Drink Spill Predicament!

[jimbojango]

Hello!

Ive gone and done a stupid im afraid.

I knocked a can of lager on to my pc tower the other night which has a mesh vent on it. I immediately switched it off and unplugged then lay it on its side to prevent anymore dripping on the mobo.

Couple days later i took it apart and cleaned the dried lager off as best as i could and left a fan blowing on it to dry for a while. It was mainly a few splashes on the mobo, ram and a little on the back of the gpu.

When trying to power on again all the fans whirl up but the heatsink and tower fans stop after just a second whilst the gpu fans keep churning for a couple more seconds before the whole rig turns off and then powers itself on again and repeats the above.

I was hoping for some advice really. Has anyone had this happen before or experienced these symptoms and know what component might be affected?

The psu is in its own enclosure and didnt take a drop and there was nothing around the cpu which pretty well encased itself so im thinking ots either the ram or mobo.

Any thought?

Thanks very much!

 

[bigpinkdragon286]

Sounds like the beer may have caused an electrical short somewhere, and the equipment is failing to POST. As a result, it may be performing a reset loop in an attempt to POST successfully. Some motherboards detect a failed POST and will reset the system and try again a few times before coming back with an error (if possible.)

I would carefully disassemble every possible thing and see if there was more cleaning that could be done.

Deionized, distilled water may be your best bet in removing any dried lager, along with moderate physical scrubbing with a brush and some soap, could help. Using water will lead to a longer drying time, and you need to be certain any washed parts are dry before you try and put them back into service.

Very pure isopropyl alcohol can help too, and as it displaces water, can help with the drying time from any water used.

An oven on a low setting, such as 200°F can be used to speed drying time after washing with water and shouldn't cause any issues with plastic bits or good quality capacitors.

Something else that would be very handy would be a second PC, in which you can test individual parts, to see which ones even need servicing at this point. Subjecting your parts to unnecessary service work can lead to problems that weren't otherwise present, so if you can test things for good without having to actually clean them, that would be good.