We all know the horror of spilling beer or some other liquid on our beloved DJ gear. Chances are that at one time or another, you or a friend has had the unthinkable happen at a gig or a party. Fear not, though—it doesn’t always have to be the end of the world. Knowing what to do and acting quickly can save your precious equipment—and possibly some disappointment and money. Here’s how to do DJ-gear damage control when disaster strikes.
WHAT CAN HAPPEN
It’s the end of a night, you’ve been playing for several hours, maybe knocked back a beer or two yourself. You take your eye off the ball for a second and disaster strikes! A drink is splashed all over your gear, pouring into all every opening—between the jog-wheels and into faders, or all over your laptop’s keyboard. When this happens, you don’t have a second to waste if you want to save your stuff from a watery death.
ACT QUICKLY
If you’re a “show must go on” kind of performer, then by all means, find some other method of keeping the set going—but that’s not what this story is about. Quite the contrary, we are in “forget about the music” mode now and trying to rescue your gear. The first things you need to do are:
1. Pull out your power cables and battery (in the case of a laptop)
The first immediate danger is short circuits developing inside your gear. When liquid touches electronics, it conducts electricity to every component it touches. This can and will destroy the fragile components inside. You only have a matter of seconds to act, so be quick. Power cables come first here, as they often carry the most power and circuit-damage potential, so unplug them immediately. If your laptop is involved, remove the battery right away as well.
2. Pull out USB any cables
USB cables conduct power—5V at 500mA to be precise—often providing it to MIDI controllers and audio interfaces. These need to be removed right away for the same reasons outlined in the first point.
3. Turn your equipment upside down
If liquid is running into your equipment from the top, turning it upside down reverses the flow away from the circuits inside.
4. Pull out audio cables
Lastly, pull out your audio cables. There are usually more cables here there anywhere else, and they take a bit longer to remove—but they still carry power.
5. Dry everything as much as possible
Obviously, you will want to dry off your gear and the surrounding area. If you couldn’t find a towel or rag before, now is the time to get one. Be sure to dry everything as best as you possibly can. Hopefully the equipment will be saved from real damage, but you’re not out of the woods yet.
GEAR RESURRECTION
Your gear might be dry, but that doesn’t mean it’s safe—or that it will work again. Hopefully you managed to limit the damage caused by following the previous steps, and doing so quickly.
The problem now is, how do you get that corrosive, sticky gunk out of your equipment? Well, you’re going to have to open it up. THIS WILL VOID YOUR WARRANTY! But warranties generally don’t cover Budweiser spillage, so you have nothing to lose if your gear needs to be fixed. Beer and other beverages contain all kinds of corrosive salts and sugars, which will destroy metal contacts, rendering switches and components useless.
Move everything to an area away from any shag carpets or any other sources of static—and don’t wear a woolly sweater here.
Start by removing knobs and fader caps. Then remove the screws on the back, taking note of exactly where they go. I like to put them on a table and arrange them in the positions they came out of.
It’s important not to force anything, especially in the case of laptops. They often have lots of clips that need to be gently pried, so if it’s not coming off, then you have probably missed a screw. Also, be careful not to pull on any wires or ribbon cables.
Now you need to assess the damage; chances are that it’s still wet inside.
Remove all of the wet circuit boards and plastic or metal parts, taking care to note the locations of wires and components. Note: Your laptop has a CMOS battery in it, which looks like a watch battery; this needs to be removed as well.
CLEANING
Now you need to wash the damaged parts with clean water. This isn’t as crazy as it looks. As long as there is no power going through it, your gear will survive this step. I usually run a cold tap over the parts for five minutes. This also can be done with circuit boards, providing all power has been drained from them. For a laptop, you might want to leave it over night to completely discharge. The point is to totally remove any gunk from inside switches or hiding under chips and things. It is also possible to use denatured alcohol (not the Gentleman Jack that got you here), distilled water, or contact cleaner for this process. I use water as it’s cheap, and everyone has a tap—but if your water is particularly hard, you may want to go the route of distilled water, just to be safe.
