Water got spilled on the keyboard of my Macbook. Let’s just leave the description of “the incident” in the passive voice.
I immediately turned it upside down while shutting it down, and dabbed away what I could with a paper towel. I then set the thing more or less in that same position on some boxes and pointed a fan at it for a day or so. Reasoning (perhaps with no scientific basis at all) that there is a sweet spot in timing between the water evaporating and corrosion starting to happen (since I could not remove the battery), I turned the thing on today in order to try to recover the data. I succeeded. No errors or problems of any kind.
So what should I do now? I know the legit answer is that I should take it to a tech to open it up and assess whether any residue was left anywhere and to look for corrosion, and consider some kind of denatured alcohol and toothbrush treatment. But assume I’m not going to do that because of the time commitment and because I can’t afford any serious repair/replacement (since I have another computer I can use if this one fails).
In short:
[ul]
[li]Short of opening the thing up, what kind of diagnostics can I perform in OSX to assess whether anything has shorted or otherwise might be damaged? If there’s a super-nifty utility out there, I’m willing to shell out a few bucks to buy and run it.[/li]
[li]What is the timeline over which I should expect corrosion to occur or problems to pop up? If I make it two months without problems am I in the clear?[/li]
[li]On a scale from 1-10, how stupid am I for stubbornly refusing to take it in for a proper professional assessment and repair? Am I wrong to assume that any fix will be $300+?[/li][/ul]
I would turn the machine off, and remove the back, and then place it under a fan for at least a day. Any corrosion is only going to occur when there is liquid present, after it dries, the damage won’t progress.
If the machine powered up and seems to work ok, you probably dodged a bullet. The usual symptoms of water damage are: Machine won’t power up or keyboard doesn’t work right.
Diagnostics disks are available, but they are Apple-proprietary. Some careful Internet searching will usually lead you to them (search for ASD - apple service diagnostic). I wouldn’t bother with them - it will be painfully obvious if something isn’t working. Just check all the subsystems - Graphics, Audio in/out, Optical drive, USB, etc. etc.
I charge a minimum of $300 for a water-damaged machine. Note that both sides of the logic board usually get damaged.
Is that right? I had read somewhere that residues from the water can be corrosive. Is that just some internet BS?
I’ve essentially done this (including by running Apple Diagnostics, which is pretty slick these days) and am satisfied that everything is in working order. My fear was that something could be working now but slowly be damaged by residues left over by the water, but I guess that turns on the answer to my first question above.
The only time I’ve seen problems with a machine after the liquid had dried was when they had spilled coke on it - that leaves a gummy, hydroscopic residue that combined with the corroded solder made a conductive path. I don’t think this will happen with just water.
I’m not really into hardware repair (just software) but that’s my experience as well. Plain water usually doesn’t have anything in it that will cause any more problems after it dries. I’ve never seen anything work after the water has dried but stop working later.