- Julius Kaveckas is the owner of Phone Fix Craft, based in Dublin, Ireland.
- He has gained over 1 million followers on TikTok for videos of deep cleaning dirty Apple products.
- Julius walks us through the process of deep cleaning earwax from three different pairs of AirPods.
The following is a transcript of the video.
Julius Kaveckas: Today, I'm going to show you how to clean dirty AirPods from start to finish. We offer all kinds of quality repairs. We specialize in iPhone repairs, mainly. Whatever is portable and smart, we can repair it. So, when people bring in their AirPods, the main problem they have is low volume, either on both or just on one side of the AirPods. Usually they come in the condition that customers are going to throw them away, and they just come to me as a last resort. So, I'm going to show you three different pairs of AirPods in three different conditions. This pair of AirPods, of course, they are not cleaned. Of course, the main brown thing is the earwax, and it's a piece of bacon or sausage or carrot. [laughs] Nobody really knows. I just pour a drop of pure alcohol and leave them for a couple of seconds just to soak in and use a toothpick to kind of release whatever is in there, probably earwax or something like that. I soften that with this short brush. I just trim them down to make them harder. [scrubbing] Then I just use vacuum cleaner to suck everything out. [vacuum whirring] And then I then repeat, repeat, repeat the same process again and again until it's clean, really. There's two sets of mesh in every AirPod. There's the one, the steel one, that you see in front. And there is one, a little bit smaller-pitch one, behind it. So we can see the clean second mesh behind it in those few open holes. The actual mesh is pretty clean. Most of the holes are still open. So this pair actually looks very bad, but it's still quite loud and usable. [vacuum whirring] Yeah, these look the worst. These AirPods, they were still working. You can see some open holes there. So the sound was still coming through. It was super, super quiet, but it was still coming through. That one open hole in that mesh, it makes a difference, really. It looks like they were lying around for a good while somewhere in the corner, because it looks like mold or something like that. Yeah, they were not the cleanest ones, that's for sure. I can see it's seen some better days. You can see the actual plastic. It was probably chewed by a small dog or cat or something like that, 'cause the plastic itself, like, you'd never -- or maybe it was chewed by the owner themselves. Visually, the left one might look much worse than the right one. It's just a matter of how many of those holes in the net are still open. You can see the dark holes, where it means that there's nothing behind them, that they are not clogged. So they are open, sound can still go through them. And usually if they are still, like in this one, probably there is, like, 20% of the holes are still open. I believe the customer tried to clean them by themselves, and they did their best. So, if you zoom in, you can see the actual, that every single hole on that net is clogged. You can see something there. On the last pair of ones, I was using Mr Muscle. Window and glass. "Streak-free shine." Every single one is clogged, so I believe that this is completely silent. So it wasn't usable, that's for sure. So, when the AirPod is clean, the mesh of the speaker, it looks like nice dark gray color, and you can actually see through the holes. You can see the dark black inside of the AirPod. The volume is back, it's loud and clear, and they're usable again. I don't want to look like the pros of the AirPods cleaning. I just, I would like to find a solution that, you know, maybe even a DIY solution, where you can keep them clean and tidy and loud.