Once your gear is thoroughly cleaned, use a hairdryer to gently dry everything off. Take care not to melt anything here. Don’t use high heat —just use enough to make everything dry as a bone.
REASSEMBLY
When everything is dry and clean, it’s time to put it all back together. If you made a note of how it came apart, then this should be easy. Just reassemble it all accordingly.
THE MOMENT OF TRUTH
Now it’s the tentative moment of switching it all back on. Hopefully it will work on the first try with no problems. Occasionally, you will have a sticky button or fader left and it will need to be rinsed again with warmer water. And you might find that you still need to replace some parts that just won’t come back to life. In the worst-case scenario, it may be completely dead. If it’s your laptop that’s dead, and it won’t come back to life, you might have to replace the motherboard (often called the main board). eBay is usually a good recourse for affordable main boards.
Remember, an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure. Always take care of your equipment and never let liquids anywhere near it, for any reason. It is your livelihood after all. Good luck!
How have you reacted when DJ-gear disaster strikes? Let us know in the comments.
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[…] The contacts on this fader (diagram below) are on the bottom of the fader instead of the top surface (which is standard on traditional DJ gear). This gives it a much better chance at surviving toxic sugar drink spills and coffee mishaps. […]
[…] The contacts on this fader (diagram below) are on the bottom of the fader instead of the top surface (which is standard on traditional DJ gear). This gives it a much better chance at surviving toxic sugar drink spills and coffee mishaps. […]
[…] The contacts on this fader (diagram below) are on the bottom of the fader instead of the top surface (which is standard on traditional DJ gear). This gives it a much better chance at surviving toxic sugar drink spills and coffee mishaps. […]
great tips to have for any mishaps
In most cases you will not have the opportunity to immediately open up your hardware. ‘the show must go on’.
1) unplug power, USB and audio asap.
2) inform your public and that your first priority is to get the music up.
3) Turn your gear upside down
4) find a back up solution so that ‘the show can go on’
What I would consider is buying some silicagel and carry this to your gigs. It absorbs liquids as no other, even more, it takes it out of the air, so putting your hardware into this upside down would be very effective.
Silicagel is the stuff you find in those little pockets or the stuff when you have a wet room to absorb liquid uit of the air.
Even now you have cat litter that is 100% silicagel so you find it everywhere.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silica_gel?wprov=sfla1
http://www.pet-happy.com/silica-cat-litter-review/
Remember you will still have to clean all the moment you come home.
Preferably with non oil Electronica cleaner.
Remember if it’s faders you’ll need to relubricate. Look this up and inform with professionals.
Use for example faderlube.
Good luck!
Great article. I had a minor spill on my ns7mk2 and reacted in pretty much the same way as described. However, contact cleaner did not work so well on touch control surfaces or buttons that are not able to switch physically (sorry, lack of term here, you can press them, but they stay in the same position(pressure switch/contact switch?)) like many controllers have for play/cue and even pads. I would find for example that the switch for headphones would, not trigger at all, go on and off instantly or even activate another channel for monitoring, until I cleared the contact completly after allready cleaning the entire device properly and it was even non-residue contact cleaner. So it resolved, but the same kind of buttons on my phone are not working at all, so I geuss I got lucky it didn’t happen on my controller.
2 hours after i received my Numark NV ii i spilled cola in the controller….
Use rubbing alcohol instead of water. Dries faster than water and less time waiting for it to dry.
At my gig recently in a pumping nightclub on the top floor of a heritage listed building. It was pouring rain outside and it started coming in through the roof and all over my laptop. The music can’t stop unlike in this article, so I just moved the laptop as far away from the decks as I could and someone from the bar came over with a towel for me to wipe my gear and said “oh yeah the roof leaks forgot to tell you, it’s a heritage building so we can’t touch the roof.”
So when I got home I covered my laptop in rice and now I have silicon plugs in all the sockets of my MacBook Pro and a silicon keyboard cover for all gigs.
