Asus K501U doesn't like chardonnay..

[splin]

A glass of white wine was knocked over, and into, the laptop and the reward was instant death - no leds, not even the green charging led (ie. charger plugged in). It was quickly opened, drained and dried but what next? Is it most likely a write-off?

[Cyberdragon]

Alcohol is conductive, so it probably shorted a bunch of stuff, and it's corrosive, especially with electricity. So your motherboard is all rusty now. How badly determines whether it's fixable. It could just be one small power circuit, or the CPU or RAM could have rusted away.

Are you proficient at SMD soldering and have a hot air station? If you are, you might be able to fix it. Otherwise you'll need a new motherboard, or just a data recovery.

[cdev]

My experience restoring "liquid damaged" equipment has been fairly good. Look elsewhere on here for the procedure, and cautions. I hope you removed the lithium battery if there is one. You should completely disassemble and clean the pieces individually. Take the normal precautions for ESD.

Distilled water does not conduct, and might be the best thing to use to clean it, maybe using a toothbrush on the traces then thoroughly dry the motherboard.. I would treat the disk separately, don't immerse that! Go slow and make sure its totally dry everywhere before applying any more power.

also the screen should not be immersed.. 

100% distilled water and then a thorough drying in an oven set on low or in the bright sun or both...

Get other opinions..

[Armadillo]

It is a good move definitely that you have taken it out, drained and dried it.

Definitely not a write-off, it can be restored as it contained ~14% alcohol [which would have absorbed any sugary content of the grapes]. [the worse would be coca cola].

You should take out both the lithium battery as cdev has said, and the Bios battery, take out CD rom drive, take out ddram cards. [if removable].

You can used DI water, RO water, distilled water, or Isopropyl alcohol [another alcohol] to wipe clean the board then put the board to dry. Mechanical assisted with hair dryer would be great.

After that, you put it back with the bios battery [don't put lithium, drive, or ddram as yet], plug in the power supply. If you able to see sign of life, then turn it back off, and plug everything in.

If not, then the most is the S5 stage problem and not expensive to repair, far from "write-off".

[Decoman]

I once knocked over a large cup of sour milk over the keyboard of a Dell Inspiron 5000 laptop (a really expensive laptop, even my boss thought it was expensive when I ordered it for myself at work). It seemingly died in an instant, however, after putting the laptop at an angle and drying the laptop for 14 days, the laptop booted up again after that.

Right after the incident the milk was seen dripping out of the laptop from some opening at the bottom edge of the computer as I was waiting for the laptop to dry.

I do not remember what I did with the battery, I might have removed the battery shortly after the laptop powered off. (I probably did.)

In retrospect, I think I could have doused it with water a little to try clean things up. Presumably most of the milk dirtied up  the keyboard, and presumably most of the insides did not come in contact with the milk as it found its way out of the laptop at the bottom.

[Cyberdragon]

Do not just clean it first!

If cleaning it fixes it, great. But if it doesn't, as Louis says, "we don't want to remove the hints". Remove all power sources, and identify all rust spots. Once you remember where all the rust was, then you can clean it. If it doesn't work though, you'll have a good idea of where to check.

[GreyWoolfe]

I once knocked over a large cup of sour milk over the keyboard of a Dell Inspiron 5000 laptop (a really expensive laptop, even my boss thought it was expensive when I ordered it for myself at work). It seemingly died in an instant, however, after putting the laptop at an angle and drying the laptop for 14 days, the laptop booted up again after that.

Right after the incident the milk was seen dripping out of the laptop from some opening at the bottom edge of the computer as I was waiting for the laptop to dry.

I do not remember what I did with the battery, I might have removed the battery shortly after the laptop powered off. (I probably did.)

In retrospect, I think I could have doused it with water a little to try clean things up. Presumably most of the milk dirtied up  the keyboard, and presumably most of the insides did not come in contact with the milk as it found its way out of the laptop at the bottom.

I worked for a Dell service provider as a field service tech during this era.  They were fun to work on along with the 7000 series.  Luckily, I never ran into one with liquid damage.  That would have been dicey for the standard warranty, no issue with the gold warranty.

[splin]

Thanks for the encouraging suggestions. I drained it and wiped dry as best I could, without removing any components within a few minutes of the spill. I also disconnected the battery but didn't notice the bios battery.

The good news is that after drying overnight it does boot up and appears to work. I've shut it down again, battery disconnected. Fortunately the spillage didn't get into the display.

So if I leave it a few days to dry thoroughly, might it be safe to use for a few days until I get the time to dismantle and clean it, especially as there is always a risk of causing more damage in the process?

The keyboard seems to be all working but it may well become erratic. Problem is that it's not easily replaceable being fixed with dozens of heatstakes. I could cut the heatstakes easily enough but how would you then refit it or a new keyboard? Should I immerse the keyboard, stll fixed to the case, in distilled water to try to clean it? I'm not sure that will help much without taking it apart, but I've never had any luck repairing cheap membrane keyboards which have suffered water spillage by separating the membranes to dry them.

Replacement keyboards don't seem to be readily available on ebay - presumably you are supposed to buy the whole upper case with keyboard but they are expensive at around £95.

[Armadillo]

There are 2 camps of thoughts;

One)

Alcohol is a solvent, so it should have absorbed most of sugary content. One camp of thought is to treat it as water spill. Modern laptop keyboard is rather impervious [though not water proof] to water spill. Moist Cloth and blow dry as in the MSI video below is suggested. Is OK to run the laptop if it has successfully started up.



Two)

Depending on your level and speed at dismantling. As for me, I would complete teardown the laptop, distilled water brush the boards [except battery contacts, speakers], and blow and leave it to dry for a day.
Its a good time to change the heat sink compound and heat thermal pads anywhere.
But there is also a chance that you didn't put it back properly example improper heat sinking, cross exhaust air etc....
Because you don't know where the Bio battery is, chances are you have not dismantled one before so I would advise you to take route One above for simplicity. Otherwise send it to a friend to dismantle it for you.

Other may have better suggestion for you.  Cheers!.

[amyk]

People use alcohol, albeit pure, to clean water-damaged PCBs, so it was probably not as bad as a water spill.