, flushes away the garbage, lubricates and leaves behind a protective coating that improves the electrical connection and also protects it for years to come. Highly recommended!

Amazing stuff! We call it "Technician in a Can".

I've used one form or another of this product since the mid '70s and it's fantastic. I'd found out about it from a magazine back then called Audio Amateur and at that time, the similar product was called Cramolin. As with DeoxIT, it came in a red and a blue variety. The blue is/was a preservative for newly manufactured contacts and the red is/was a cleaner and preservative. Theoretically, the blue may provide longer/better protection while the red is better for cleaning and restoring contacts which are already oxidized. You can clean contacts with the red, then remove it, then treat with the blue to get the best protection of already oxidized contacts, but in practice, the red alone works so well that it's extremely effective to simply clean and treat the contacts in one step using only the red. As a result, I use about one can of blue for every ten or more cans of the red. For most uses, most folks only need the red (D) variety. I don't want that to make it sound like I go through cans and cans of the stuff, but since I work in the electronics field, I do use a lot more than most people. As has been mentioned in several other reviews, you need very little of it to do most jobs. A single can will last a very long time even for someone who is constantly working on a lot of equipment. After finding out how well it worked on audio connections and potentiometers, I introduced the folks at the electronics company where I worked to it. All of the technicians and engineers were amazed and it soon became a staple. We designed, manufactured, installed, and serviced various telemetry and process control equipment. A lot of this gear as well as equipment made by others that we were called upon to service was in areas with corrosive atmospheres like oilfield, refinery, water/wastewater treatment, laboratory, and other locations where hydrogen sulfide, chlorine, hydrochloric acid fumes, etc., are present, leading to lots of contact-related problems. It's been extremely effective over these many years, and although the name and formula has changed since the "Cramolin" days, the new stuff seems to still be very good. I've also used it on very high voltage connectors and one of the amazing properties of it is that while it improves contact integrity and lowers contact resistance dramatically, it does not break down and cause leakage or flashover when used on high voltage systems. I've used it for years on photomultiplier tube and Geiger tube devices (radiation survey and monitoring equipment), and never had any problems with it. These systems usually operate with bias voltages between 900 and 1500 Volts, but sometimes run up to 2500V. A fantastic example of how it works was something we did many years ago where we had a batch of very old thermal self-resetting circuit breaker devices in a system. The problem was that they had silver contacts. Silver itself is the best conductor of all elements, but it is very reactive and oxidizes (tarnishes) very easily. These devices were sealed and "non-repairable". But their contact resistance was unacceptably high. I mixed a solution of Cramolin Red and a solvent (probably Freon TF back in those days), put it in a glass jar, and simply dropped these breakers into it and kept them submerged until the bubbles stopped coming out to make sure they were totally flooded with the solution. We then took them out, letting the fluid run back out of them, and then rapped them on a desk a dozen times or so to make the contacts inside "jiggle" a bit. That was enough to let the Cramolin work its way between the closed contacts. Measuring a number of these breakers before and after the treatment, the resistances started out between 100 and 200 milliohms. After treating them, the typical resistance went down to around 6 milliohms! The high current and low voltage these devices needed to carry meant that the voltage drops across them had been unacceptably high, but post-treatment, they operated beautifully. And stayed that way for years. Various other contacts which would heat up and cause other problems prior to treatment operated cool and with extremely low voltage drops after treatment. I've personally "repaired" countless potentiometers, switches, and various connectors over the years with this stuff. We call it "Technician in a Can", and it lives up to that name. I pre-treat a LOT of contacts prior to crimping them onto their wires, and it lowers the mating forces and improves the reliability of virtually any connector. It truly is special stuff. It's indispensable for technicians, manufacturers, audiophiles, etc. If I had a 55 gallon drum of it, I could take entire pre-amps and other audio gear and dunk it to fix all of the bad switch contacts and pots in one quick operation. :) The only thing that's a minor issue is that as with any contact cleaner that has (or is nothing but) a solvent, it will flush away the viscous goo that's often used to make a potentiometer have a "silky" feel to it when rotating. So when you're treating a pot, it's best to try not to allow any to get to the shaft/bushing part of the pot if you want to preserve the grease that's in that annulus. But it often totally fixes a "scratchy" pot by simply getting it on the resistive pad and then running the pot back and forth a dozen times or so. As with so many things, for some reason, manufacturers just love to make pot wipers with silver plating. Bad idea! But all too common. Once that wiper tarnishes, the pot will sound awful since silver oxide is an insulator. The DeoxIT usually allows that oxide layer to be removed by simply rotating the pot a dozen times or so, and then it coats the wiper and the resistive element, preventing future problems and leaving the pot working/sounding excellent. Anyhow, all I can say is that this product has served me extremely well for nearly 40 years, and I highly recommend it.

