Thread: How to resurrect a wet DAW?

Just make sure they are totally dry before powering, compressed air should help.

Be very careful using compressed air in a wet atmosphere. Compression of the air can cause water to condense out, and high velocity water droplets are destructive.

I would definitely remove the MOBO and the affected card to clean them. I would also use a brush to give them a more thorough clean than just spraying. Be careful with static though. I usually cut a small non synthetic paintbrush down to about 1/2 inch to give a decent stiff brush and use with IPA (Iso Propyl Alcohol) for such cleaning.

Most modern surface mount parts are designed for wet cleaning so, provided everything is clean and dry, I think you should be OK.

Yeah, I'm hoping to be able to do it tomorrow. I was going to do it yesterday but ended up vacuuming up some more water. I'll probably tear up the carpeting in the studio and put down some synthetic industrial carpeting without any underpadding. I'm just trying to minimize the possibility of any mold at the moment. A close friend of ours contracted bacterial pneumonia from the mold that was growing between the walls of her hi-rise apartment and ended up staying with us for four months while she battled with her coop. By the way, she won and they bought her apartment. It helped that she had gone to college to be a biologist before switching to finance. She hired a professional "moldologist" who tore up the wall; took samples and tests and provided his findings along with a white paper that he had authored on the subject.

Dunking in alcohol can help because it displaces water and dries quickly.

But this is still an indefinite matter.

Well, I cleaned and dried everything and turned on the power switch. The power supply is providing power to the ASUS P5B Deluxe mobo and my processor fan and video card fan are working. However, there's no video and I do not hear the bios kicking in the hard drives. A buddy of mine says that even if the power was off the capacitors on the board would still have been storing energy (even though I hadn't turned this computer on for more than a day) and they are now fried. Does this make sense?

This depends to an extent. Although the PC was off, was the line power also turned off? If not, the ancillary 5V would still have been active and this may have caused some damage.

The main supplies though would have been off and any associated cap's would have discharged within minutes at the most. The only other point to be aware of is that, of any modern components, the most likely to be less than watertight would be the electrolytics but that is still unlikely.

Would the ancillary 5V have been powered by the lithium power cell on the board? If so, is there a possibility that I could resurrect the board by replacing the cell?