Fucking hell… just spilled a full glass of coca cola up my Z2… Hopefully it still works after cleaning 🙁
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a drunk blonde requesting me stupid songs spilled a drink over my DDJ SZ and she didn’t even noticed it. I reacted fast like a ninja and sucked like a vacuum every drop over my precious controller. She goes what the fuck are you doing.. do you have coke??
hahaha! some people eh
tell me about it.
This is why I have a zero tolerance, everything over-ride, policy in the DJ booth. If someone attempts to come into the booth with a drink (who isn’t a DJ and they know where drinks go and how to deal with them), I stop them and ask them to take the drink out. If they ignore my request, I tell them “that drink needs to go, or you go.”) if they ignore that, I call security over my DJ mic up to the booth. No one’s request is more important than everyone else’s musical enjoyment, and not one gets to ruin my equipment at any cost.
Normally, it’s not an issue, but it’s something I have no tolerance for as I’ve seen gear ruined, and nights brought to a halt when some drunk person decided bringing their drinks into the booth was OK.
It sometimes takes a bit to be firm with people, but when you point out why, normally people respect why you ask them to obey a simple rule.
yeah mannn. I agree. when that happen no ones is gonna pay for our shit.
yeah man. I agree. when that happen no ones is gonna pay for our shit.
alcohol resistant dj gear 2016
Water…. bad idea. Use Isopropyl Alcohol and clean the contacts. I’ve saved many computers doing this.
I actually spilled coke on my laptop, and I can say, it was really not cheap
happened to me twice with my macbook pro.
some how i managed to save it. followed the same procedures instead i used raw whisky to clean the internal parts. and it dries pretty quick too.
Shit happened to me at my gig at Avalon last year on my birthday. Killed my S4 but was lucky enough to have both my F1 and X1 as back ups with mappings ready to go to help me make it through my gig. But that was a fucking nightmare!
So here’s my drink spill story. I Dj’d a Halloween party alongside a friend and were arrived at the venue early. We witnessed some people stealing Hennessy bottles from behind the bar and they left. The party promoter blamed my friend and I and even though she didn’t know my name she remembered my face. Fast forward a few months to May of the next year and I am Djing a party at a bar and same promoter was there, saw me, and time her drink spill as soon as i dropped a big tune and pretended to act as if someone bumped her. Luckily nothing happened but I did have to clean out the faceplate and faders on my Tascam XS-8.
qc cleaner?
you guys rock. I literally asked you guys a question about this like 2 days ago.
Quick tip… Those silicon keyboard covers have saved my laptop’s life a few times. And try to rise things off the dj table so if a drink spills on the table it wont affect the electronics.
Now this is an article that every deejay deserves to have all details about in all their deejaying career.Well done DJ Tech Tools.
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About 2 months ago I accidentally dropped my coffee on my MacBook Air. No big gig here, just a pre-office Starbucks… Anyway, I turned the thing upside down, turned it off, and started to dry it as much as possible with napkins.
As I was at a mall, I left the shop in shame and ran to the office supply store, where I bought a can of compressed air. Since you can’t open a MacBook Air fast enough without the right tools, I needed to get out as much capuccino as possible, fast. I blew and blew compressed air in between the keys and every cavity I saw, cleaning the droplets of coffee with more napkins. If you remember your physics lessons, you could have guessed that given the sudden pressure change inside the air can, its temperature drops. Boy, it drops! I had to use the coffee sleeve to handle it, just to go from hurting cold to uncomfortable chill. I think I used most of the air out of the can, but no more droplets came out. The can was covered in frost.
The Mac shop was still closed, and I had to go to the office. At lunch time, the Mac shop was already open so I went. The tech guy gave me the lecture about how unlikely it would be for my Mac to survive. I insisted to get it opened and cleaned. More lecture and disclaimer, but they took it. I’m pretty shure they go the alcohol route stated here.
