Hey Karl, Isopropyl alcohol would've been my go-to option as well, maybe it just needs a little elbow grease? 😉 If that's really not getting the job done, Jaycar sells some electronic cleaning solvents that might do the trick. Fair warning, I can't vouch for how safe it is to spray that stuff directly on a populated board. As you said, I think you'll find that the grease didn't actually penetrate the enclosure on account of the device being passively cooled, so it's probably not even a factor to be concerned about. Sadly, the antennae on the RB4011 are not user-detachable, although if you're crafty you can probably make your own replacements. I found a couple of relevant forum posts with a quick search: - https://forum.mikrotik.com/t/are-the-antennas-on-the-rb4011-detachable/14356... - https://forum.mikrotik.com/t/rb4011-loose-antennae/155202 Best of luck with it! On Fri, 24 Apr 2026 at 16:47, Karl Auer via Public < public@talk.mikrotik.com.au> wrote:
I have come into possession of an RB4011iGS+5HacQ2HnD-IN.
It works, but its life was spent in a cafe, and the outer casing at least has a thin layer of grease from (I guess) aerosolised grease in the air around the fryers. The top is worst, the bottom and sides seem much less affected. The four antennas are very greasy, and one seems broken.
I haven't taken it apart yet to see if the innards are greasy too (don't have a small enough allen key). As it is passively cooled it seems likely that it'll be OK. It was running 24/7 in that environment, so I think anything that was going to catch fire would have done so by now :-)
So I have two questions!
1: What's the best way to get the grease off (and possibly out of) this thing? Isopropyl alcohol doesn't do much. If I can get the PCB out of the case I might just wash the case with detergent and a brush :-) If I'm carefull I could probably do the same with the antennas. There are people on the Internet saying to do much the same thing with the PCB as well but...
2: Are the antennas on this model replaceable? They don't seem to want to unscrew or unplug.
Regards, K.
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