Spilled Liquid on Your Laptop? Liquid Damage Repair in Brisbane

A spilled drink does not usually kill a laptop on contact. The damage is done afterwards, by electricity flowing through a wet circuit board. That is good news, because it means quick action makes a real difference.

The first five minutes

1. Unplug the charger.
2. Switch it off immediately. Hold the power button down until the laptop goes dark. Do not save your work or shut down normally first: every second it stays on is more damage.
3. Unplug everything else: USB drives, mouse, headphones, monitor cable.
4. Open it and stand it upside down like a tent, keyboard facing down on a towel, so the liquid drains back out the way it came in instead of running further into the laptop.
5. Blot, do not wipe. Dab the liquid you can see with a cloth or paper towel. Wiping spreads it into the gaps around the keys.
6. Leave it off. This is the hard one. Do not switch it on "to see if it still works".

What not to do

• Do not turn it on to test it. A wet board that is switched on can destroy in seconds the parts that would otherwise have survived.
• Do not plug the charger in. Charging puts the highest voltage in the laptop across the wet area.
• Do not use a hair dryer, heater or oven. Heat pushes liquid further in, warps plastic and is dangerous for the battery.
• Do not rely on rice. Rice can draw out some moisture, slowly. It does nothing about the sugar, salt and minerals the liquid leaves behind, and those are what do the damage.
• Do not shake it. That spreads the liquid across more of the board.

Why drying it out is not enough

Pure water is not the real problem. What matters is what is dissolved in it. Tap water carries minerals. Coffee, tea, soft drink, juice, beer and wine carry sugars, acids and salts. When the water evaporates, all of that stays on the board as a film, and the film conducts electricity.

Put a voltage across that film and you get corrosion: metal is slowly eaten away from one contact and deposited as crust between it and the next. Contacts on a laptop board can sit a fraction of a millimetre apart. Eventually a connection is eaten through and something stops working, or the crust bridges two contacts and creates a short circuit.

Two things make this worse than most people expect:

• A laptop that is "off" is not fully off. While the battery is connected, a few circuits stay powered so the laptop can respond to the power button and manage charging. Corrosion carries on in those areas even with the lid closed. This is why disconnecting the battery is the first thing a repairer does.
• Sugary residue keeps pulling moisture out of the air. A board that looks dry can become conductive again on a humid Brisbane day.

"It worked fine afterwards"

This is the most common story we hear. The laptop was dried, switched on, and worked, for a while. Then, days or weeks later, some keys stop responding, the trackpad misbehaves, it stops charging, or it will not turn on at all. The corrosion started on the day of the spill and took that long to eat through a connection.

If your laptop has had a spill and still works, it is still worth having it opened and checked. Cleaning a board before it fails is a much smaller job than repairing one afterwards.

What liquid damage repair involves

• Open the laptop and disconnect the battery, so nothing on the board is powered.
• Inspect the board under magnification to map where the liquid went. It rarely stays where it landed.
• Clean the residue and corrosion from the board and connectors, including under and around the affected parts.
• Test for short circuits and dead power rails with a multimeter and oscilloscope, to find the components that were damaged.
• Replace the failed components and rebuild any contacts or tracks that were eaten away.
• Test the laptop charging, display, keyboard, ports and under load before it goes back.

We start with an assessment and you get a quote before any major work begins. Not every liquid-damaged laptop can be saved, and where the damage is too widespread to be worth repairing, we will tell you that rather than guess. If the files on the laptop matter more to you than the laptop itself, say so when you contact us, because it changes what is worth trying.

What to tell us

• The make and exact model
• What was spilled, roughly how much, and where it landed
• When it happened
• Whether it has been switched on or charged since
• What works and what does not

Related: laptop not charging, laptop motherboard repair, and everything else on our laptop repair Brisbane page.