Two days later, tech guy called. “Your Mac is OK. I guess your air-blowing saved it. It could still fail at any given moment, but for now, it seems just fine”. And fine it is!
Maybe it would be good advice to keep a can of compressed air with your gear 😉
place it in a box of silica gel (small sachets found in various shoe boxes) and forget about it for 3-4days
only if its just water on your gear, if its juice like a vodka and coke, thats not going to help at all 🙁 sorry
yes it would end up sticky for anything other then water.
Sadly happened to my S4 cuz of a friend of mine that bought me a drink… I cleaned it up, opened it to dry it but my right fader is having some bugs (the middle range can’t be used anymore) and my S4 is now unable to work properly… Never let this happened. 1 time is enough, take care of your gear guys…
try squirting water directly into the fader slot (you need to open it up again) whilst sliding the fader back and forward. trust me this is almost guaranteed to work, there is most likely gunk stuck on the fader tracks inside.
Yep that’s what I tried yesterday afternoon, last chance ^^
I pulled of the back panel and use my shower to put water in the fader slot while i slid with it. I’m waiting for it to dry. Fingers crossed !
good luck! i hope it works for you, s4’s certainly aint cheap!
All i saw was water being poured on a circuit board and a tear fell from my eye
haha! dont worry, it survived 😉
99% Isopropyl alcohol is THE best for cleaning internal electronics. It is cheap, effective, and safe (for the electronics). It is FLAMMABLE, so work smart. 90% still has impurities that may leave your board with a white film (impurities) which still may lead to short circuits. 99% ISA can be purchased at almost any drug store and online. Go ahead and use a medium bristle toothbrush to scrub it down. Here is a video about removing flux, but the concept is exactly the same. In the video he states to avoid anything mechanical (physically moving parts), but if you have a drink gumming up the physically moving parts, this is where you want to clean.
[…] Hopefully, this will be enough to save your equipment from the worst of the damage. However, there are definitely further steps you can take to prevent lasting damage. For the full guide on gear resurrection, cleaning, and reassembly, check out the DJTechTools article here. […]
Oh also a bin of dry uncooked rice is your best friend here!
I still wouldn’t use tap water, especially here in Florida the water is very hard. 90% isopropyl/Rubbing Alcohol should work even better and will evaporate in seconds. Just my $0.02, great article though.
I’m a Nazi about drinks near my gear. I will toss out people’s drinks if they set them on the same table with my gear.
I had such a lucky break at my gig tonight.
At this particular venue, you DJ on stage in front of everyone. There’s a small cage which the DJ gear sits on – only big enough to fit the CDJs and mixer, so I had to put a small table next to it, to put my laptop on.
Only problem is though, if you’re playing a killer set, everybody jumps up on stage to dance with you and that table becomes an instant magnet for everyone to put their stuff down on to. Shirts, handbags and yes – drinks.
I tell anyone that puts a drink there to move it away, but as you say – you only have to take your eye off the ball for a second for disaster to strike.
Some intoxicated guy went to put his drink down on the table and misses – the full glass of beer goes everywhere. Luckily most of the beer went in the opposite direction to the laptop, which only got a light splash on it.
And I was able to quickly lift it off and wipe up the puddle on the table before it could do any real damage. But most of the beer went over the edge and poured directly in to the powerboards for the CDJ and mixer (which were hidden from my sight).
Since I’d save my laptop and “the show must go on”, I kept DJing for about 30 mins before BOOM – the powerboard frizzed and everything went dead.
Took about 5 mins before we had the power back on to everything – but what a nightmare that was and completely exhausting,
I’ve seen this stuff in action on RC electronics, it can pretty much make things waterproof…. it’s worth looking into. I’m going to source a can of it for a few applications, and may just try and hose down my mixtrack pro 2 internals with it and see what happens…. wondering if it will be OK on the faders. http://corrosionx.com/corrosionx.html
the faders would likely scrape it off the tracks inside, plus you need to watch out for it gunking up the tactile switches. it will probably protect most of the smal components though, but only to a minimal degree. if that helps
Dont use a hairdryer, too easy to overdo it… just let it dry out for a week with a pc casefan running next to it.
