How to Hack an Airwick Battery-Operated Air Freshener


Yeah, you read that right. Lame, huh? I mean, lame that you'd even have to.

See, a while back, the air freshener companies made these neat little pressurized cartridge things that you could press to release a puff of something flowery to cover the unholy reek every time you poop:


But in their infinite wisdom, they seem to have discontinued these. I imagine the board-room discussion went something like this:

"People like this product, but we think they're not pooping enough because we're not selling enough refill cartridges."

"I have an idea! Let's switch to a battery-operated design so that we can AUTOMATICALLY freshen the air every few minutes! Even when nobody's around to smell it! Even when nobody's pooping!"

"Brilliant Jenkins! And let's give them no way to turn that off so that a cartridge goes dead in 2 weeks, and so do the 3 AA batteries inside!"

"Splendid thinking, Farnsworth!"

So they did. And the AirWick Battery-Operated Air Freshener with patented Money-Waster(tm) technology was born. And they pulled all the manual models from the market:


So here we are, finding a need to do something nobody in history has ever needed to do before: Hack the air freshener so it doesn't automatically puff constantly, wasting money.

Step-by-Step


  1. Remove the batteries
  2. Remove the 2 screws holding the package together (One is inside the battery compartment).
  3. Use a regular screwdriver to pry the package open. This will take some effort as it's quite well built. Be careful:


  4. Remove the 2 screws holding the control board in place.

    Here's the board. There's a control chip underneath the black epoxy bump. In the middle of the board, above the alligator clip holding it, there's 4 solder pads arranged in a square. Those are the contacts for the spray button:


  5. Cut traces where the two red lines are shown. A small file works well for this. This will lobotomize the automated functions and remove all power from the rest of the circuit so that it doesn't waste electricity. 5 traces will be cut in total:


  6. Solder 2 wires as shown. One is going from the battery's ground to one side of the pushbutton, and the other is going from the pushbutton to the control lead of the solenoid's power transistor:


    Here's the board with all the changes made:


  7. screw the control board back into the case:


  8. Snap the case closed again. You can put the screws holding it together back if you want, or if your prying-open efforts damaged the tabs too much for it to hold itself together well.
And that's it! Now the air freshener will only spritz when you want it to, not when AirWick corporation wants it to. (As a side, note, the device will now keep spraying for as long as you have the button down, instead of a quick spritz)

Fuck you, AirWick corporation.