Computer Water Damage

If you have ever been involved in any kind of flood; whether it is from excessive rain, flooding rivers, streams or lakes, or a leak from inside your home, you know that recovering anything that got wet needs particular care to restore it to its former usefulness. Electronics or electric appliances and water are not good friends and unless proper café is taken the device in question will not operate properly after getting wet.

The first step in any attempt to salvage electronics from computer water damage is to open up the case if it is a desktop and make sure that all excess water is gone. Next you should have some isopropyl alcohol to spray on any contacts to help in the removal of all the water from anywhere electricity will be running. You should then take the affected parts and make sure they are dry in every way before attempting to power up the system.

The issue is that if there is any moisture on any electrical contacts when you switch the power on you run the risk of burning out whatever that circuit is involved with. If you short out the motherboard you will have major issues in getting it repaired. You will need to make sure there are no problems with your hard drive as well. To help keep that from happening you should remove the hard drive from the system and make sure all of the contacts are completely dry. You can hook it up to a test system to make sure that your data is all intact before reinstalling it in your restored system.

There are other issues to consider as well. Many times a little liquid will cause the cooling fan to stop working even if everything else seems to be in order. It is a simple fix to replace a cooling fan. All you need to do is remove the desktop unit cover and remove the two or four screws that attach it to the case. Unplug the power cord and plug in the new unit, reattach the mounting screws and power it up before you put the cover back on. This way you can check to see if the fan is working properly. Let it run a few minutes and see if the fan comes on. If it doesn’t come on after ten minutes you may have a problem with your heat sink.

If the heat sink is not working properly and sensing how much heat is coming off the system, your fan will not kick in when it is supposed to. If the system overheats because of the fan or heat sink not working you can cause damage to the hard drive, the memory or even the motherboard.

All of those problems are much more expensive to fix. If the computer affected by water damage is a laptop then you have an entirely different set of steps to take to mitigate the computer water damage.

Since a laptop has all of its components in a much tighter package you will need to do some major disassembly to make sure you get all of the moisture out of your system. The easiest steps are to take out the battery.

Merely open the battery cover and pull the battery out of its compartment. In some cases there may be a couple of screws holding the battery cover in place. Make sure once this is done that you apply alcohol to all of the contact points and wipe them down with a clean cloth or cotton.

Next make sure you remove the screws that hold the case together to separate it to get to the motherboard and other components. Once you have removed the outer case, I recommend taking a picture so that you will have a guide to putting everything back in its proper place. For electronic instruments like desktop and laptop computers you do not want to end up with parts after you have put things back together.

To summarize, make sure that you do not turn the power on to the system you think has computer water damage. Any moisture on contacts can create a short circuit that can destroy any or all the components in your system. With a little care, you can affect a successful repair to your system at little expense. If you take your unit to a computer repair person, you can expect at least a bill of one hundred dollars. Try the above steps and you can most likely avoid that bill.

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