LIQUIPEL it like Steve Aoki
[…] What To Do If You Spill Booze On Your Mixer, Laptop, Or Controller – DJTechTools shows you how to deal with one of digital DJing’s worst nightmares Read more […]
“No Beer Near The Gear” is my moto. Hasn’t happened to me yet [fingers xed]
Thanks for the upside down trick!
you always want to blow dry it and give it a few hours to dry, same principles can be applied to any electronic device. Also if anythings gets into a fader you want to clean immediately because I had several times where beer has gone into my crossfader and it makes corruption on the contacts of the fader.
A mi me ha pasado con cerveza y vino. Por suerte no hubo ningún daño, ya que yo soy de los “the show must go on” =/
Creo que si me hubiesen tirado mucho líquido, hubiese apagado todo… voy a tener en cuenta estos tips gracias.
PD: soy el único que escribe en español (?)
Actually, the only real time a thing like this happend to me:
2000, a guy drops a full glass of beer on my cd metal suitcase,fulled with orginal cd singles and original albums. glass and beer all over. There and then I wished for a computer to play music with…..
I manage and DJ in a venue , dont let any drinks near the gear !! ,,,and i make it clear to other DJ’s … best thing is to have a drink holder built in the dj box and only use that. customers thou when they have had a few and its busy can be a challenge if you have a “open” DJ box
[…] Para que no te pierdas en ningún paso, lo mejor que puedes hacer es leerlos y ver las fotos aquí. […]
Something that saved quite a few bits of gear in my time…if you can’t get the gear to a spot to open it up right away, find a place that is warm and dry to put it until you can. I had a laser get rained on at a festival. We put the thing near the amp racks for the rest of the weekend and when we opened it up we found that the damage was minimal. I’ve seen many promoters and DJs say “well it’s ruined already, so screw it” and leave gear out in the rain or in places where more crap gets spilled on it. That extra step of stowing wet gear someplace where it will be dry seems like a no-brainer, but people tend not to think about it in a panic.
Great article!
one girl spilled a drink on my laptop which fried instantly.
I was so pissed
As others have pointed out, using water is not the best way. For alcohol I always keep some isopropyl alcohol (2-propanol) at home (and otherwise can get it at some stores or a pharmacy). Isopropyl alcohol can be used for many cleaning uses and it is good to cleanup spillage. It will also drive out water out of connectors etc.
I’ll dj on a shaky boat with lot’s of drunk people, so this article may be relevant to me…i hope it won’t 😉
AWESOME custom cable work there, Noxxi ! 😉
haha! thanks! using a “wiring loom” helps to me to set up a lot quicker, its probably not so good for the cables, but i always take spares 🙂
AWESOE custom cable work there, Noxxi ! 😉
i’ve used alcohol to clean up pcb’s and mobo’s for just this reason, i find that it’ll even break down dried coca-cola. as for a hair dryer, i find that the forced air gun on my smd solder station makes short work of it. thankfully i don’t have this problem myself as i don’t drink and my practices over the years don’t allow me to put open fluids by my gear.
[…] Let’s face it. We’ve all been there. You’ve reached the end of the night behind the decks. You look down and there’s beer, booze, or Red Bull spilled all over the place. Instant panic! How do you salvage your controller, mixer, or laptop? Have no fear. In a new feature-length article, DJ Tech Tools shows you how to do DJ-gear damage control when liquid disaster strikes your set-up. Explore the full step-by-step DIY walk-through here. […]
Only beer spilled on me went right inside of the record box.
I learned to store my records with the opening to the side from there on out. They all came clean but cleaning 100 records is a PITA but at least not electronic!
