This evening my cat decided to pester me while I was working at my computer desk, and knocked a half-empty bottle of water over…into my computer’s top grille. Most of it missed the mark, but at least some of it entered the chassis. The audio distorted, then stopped and the mouse froze. As quickly as I could get my wits about me, I turned off the machine and unplugged the power supply.
How should I approach damage control in this scenario? How long should I wait before even attempting to power it on? Should I take a hair dryer to the motherboard and other components? Any other tips to avoid a fried computer?
hard to say what is damaged and what isn’t. Ideally if you can, take everything apart and then dry whatever you can off and leave it for a few days. Rice is great at drawing out moisture but its probably not feasible to put a motherboard into a bag of rice, so again depending on what got wet do what you can to dry it off and then leave it alone for 2 days.
Once that time has passed do another inspection to see if there is any moisture left over and if there isn’t put it back together and power it on to see what happens. You won’t know what is damaged until you power it on and if you do so while it’s still wet it can damage other components so try to be as sure as you can that it is dry before doing that. Then depending on the behaviour you can figure out what needs replacing. Just make the power off on the PSU easily accessible when you do put it back together in case you need to quick shutoff.
Someone just posted about this in another thread, if it were my PC I would hose it down with this stuff in a warm (and well ventilated) environment. Most solvent based electronic cleaners will do the same, as they quickly evaporate the water goes with it. The warmer the environment the greater the evaporative effect, just be mindful of flammable fumes as that risk goes up as well.
Even with that I’d wait bare minimum 24 hours I once blew up an rx480 cleaning off sprite (I wasn’t the one doing the spilling) with alcohol because I only waited 4hours
Either some was still under SMDs and hadn’t evaporated or some sprite was still under there
OP might be fine if the only thing was tripped was a fuse and not a crater on PCB
Just a general one with pets; don’t place your computer in a spot where things can fall onto the case. So on top of desks and certainly not on floors.
Makes future accidents like this a lot harder.
Unfortunately I have a very small desk, so placing my huge tower on it is not an option. I’m just going to let it sit for a few days. All the moisture should evaporate after a week or so. It’s not like I don’t have other computers, though this particular box does have my beefiest GPU. I’ll be falling back to a Vega 56 and/or 2070 Max-Q so it’s not the end of the world.
More seriously, what is left to do is wash / scrub anything that has been touched by the water with isopropyl alcohol. You can even do a full dipping, but only pure isopropyl alcohol!!! No water or other disinfectants containing some % isopropyl alcohol. If you have access to an ultrasonic cleaner, it would also be great.
But what was to be damaged has already been… With luck, the damage may be minimal.
PS
The CMOS battery is still an active source on the motherboard, so it should also be removed immediately!
For general drying, you can use Silicon dioxide, also known as silica, but for God’s sake, don’t use rice!
If you are not afraid, you can put it in the oven for several minutes at a low temperature to evaporate everything.
Fortunately the battery is down near the bottom of the case, and the water would have to make it past several PCIe cards/PCBs to reach the battery. Ofc a circuit higher up in the chassis could have been energized, so maybe not so great after all.
And I do not recommend using a hair dryer for drying. Failure to control temperature can end up bad for some components.
Contrary to appearances, the dryer is a powerful source of heat. I used to fix a cold solder joint under the gpu with a dryer when I didn’t have any other tools … so be careful with that!
No, seriously, it’s terrible. As Louis Rossmann has said, one of the best things you can do is put something that got wet in some sunlight coming in through a window with a fan blowing on it. But this has some exceptions, in enclosed devices like a phone or laptop, you need to take them apart to do this. The sooner you start to remove the water, whether it’s through evaporation (with heat) or alcohol, the better.
Had to leave town for a few days, so I let my rig just sit for almost a week. Good news; just fired it up, and it booted fine and I successfully did a benchmark run in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. Been a while since I had to ‘burn in’ a PC, so any suggestions on a test to check the various subsystems?
