No matter how clean you are and how often you clean your home, airborne dust particles end up settling on furniture, appliances, and in the case of computers, also indoors. Obviously, the cleaner and more careful you are, the less dust will come in, but you can be sure that there will come a time when you need to take the PC apart and clean it inside.
With the PC on, more dust will always enter
Unless you have a completely fanless (fanless) PC, more dust will get inside with the PC turned on simply because the dust particles, virtually invisible, are suspended in the air and the case fans put this air in. inside the case to cool internal components.
In other words, fans will inevitably have dust inside because these particles and mites are suspended in the air, the air they are constantly putting in and out of the box. Obviously having dust filters allows a large portion of these to remain in the filters, which are usually washable and easy to put on and take off without having to disassemble anything, but even with these- a good deal of dirt will eventually settle on the components.
Does dust get in when leaving the computer turned off?
Fans aren’t really the only reason dust gets inside the PC, although they are the main culprits. Even with the computer turned off and unless you have sealed it tightly, dust will also get inside since all cases have vents (even if they are partially “covered” by fans), and the dust will eventually seep through these vents, even on verticals because even if there is no wind in your room, there are still drafts pushing these dust particles.
So the answer is yes, yes dust will get into your PC even when it is turned off or even if you have a completely fanless PC with no fans. Obviously, the rate at which the internal components of the equipment will get dirty under these circumstances will be much lower than with the PC turned on, as the fans will not put air with dust particles inside.
Isn’t there a dust-proof solution?
Unfortunately no. The solution would be to have the PC hermetically sealed, but that is not feasible because then there would be no cooling and the components would end up burning. The best thing you can do is make sure that your box has dust filters in any air inlets where there are fans (in fact, even if you have areas without fans, whenever it is. there is a grill, it is recommended to have a filter to attenuate the entry of dust), and of course to carry out periodic cleaning both of the filters and of your house and of course of the PC.
The filters, as you can see in the image above, block a lot of the dust and eventually it will settle there, but you have to keep in mind that the fans will continue to pass from air through them and “push” that dust, which will eventually sneak inside. For this reason, it is important to clean the filters in the box with some regularity, as this will prevent them from becoming too full of dirt and eventually getting inside the box.
With everything and with that, there will come a time when you have to open up the PC and clean it inside. If you maintain a good cleaning in your room, the box is not on the floor but on the table (since it is on the floor it absorbs more dirt) and you constantly clean the filters, you probably won’t not to do a deep cleaning, but likewise, the time will come when you will have to do several “overhead” cleanings, even if it is to remove most of the dust and dirt from the interior.
