Tea + Motherboard = ?

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Amy, my friend’s sweet three year old, spilt tea on Daddy’s motherboard last weekend. It wasn’t fitted, and was just sitting there on it’s ESD bag waiting for the next stage of the installation. He likes a sugar or two in his tea, so as you can imagine the mess is quite sticky. The worst hit areas seem to be the CPU socket and the DIMM slots.

He cleaned as much of the excess as he could with cotton buds and anti-static foam cleaner but still thinks a good (careful) wash could be the order of the day.

Any suggestions/recommendations? The board was replaced anyway, so having it working again isn’t a high priority, we’re just curious…!

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Hi
You can do this with keyboards, but never tried it with a motherboard : rinse it in warm water, then drain thoroughly and allow to dry in a warm place for 48hours or so. I can’t think of any mobo component that would actually dissolve. However, I would first remove the on-board battery, CPU and memory moules if fitted. In your particular case, they clearly were not.
You’ve nothing to lose but your PSU….
Before you try this, wait a day or two to see if anybody with experience of this has tried and fried, and is prepared to say so.

Take care!

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Hello all,
I have heard of washing the keyboard and even circuitboards and I agree with Merc with what he said. However, perhaps you should take care with the water, what alot of us get out of the tap is not exactly pure H2O. If you live in a hard water area (your kettle gets furred up alot) a limescale deposit may be left behind as the water evapourates. I wouldn’t normally think this is a problem as to my knowledge it is not a conductor or semiconductor and many circuit boards have a protective varnish coating. The sticky bit (excuse the pun) will be plugging all the stuff back in as there is a chance that one or more contacts will be insulated by this deposit. It’s up to you whether you want to go to the effort but as has been said you haven’t much to lose, and doing nothing just leaves you with a toffee coated m/board. Should smell nice as the CPU heats heats up, but watch out for the wasps and ants!!

Best of luck,
Ewan

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The smell of caramel rising from the gently-warming components is enough to make me think about marketing ‘heat sink scents’. Just think, a small slither of something scented that slips sandwiched somehow by the separate fins of the sink. The fan then wafts it around and the case fan exudes it into your immediate environment. Available in banana, cherry and marshmallow.

Herein my fortune lies…

I’ll let you know how I get on with scrubbing the board. I think a combination of my wife’s toothbrush, a mild detergent solution and warmed bottled water may do it, then into the airing cupboard for a couple of days.

I’ll keep you posted.

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..loved that neologism ‘slither’ as a noun. Make your own language and fortune – way to go, man.

Rgds

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