Every single week I invariably receive a device that has come into contact with water. Sometimes the customer spilled an entire glass of water on their MacBook Pro keyboard. Other times they dropped an iPad into a puddle of mud, or occasionally someone will get just a few droplets near their device; yet all of these instances have the potential to render a device unusable.
This becomes indescribably frustrating and expensive quite fast. Liquid contact voids warranties, as manufacturers know how physically difficult — in some cases impossible — it is to resurrect liquid-damaged boards. Whenever I break the terrible news (well, sometimes it’s not news) to customers that their computer has liquid damage and cannot be economically fixed, they give me their emotional reaction but, to this day, nobody has asked how liquids ruin computers or cell phones or iPods.
In a hypothetical environment where you could run completely pure water over a powered board, you would be surprised to find that nothing much would happen. Pure H20 is actually not a conductor! Its covalent bonds join the positively charged H+ ion with the OH- ion for a net charge of 0. Most water that we come into contact with does, however, contain free ions of different charges. Salt, for example, consists of sodium (Na+) and chlorine (Cl-) ions that will separate as sodium chloride molecules dissolve in water.
Because there are these “mobile ions” present, electricity can be conducted through the water which, in reality, is a “solution,” and this is as good as causing a short circuit on your logic board. When any sort of liquid compound (soda, tap water, broth, tea, beer, etc) come into contact with a part of your boards, you run the risk of short circuiting and destroying tiny components like transistors, capacitors, and plug leads by causing too many electrons to flow through these components.
I find short-circuiting to be the most pervasive cause of liquid-contacted board failure though there are numerous circumstances where this type of failure is unlikely because, let’s say, the computer is not plugged in and the battery is depleted. There ought to be, in this case, little to no current in the circuitry of your device. That doesn’t really matter though because corrosion, the very same phenomena that causes rust on iron alloys, is imminent.
Corrosion occurs when an electrolyte (such as tap water) comes into contact with metal (found all over printed circuit boards) and slowly causes its atoms to bond with liberated oxygen ions – liberated when the electrolyte made contact with C02 in the air and started forming carbonic acid, which started dissolving the metal atoms.
As you can see, a number of chemical and physical forces go to work the moment any liquid touches your computer and is quite out of your control at that point. A lot of customers plead with me that they immediately powered their devices down, put them upside down, blew air on them, opened them up, dried them with leftover Kleenex or whatever, in the hopes that I’ll say “…oh alright, I’ll let it slide this time, but next time be more careful!”
Sadly, I have not yet been given access privileges to change the laws of physics and chemistry. Until then, please be mindful of your liquids and don’t take chances: those who have dropped their phones into toilets and gone on to use them (not sure why) for years after are freaks of nature and should thank the power of love for their good fortune!