R&D electrical engineer here! I have to do this sort of thing all the time and can confidently tell you it's pretty normal.
The real risk isn't really to the toaster (who cares, it's just a toaster, and even if it starts on fire when you plug it in, you're probably watching it pretty closely).
No, it's that you leach lead or other such nasties (sealing rubbers, PCB epoxies, what-have-you) into your dishwasher and start eating them when they get redeposited onto your dishes. Lead isn't that harmful... except when you eat it. Don't eat lead.
In fact, if you have a dedicated dishwasher for this (or ultrasonic cleaner! those are pretty awesome, most of the time, for most things!), I'd say it's perfectly reasonable to do this! You know what we call those kinds of things where I work? Parts washers. You know what we wash in them... circuit boards! It's fine! Circuit boards are cleaned with aqueous solutions all the time as part of normal manufacturing! If you don't have a dedicated dishwasher... well, I wouldn't do it then, but if you must, you'll want to run the dishwasher a few more times, empty, with a strong detergent, preferably a lead-chelating one. (You might also make one of those runs with dishwasher cleaner, and strike the whole "yearly dishwasher cleaning" task off your to-do list for the first time this... uh, decade?)
You will, of course, want to dry things well. This is both easier and harder with a toaster. Easier because, well, toasters get hot, and this will get any nooks and crannies dry. Harder because one of the tricks to get things dry faster after they come out of a parts washer is to rinse them in alcohol, because alcohol dries very fast. You, uh, don't want to do that with a toaster. At least not one you intend to run any time soon.
Yeah, RoHS and REACH and friends have really made things better on this front. But older electronics, both pre-RoHS and simply aged (aging definitely changes many things' composition), are different.
So, do you reeeeeeally want to run this risk with your food? The one thing you should not do with most of the actual nasty chemicals is eat them. Bottom line: please do rinse your dishwasher if you try this.
dishwashers normally dry the dishes by heating them with an electric heating element; this is more likely to damage electronics than the water
there are also some electronic components that won't deal well with water, especially strong streams of water. microphones and speakers come to mind, because they commonly include exposed paper, thin membranes, and sponges. i'm thinking an ocxo would also be a problem both because overheating it can cause rapid aging and hysteresis and because drying out the fibrous insulation is going to be hard
Right about the heat, definitely something to be careful with for the mechanical parts. (The electronics, not really so much... anything that can survive the lead-free reflow profile has some pretty solid heat tolerance.)
And also right about not washing speakers and microphones, I'd never put those through a water or solvent wash once their protective taping was removed. Surprisingly XOs are not really known for wash issues, at least these days (I think they're all hermetically sealed now), but they are notoriously sensitive to ultrasonic cleaners. So be careful there.
I guess the joke is that it evaporates rather easily and it's rather flammable, especially fumes that are nicely pre-mixed with air for completer combustion. But that's just my guess at what they meant, author should ideally confirm
At one point I was involved in cleaning out a large system with alcohol to actually get the thing clean and dry. We went through I think it was three 55-gallon drums of absolute alcohol. By the time we were done, the air in the shop (not a small space!) was noticeably... alcoholic... and we were, uh... sensitive to it. So alcohol vapors in the air are a real thing.
The real risk isn't really to the toaster (who cares, it's just a toaster, and even if it starts on fire when you plug it in, you're probably watching it pretty closely).
No, it's that you leach lead or other such nasties (sealing rubbers, PCB epoxies, what-have-you) into your dishwasher and start eating them when they get redeposited onto your dishes. Lead isn't that harmful... except when you eat it. Don't eat lead.
In fact, if you have a dedicated dishwasher for this (or ultrasonic cleaner! those are pretty awesome, most of the time, for most things!), I'd say it's perfectly reasonable to do this! You know what we call those kinds of things where I work? Parts washers. You know what we wash in them... circuit boards! It's fine! Circuit boards are cleaned with aqueous solutions all the time as part of normal manufacturing! If you don't have a dedicated dishwasher... well, I wouldn't do it then, but if you must, you'll want to run the dishwasher a few more times, empty, with a strong detergent, preferably a lead-chelating one. (You might also make one of those runs with dishwasher cleaner, and strike the whole "yearly dishwasher cleaning" task off your to-do list for the first time this... uh, decade?)
You will, of course, want to dry things well. This is both easier and harder with a toaster. Easier because, well, toasters get hot, and this will get any nooks and crannies dry. Harder because one of the tricks to get things dry faster after they come out of a parts washer is to rinse them in alcohol, because alcohol dries very fast. You, uh, don't want to do that with a toaster. At least not one you intend to run any time soon.