How To Clean Nintendo Switch Joy Con

Whether I'm building an island in Brute Crossing: New Horizons, soaring on a glider across Hyrule in The Legend of Zelda: Jiff of the Wild or but enjoying the chaos of MarioKart 8, the Nintendo Switch ($299 at Amazon) is my absolute favorite piece of tech released in the past few years. But with its plastic build, weird kickstand and simply-OK battery life, information technology'south far from perfect. And at present after two years of use, my Switch suffers from Joy-Con drift, which makes games seem possessed. When I'k not touching a Joy-Con, characters walk off on their own or selection screens become a rapid scrolling mess. Information technology'south like someone else has taken over the console and they're non great at playing games.

Joy-Con migrate has been known for years, but with the increased gameplay happening during the coronavirus pandemic, more Switch and Switch Light ($229 at Walmart) owners are experiencing the annoying phenomena for the get-go fourth dimension. In fact in June, Nintendo'southward president Shuntaro Furukawa apologized for the "inconvenience that Joy-Con issues have acquired."

The adept news is you have options to gear up this inconvenience, some of which don't involve tools or spending any coin at all. Here are five ways to fix, clean and replace your Joy-Cons on your Nintendo Switch.

Nintendo Switch Joy-Con Drift — If you run into Joy-Con drift, the first thing you should practise is check the calibration.
Patrick Holland/CNET

1. Calibrate or recalibrate your Switch Joy-Cons

The first thing you should do if you notice Joy-Con drift (especially on the left Joy-Con) is calibrate your controllers. This is the most straightforward style to bring things back to normal. It's worth knowing how to do this because you'll finish up checking the calibration at some point for pretty much all these tips.

Here's how:

Remove your Joy-Con from the body of the Switch
Go to Organization Settings
Scroll to and select Controllers and Sensors
Select Calibrate Control Sticks
Then press down on the control stick for the controller you want to calibrate.

You'll come beyond a scale check screen. If yous're non touching or moving the command stick, y'all should see a plus sign in the center of the circle. And when you're touching the controller or moving it, you should encounter a dot. Move the problematic joystick around and you should see the color of the circle alter from black to blueish. If non, it'due south fourth dimension to recalibrate your control stick.

To recalibrate, press the X push. You'll exist asked to move your joystick in a specific direction and let go. Eventually, after doing this left, correct, upward and down, you lot'll be prompted to rotate your control stick in a circle clockwise.

ii. Clean your Joy-Con's joystick

If you lot still feel Joy-Con drift after calibrating and recalibrating, the next matter you should practise is clean the control stick. In the body of the Joy-Con at the base of the control stick is a sensor. Cleaning that sensor volition resolve the trouble of Joy-Con drift for nearly people.

If you look closely at the joystick, it looks like information technology's wearing a graduation cap, the bottom of which has a rubber or silicone covering over the top part of the mechanism. Saturate a cotton swab with 70% isopropyl alcohol and and then dab the swab against the lesser part of that "graduation cap" to get some of the alcohol under it.

In one case you've worked your way around, rotate the joystick for 30 seconds to piece of work the alcohol across the sensor inside. Subsequently you do that, let it sit for fifteen minutes and check the calibration.

2 warnings: Don't employ the isopropyl alcohol directly to the joystick. Information technology could seep past the joystick mechanism and onto other parts in the Joy-Con. Also, brand sure your Joy-Con'south battery is fully tuckered before cleaning. Electricity and liquids don't always mix well.

When I first did this, information technology worked well. Cleaning the control stick periodically got my Joy-Con back in tip-top shape.

3. Nintendo will fix Joy-Con drift for yous

If calibrating and cleaning don't help, get Nintendo to prepare it. The company has a Joy-Con repair program for hardware within its ane-yr warranty. However Nintendo has been fixing Joy-Cons with drifting issues for gratis fifty-fifty if they're out of warranty.

The catch hither is that because of the coronavirus pandemic, Nintendo'south repair facilities are scaled back and shipping might be delayed. So who knows how long it will take for you to get your Joy-Cons back.

Get to Nintendo's support page for more information.

4. Buy a new Joy-Con for your Switch

Some other option (possibly the most costly on this list) is to purchase a new single Joy-Con for around $50. Nonetheless, single Joy-Cons are often out of-stock. Even if you discover one to buy, it might non exist the side or colour you desire.

And at $80, a pair of Joy-Cons will cost you even more. I as well wouldn't recommend buying used ones because they might already endure from Joy-Con drift.

v. Replace the joystick yourself

This terminal tip is the nearly drastic. You can remove the problematic joystick and put a new 1 into the housing. In that location are numerous kits online. I got one on Amazon for $xiv which comes with two new analog stick modules, and tools.

Opening upward the Joy-Con, removing the joystick and putting information technology all back together requires an intermediate level of skill and a high level of patience. Too, this process volition void Nintendo's one-year warranty.

To see what the process entails, please sentinel my step-past-pace guide. I should note that since I did this, my Joy-Con no longer has drifting issues. That said, in the procedure of putting the controller back together, I snapped a cable and lost the use of my left trigger button. This was plainly non the ideal outcome, just I'm happy to sacrifice my trigger button to get rid of Joy-Con drift.

Now that your Joy-Cons are sorted, check out how to connect your PS4 DualShock controller or Xbox One controller to a Mac.