Water in my MacBook Air :-(

Parent Cafe
1

I had a tiny spill. I dried off the keyboard area with towels and paper towels, turned it upside down, let it rest in that position for hours, & in the meantime called Apple Support. Made an appointment at Genius Bar for this week. Apple Help also said to do data recovery first, in case their fooling with it destroys data. While on phone with him he said to hold 3 keys down while powering on. Ever since then I’ve had a black screen. Before then, the keys weren’t working but the track pad was, and I could turn the machine on and off. I just couldn’t log on because I couldn’t type in my login password.

Very worried.

2

I have never tried this, but have you heard of putting wet electronics in a bag of uncooked rice to draw out the moisture?

3

DON’T PUT A COMPUTER IN RICE.

Sorry for the all caps, but SUPER important. You can do the rice with phones because there are no crevices large enough for the rice to get into, but if you do it with a laptop the rice can and will get deep into the laptop’s hardware. (It happened to me).

OP, don’t try turning it on for a few days at least, to give the water a chance to dry out. The water itself is not damaging unless there is electricity running.

4

Based on what I know of the Air (I have one), you could try spraying the keyboard area with contact cleaner, it is hydrophobic and might help dry the water out. Probably the best thing I can suggest, though, is to let it sit for several days, give it a chance to dry out, then charge the battery with the machine off, which will help as well (the battery charging heats up)…once fully charged, try turning it on.

5

You can also use a hair dryer but not on high heat. You don’t want to heat up the water droplets, just blow air at them.

Computers tend to work once they dry out.

6

Don’t open it or try to turn it on while it may still be wet! Then, the electrical current goes across the board and shorts out, killing it. Learned this the hard way with D1, when her roommate spilled tea on D1’s laptop. Keep it closed until your genius bar appt.

7

My daughter dropped her phone in the sink then put it in rice to dry out. A piece of rice lodged in the charging slot. A friend tried to pry it out, damaging the charging pins. The phone was a total loss. We couldn’t even get the photos and other data off it. :frowning:

8

Too late. but it’s obviously off now, given what I said in the OP. And closed. I still think I need to recover my data first.

9

Do you have any friends working in a chemistry lab with an access to a vacuum pump and a chamber big enough to fit your laptop? I’ve dried many electronic pieces this way. It is the best possible way to get water out of things. Good luck with the data recovery!

10

What about an oven on a really low setting. Some ovens have a “bread proof” setting that is about 90 - 100 degrees.

11

I’ve baked several phones at 125-140 degrees for an hour. Cars in the sun get to 140 degrees, so phones, and I assume laptops, can handle that high of temp for hours. It has worked every time for me.

12

It’s summer. Put the laptop in the car for an hour.

13

Lemons and lemonade

http://uscenespullzone.uscenes.netdna-cdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/Mac-and-Windows-laptop-screensavers-copy.png

There is a silver lining!

PS I hope they can fix it without losing the computer.

14

You and your MacBook have my prayers. [-O<

15

H spilled water on my iPhone so I turned it off, set up in front of a fan for a couple of days, now it’s fine. I did prop it up so the air could circulate all sides and I did rotate it every so often.

16

I understand that recovery of a phone is quite different from that of a computer. :slight_smile:

17

I appreciate all the replies so far: the cute, the funny, the serious. Here’s what Genius Bar said yesterday: Definitely needs repair if screen is black – a repair to cost $755. Ouch. Data recovery would be my on my own initiative, they said – with a Third Party.

Told boss. Naturally he’s disappointed by the news but has been forgiving and will replace it with something, although naturally it will probably be another used machine. (That one was a 2009 machine, if I didn’t say that.) I offered to send it out for the data recovery and pay for that (of course), but he asked me to wait until he tried recovering it himself. That was 24 hours ago. No news yet.

I feel really bad and guilty. :frowning:

18

Don’t feel bad, accidents happen. Is it likely that the tech people gave you bad advice in telling you to force start it before it was dried out?

19

It is very likely, @greenwitch (cute name)

Others, including some Apple people (hey Apple people go with Green Witches; you could marry and produce green apples :smiley: ) seemed kind of alarmed that such advice was given.