The best thing that u can can do,with your own equipment, after the disaster strikes
is to to leave them dry ,and then take them to a proffesional to open them… you are going to loose some bucks, but propably you are gonna save the equipment…..
this is false, if you leave it to dry inside, then removing the gunk will be much harder, the gunk is also corrosive, very corrosive, by the time its completely dry irreparable damage may have been caused. sure a professional will be much better equipped to dismantle equipment, but anyone with patience can do it, its really not that difficult to take a few screws out and unplug a few wires 🙂
[…] Let’s face it. We’ve all been there. You’ve reached the end of the night behind the decks. You look down and there’s beer, booze, or Red Bull spilled all over the place. Instant panic! How do you salvage your controller, mixer, or laptop? Have no fear. In a new feature-length article, DJ Tech Tools shows you how to do DJ-gear damage control when liquid disaster strikes your set-up. Explore the full step-by-step DIY walk-through here. […]
fuck it, it’s only a Behringer
Behringer has some surprising gems if you know what to look for.
A note on laptops; once the battery is out, hold down the power button to completely discharge any residual power in the system.
this is a great call, that i forgot to include in this article. well spotted
You should use alcohol and alcohol only that you would use for soldering.
you probably should, however not many people have a lot of alcohol lying about. rinsing a large board would require litres of the stuff. you also don’t want to leave that gunk on your gear corroding circuits whilst you wait on acquiring said alcohol. i do appreciate where your coming from though 🙂
You could also get a KB Cover for your laptop. It won’t be 100% waterproof but it saves it from most liquids getting below the keyboard into the internals.
KB covers available here in the DJTT store: https://store.djtechtools.com/keyboard-covers.html
Moshi Clearguard saved my Macbook 4 times in 2 years. Champagne killed my last laptop!
normally, i had some aura in the controller-area, and everybody knows this, that when the music stops, this is an really bad mood.
Most Tap water contains minerals that will leave deposits on the equipment. If you are going to use water its use distilled water or at the very least boiled water that has been left to go cold. Pure Alcohol or Non lubricating contact cleaner spray is a much better solution.
If you are going to go to the extreame of washing out the gear with water, you can set up a little “greenhouse” tent in a sunlit area out of a few plastic bags and coat hangers set up over a rice filled tray and set your gear up on a raised platform inside this will allow mosture to be drawn out without leaving a starchy mess on your gear.
Above all, get sugary drinks like beer, cocktails or soda out of your equipment as fast as possible as many are corrosive beyond belief and can do serious damage within hours.
that’s a good point to add to this article, i live in scotland where the water is very soft, so this isn’t a huge problem for me and i have had this technique work many times.
again your totally correct about getting the gunk out asap! maybe a good compromise in this situation is to wash it out with tap water immediately, and then when you have distilled water or alcohol, give it a second wash to remove any calcium deposits or metals the tap water left behind
citric acid has to be one of the worst for this.
Q-Tips and alcohol are your friend here.
Also be sure to clean the plastic casing thoroughly too. I had an issue on my Z2 where buttons were sticking after a spill. After board cleaning and reassembly, I realized the stickiness was gunk between the buttons and faceplate of the mixer.
This may sound a bit odd but i’ve taken to the habit of putting all my drinks on the floor while in the booth. While I’ve kicked over a few drinks during my set, I’d rather have a wet floor than wet gear. Also, if someone is handing me a drink, I use the opportunity to politely explain that you never pass a drink over the equipment.
yeah i usually put them anywhere but near the decks! too many lessons learned the hard way!
Let me share my experience with such situations.
Last summer during a festival I had an entire pint of beer dropped on my mixer, while the music was on. To give you an idea of the damage, when I turned my mixer upside down, about half of that pint dripped out from every possible opening of that mixer…
Now the real problem was with that specific mixer. See, I sport a VESTAX PMC 08, which is a 100% digital mixer. With the 05s of the past, you could get away from such a situation because they didn’t had that many digital boards in them. But with the 08, the chances of a complete fry were more than evident…
What I did, besides the *very* correct steps described in this article, was to WAIT. Yes, I waited patiently for a whole week for everything to be completely dry. If you dry everything with a hairdresser you might miss a few spots, especially inside the casing, and if you rush and fire up the thing right away you might cause again a short circuit and kill it completely. Keep everything separated and let them dry out for an entire week. Your chances of saving it might increase exponentially.
