Switch it off now, before you read any further. Hold the power button down until the screen goes dark, pull the charger out of the laptop, and then come back to this page.
Spilled water on a laptop does its damage while there’s power running through the board, so the first minute counts for more than anything you do afterwards. What follows is the rest of the first hour, what to leave alone, and what laptop water damage means if you’re thinking of selling it.
The first few minutes, step by step
- Switch it off at once. Hold the power button until it goes off, even if it looks fine. Don’t wait for Windows to shut down properly; that takes time, and the laptop is running with water inside it the whole while.
- Unplug the charger, and anything else connected to it: a mouse, a USB stick, a monitor cable.
- Don’t turn it on to test it. This is the hardest step to follow. A laptop that starts perfectly ten minutes after a spill still has water inside, and switching it on while it’s wet is what turns a spill into a short circuit.
- Take the battery out, but only if it clips out. Some older laptops have a battery that slides out from underneath when you push a latch. If yours needs a screwdriver, leave it where it is: opening the case is a job for a repairer.
- Tip it upside down in a tent shape. Open the lid as wide as it goes and stand the laptop upside down on a towel, keyboard facing the towel, so it makes an upside-down V and the water runs back out the way it came in.
- Blot it, don’t wipe it. Press kitchen roll or a lint-free cloth onto the wet patches and lift it off again. Wiping across the keyboard drags the water sideways, into the gaps between the keys.
- Leave it for at least 48 hours at room temperature. Keep it tented, somewhere dry with air moving round it. No hairdryer, no radiator, no airing cupboard and no sunny windowsill, because heat warps plastic and a hairdryer’s blast pushes water further in.
Rice doesn’t draw the water out
Rice sits against the outside of the laptop while the water inside dries at the same rate it would in open air, and it leaves dust and starch in the keyboard and the ports on its way out. Apple tells iPhone owners the same thing about their phones. Leave the laptop tented on a towel.
Tea, coffee, juice or cola is a different problem
Clean water leaves little behind once it’s dried. A sweet or fizzy drink (tea with sugar in it, coffee with milk, juice, cola, energy drinks) leaves a sticky film when the water goes, and that film holds moisture against the circuit board and corrodes it in the weeks after the spill, long after the laptop feels dry. Drying it out doesn’t remove it. A laptop that’s had one of those over the keyboard needs cleaning by a repairer, and the sooner it gets there the less corrosion there is to clean.
If it works again, it’s still liquid damage
Here’s the part we’d rather be clear about before you fill in a quote. Any liquid damage makes a laptop Faulty on our form, even if it dried out and runs perfectly now.
We check for it when the laptop arrives. We look for the liquid indicators inside (small stickers that change colour once they’ve been wet) and for corrosion on the board and the connectors, and a spill that happened months ago still shows. So declare it and choose Faulty from the start. If a laptop comes in marked Excellent and we find liquid damage, you get a revised offer before we do anything to it, and a declined offer means the laptop comes back to you at our cost. You don’t lose anything that way, but you’ve waited for a price you could have had on day one.
What a laptop with liquid damage is worth to us
We price a laptop with water damage as we price any Faulty one, by processor, brand and screen size. An HP with an 11th-generation Core i5 is worth £34.50 to us as Faulty today, one with a 12th-generation Core i5 £60, and an 11th-generation Core i7 £42. We pay the same for Dell, Lenovo and Asus. Those assume a screen of 15 inches or more.
A working laptop with no spill in its history in Excellent condition, the same 11th-generation HP, is worth £115. We know that’s a big drop for a glass of water. It’s the risk of corrosion we can’t see yet that we’re pricing.
After the 48 hours
Plug the charger in and try it. If it starts, copy your files off first, before anything else, and if you’re planning to part with it, the guide to how to wipe a laptop before selling it is the next step. If it doesn’t start, work through the checks in our guide to a laptop that won’t turn on, although a hard reset won’t undo corrosion.
If it’s dead for good, the files are still on the drive, and we wipe every laptop we receive before it’s reused or recycled, dead ones included. Our page on how to sell a broken laptop has the rest.
