How to clean a whiteboard

A. Summary

A clean whiteboard's value. Whiteboards make great brainstorming media ... if they are truly gleaming white so that colors stand out.   Cleaning a whiteboard properly is very worthwhile, but it takes a little technique.

B. Two key general principles: writing, and cleaning

  1. Write on only dry. If a whiteboard is not dry, do not write on it. The resulting smeared ink is hard to read and very hard to remove.
  2. Cleaning dry differs from cleaning wet. Dry-erase markers use an apolar solvent (like alcohol) to dissolve or emulsify the ink, which then dries onto the board.   Though ink is flaky when dry , it goes on just a little wet (it's a liquid, after all). Since ink behaves very differently wet than dry, you must distinguish cleaning dry (no solvent) from cleaning wet (using cleaning solvent). Either way, the goal is to remove purely dry ink from a dry surface.

C. Cleaning dry

  1. Use firm pressure. Key to cleaning is firm, consistent pressure. You want the entire flat of your hand on the surface, covering a wide area. Pressure matters to lift the dry ink.
  2. Use paper towels, not erasers. Dry ink leaves small flecks of cribbles. Erasers catch the cribbles, but also hold them, and in my experience no amount of eraser scrubbing can remove them all. Further, an eraser is a rough surface, so that it is very difficult to sustain firm pressure in the wipe. A paper towel will capture and hold cribbles, and can be laid very flat.
  3. Clean promptly. Ink dries over time; indeed, it can continue to be drying over a month. The sooner you erase dry ink, the easier it is to take up. Ink that has been on a whiteboard a month or more may not yield to dry pressure; wet-cleaning may be necessary.
  4. Clean after buildup If a whiteboard is poorly cleaned, it will leave faint ink smears or ink cribbles in the edges or hard-to-reach areas. These build up (ink on ink is bad), and eventually a whiteboard, even if it has been lovingly dry-cleaned, must be wet-cleaned.

D. Cleaning wet

  1. Clean deeply. If you use solvent to wet either the board or (better) the wipe cloth (paper towel), make sure you clean deeply over the entire affected area. The goal is to rub with firm pressure until all the cleaning solvent has evaporated or been wiped up in your paper towel, leaving none to evaporate from the whiteboard's surface.
  2. Allow the cleaned white-board it to dry.To the touch, cleaning solvent will be dry in just a few minutes ... but that is an illusion, at the molecular level, it is still wet (and if new writing is added, it will emulsify the new writing, leading to a white-on-dark negative effect that is murder to clean off). When you use solvent, allow the whiteboard to dry completely, at least half an hour, preferably two hours, before you write on it again. End of the day, or Friday afternoon, are great times to give a whiteboard a thorough cleaning.
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ã Copyright 2004 David Alexander Smith