Harmattan is hard on screens, laptops and printers - the five-minute fixes that work

For six to ten weeks a year, the air in your house is carrying fine mineral dust and holding almost no humidity, and your electronics pay for it in three currencies: heat, static and jammed moving parts. Every fix below is prevention; the cure, once dust has cooked onto a fan blade or paper has curled in a tray, is service fees.

What actually happens to your devices

• Fan intakes cake first. Laptops on beds and sofas - where the intakes are blocked and the fabric is shedding - build a felt layer on the fan within one season. That layer is insulation with a motor attached.
• Static stops chips slowly. A dry room with synthetic carpet and a nylon chair is a charge generator. Sudden laptop death with no warning is usually not the dry air itself - it's the discharge that happened when someone reached across the desk to touch the open chassis.
• Screens abrade. Dust on a panel isn't dirt, it's grit; wiping a dry screen with a tissue is sandpaper with confidence.
• Printers jam on paper mood. Low humidity makes sheet edges curl and static-hold to each other; the top sheet of an old ream is where all the feed failures start.

The season kit (ten minutes a week)

One: laptops onto hard trays or lap-desks, off textiles, intakes facing air they can steal - a cheap hard tray works. Two: open the printer cover, fan the stacked paper before loading, and keep the ream in its wrapper with a folded flap when idle. Three: wipe screens after blowing loose dust off (a camera blower or the keyboard trick: short bursts from the far edge), cloth barely damp, never sprayed on the panel. Four: before touching any open chassis - desktop case, TV back, console - touch a grounded metal part of it first, and keep the humidifier on the desk, not the floor. Five: once, mid-season, take the laptop to a shaded table and blow the vents out from the exhaust side while it runs off charge; a year's felt, in ten seconds.

The humidifier trap nobody warns you about

• Ultrasonic misters scatter whatever is in their water - including salt - onto everything within reach as a fine conductive film. Near electronics, use distilled or boiled-and-cooled water without exception, and point the mist away from desks. A "humidified" desk under a hard-water mister is a corrosion experiment you're funding.

When to call the professional

Anything that involves opening a sealed power supply, a TV that clicks and won't light, or a laptop that runs hot after a dust clear - that's the desk's boundary, stated without apology: capacitor charge and glued panels are where YouTube lessons end and burnt mains begin. Fans, filters, paper and cloth are entirely yours.