And a few extra tips around such a situation:
1. Always have access to a MASTER MUTE button/switch, in case you don’t have one on your equipment. During a spillage your machine will most probably overdrive the shit out of the MASTER output and A) you might fry the entire sound system B) destroy the hearing of your audience and C) piss off everybody to the maximum possible point.
2. Always carry with you a set of screwdrivers with interchangeable heads. Chances are that if you tear everything down within the first half an hour of the damage, you will stop the damage on spot and save your machine from further troubles.
3. Always, and I really mean always, KEEP AWAY any drinks. From anyone. You cannot stop someone from the audience from throwing a bottle on stage, but you most definetely can stop someone from stepping over a cable inside the booth and *accidentaly* throw his vodka on your machine. In my case that person was the next DJ on the line up, i.e. not some random dude.
4. Sugar contained inside drinks is what causes the most of the damage. Even if a soda is thrown on your equipment, you must make sure that you wash out all kinds of residuals from that drink. If they stay on the boards, they will eat out the shit of everything.
5. Alcohol is not the ideal solution for washing any boards. It can burn the boards and circuits. The safest is the solution used for cleaning vinyl records.
6. Take some time and learn the insides of your equipment. Knowing where is what can save you highly valuable time in such a situation.
7. Be 100% sure of what you are doing when you are putting everything back together. A lot of damages occur during reassembling from miss connected cables on boards.
nice tips, and thanks 🙂 the inspiration to write this article came from my experience as well.
at the end of a not to spectacular night in a local club, i stupidly accepted a beer bought for me and placed it next to my equipment. everyone had left by now so i assumed it would be fine. however as i pulled out my usb cables, i didnt realise that half of them were nicely coiled around my new pint. boom beer in one of my PL-1’s my Kontrol F1 and my MM-1. it was pretty gutting as i literally poured the drink out from the fader slots!
still though, that gear is working fine again, following the steps. making sure its completely dry is very important, i was comfortable with just a hair dryer, but if it have been an s4 or a z2 i would have waited longer, cuz you know… they are pretty expensive 😀
to be honest, it’s not the sugar that will corrode the traces, it’s the citric acid contained in soda and fruit juices that is your real problem. the sugar is still a problem as it tends to coat everything in a sticky mess.
i had no problems cleaning the laptop mobo that my brother sneezed a full mouthful of iced tea on to. the pop that he heard before powering down was thankfully only a controller/logic board on the hard drive itself.
after cleaning the mobo with pure alcohol and resealing the traces, i can say that 5 years later it is still running.
Thanks for the tip around the citric acid, my chem knowledge is not that extensive!
Pure alcohol is a bit tricky though. I’ve noticed through the years that if I use it on a board, it can cause burns on circuits because they tend to overuse silicone to keep things together, even on parts they are not supposed to, due to cost cutting. That is why I use the same solution for vinyl or for cleaning tape heads, its the safest option for someone not so keen with circuits/chemicals.
i herd putting in a bag of rice helps with wet electronics.
Does anyone know that this is true?
Rice will absorb the humidity. Still ,it will leave some non desirable starch on your gear, which you will have to wash after that…
Best emergency dryer is paper nakpin. quite absorbant and you can find it in every single party.
If you get vodka or gin on your gear it might not be the end of the world. But if it’s rhum or if there’s any kind of sugared soda in it, man you’re gonna have a bad time cleaning it. That shit sticks like hell.
Yes, rice will help to draw moisture out, however it will not remove the sticky sugar from things like beer or soft drinks.
Yes, this is true but it is a very slow process, not ideal in case of a damage. Another option is to keep those small bags you find inside your new pair of shoes and use them as moisture absorbers, but again they work slow.
Very timely article, just happened to me late Saturday night!
unlucky! hopefully your gear is ok!