Instantly restored our Cyberkey smart keys to like-new!

My place of worship uses the Cyberkey smart key system (made by Cyberlock) to manage access to our rooms and storage areas. These are rather expensive ($100+) keys, with three electrical contact points on the end that make contact with metal pads in the locks of our doors and allow/deny access based on the user's access profile. Our key system is only four years old, but already we've started to have issues with the keys, not making contact or making intermittent contact, requiring multiple tries to open doors and creating frustration for all of our users. I bought this product based solely on the solid feedback here on Amazon. I sprayed it on the contacts of our "key reader" stations around our grounds, which we have to connect our keys to periodically to update their programming. I popped my key in afterwards and the difference was instantly noticeable. Before, this took multiple tries and I'd have to apply pressure just a certain way to increase my chances of the key making good contact. Not anymore. The reader read my key instantly the first time. Thinking maybe it was just coincidence, I tried it again, and again, and again. No more bad contacts! I walked over to a lock and popped in my key, and it worked beautifully the first time. By spraying the key reader stations, all of our volunteers will eventually get their key contacts cleaned by this amazing stuff, and the keys will just work the way they're supposed to, without multiple tries or any jiggling of the keys or any other tricks. The manufacturer states that this cleaner is safe on metals and plastic, and it has not caused any damage to our Cyberkey keys, readers or locks. I feel confident recommending it to anyone else who uses this type of smart key system.

This saved my bacon, and I really, REALLY like bacon !!!

I've read about this stuff before. Countless places. Until about 2 months ago, never had any symptoms that remotely required anything like it. Then the right channel stopped working when I was working on mixing tracks. Troubleshooting revealed that it wasn't the source (computer), the power amp or the headphones. That left the patch bay and the patch cables. Now I may be lazy but it's my home studio, nobody else is using it and it didn't bother me that the cables were left in the patch bay. I wanted to be able to walk in at any time and fire it up. Then people online began telling me all kinds of things, and the one thing that seemed to make the most sense was oxidation of my patch cable jacks. Now they looked perfectly fine to me but people with a lot more experience and expertise than I said "trust us, clean the cable jacks and use this stuff." So I listened. I've wondered about DeOxit before. Amp techs have long since extolled its virtues in tube sockets. Some people have said they clean guitar cables with it. Now I am wondering about that, too. The difference it made on my patch cables was considerable. I now have good signal passing through both sides of the headphones and I didn't have to buy any new gear. Save your sanity, buy this stuff and clean your patch cables.

Amazing product

It's great knowing a product works, when you may otherwise question if it actually works. I have a John Deere 790 tractor that had major battery cable corrosion issues and until I cut and spliced new cables onto it, I used this on the exposed corroded wire coming off the leads to get the tractor to start. Previous attempts at jiggling the cables to even jumping it would not work, but a few shots of the DeoxIT on the cables and it cranked and started right up, and I was able to start it up right up every time afterward for two weeks until I had the time to actually cut, splice, and repair the cables. I use this on all my car battery terminals and any exposed wires on those too, to keep everything working properly. The DeoxIT is also great at getting my kids toys working again if they've been left with the batteries in them too long and the batteries leak and corrode the contacts inside the toy. Pop out bad batteries, spray this on the contacts and put in new batteries and the toys come back to life.

Miracle product doesn't harm old electronics and brings them back to life!

Read about this as a solution for old electronics and music equipment static. Couldn't have made a better choice. DO NOT USE WD-40 on old guitar knobs, stereo knobs, sliders, faders etc. USE DEOXIT! I had an old guitar amp that had been sitting in a damp basement for almost twenty years, seemed fine until I plugged it in to test it out. The amp had jumpy volume and was either on full volume or no sound at all. Tried working all the knobs from high to low. Oxidation on all the rotary pot contacts caused a lot of static and poor conductivity, thus no sound at most volumes! Took my amp head apart, sprayed Deoxit in all the rotary pots, let it drip, rotated each knob until the rotation felt smoother. Wiped the oxidized aluminum and extra fluid from all the pots. Sprayed again, worked the rotations again. Put it back together. The amp is now as good as new! No static! No jumps in volume! Spending fifteen bucks on Deoxit and about twenty minutes of my time gave an old amp a brand new life! I'm so impressed with this product, I really came recommend it enough! I also used it on a static-y switch on a set of desktop computer speakers, a volume slider on an old keyboard, rotary knobs on an old stereo head, and sliders for an 8-track (yes, an 8-track! Lol) and they ALL work like new! This stuff is insane! Get some!

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