Laptop Water Damage: What to Do in the First Hour

Do these five things now

1. Hold the power button down until it switches off. Do not use the Start menu or the Apple menu, and do not wait for anything to save. A clean shutdown takes thirty seconds you do not have. Power flowing through a wet board is what causes most of the permanent damage.
2. Unplug the charger and leave it unplugged. Do not plug it back in "just to check". Do not try to charge it later to see if it has recovered.
3. Remove the battery — only if it is the removable kind. If it is internal, do not start opening the machine to get at it. You will do more harm than the extra minutes of connected battery will.
4. Turn it upside down and open, tented over a towel. Like a roof. This lets gravity pull liquid back out through the keyboard rather than further down into the board. Leave it that way.
5. Get it to a bench. Today if you possibly can. Everything below explains why this is the step that actually decides the outcome.

If you can do only one of those, do the first. Call us rather than emailing — spills in the last 24 hours go to the front of the queue.

Four things that make it permanently worse

• Turning it on to see if it still works. The single most damaging thing you can do. A board that is merely wet often survives. A board that is wet and powered develops electrical shorts across bridged traces, and those take components with them. Every attempt reduces the odds.
• Charging it. Same problem, with more current behind it.
• A hairdryer, a radiator or an airing cupboard. Heat drives liquid deeper into crevices before it can evaporate, bakes sugary residue into a hard varnish that is far harder to remove, and can warp plastics and stress solder joints. Room temperature and gravity are what you want.
• Rice. It does nothing. This is worth being blunt about, because the myth costs people their laptops every week. Rice is a mediocre desiccant that cannot reach inside a sealed chassis, and — critically — your problem is not moisture. Your problem is the conductive residue and the corrosion the liquid left behind, and drying the machine out does not remove either of them. Meanwhile the fortnight it spends in the bag is a fortnight of corrosion eating copper.

Why speed decides the outcome

Almost nothing spilled on a laptop is pure water. Tap water carries dissolved minerals. Coffee, tea, fizzy drinks, wine, beer, juice and soup carry sugars, acids and salts. When the liquid evaporates, all of that stays behind on the board as a residue.

That residue does two things, and both get worse with time:

• It conducts. Salt and sugar deposits bridge traces that were never meant to be connected. That is why a machine can seem fine for a day and then behave strangely.
• It is hygroscopic. It pulls moisture out of the air. So even after the laptop feels bone dry, the residue keeps re-wetting itself, and the electrochemical corrosion carries on eating copper traces, component legs and connector pins — for weeks.

This is why the timeline matters so much more than the size of the spill. A board cleaned properly within a day or two usually comes back. The same board left for a month may have corrosion through traces that no longer exist to be repaired.

In our workshop, roughly seven in ten spills that reach the bench within 72 hours are fully recovered. The rate falls steadily after that, and machines that arrive weeks later are frequently beyond economic repair — not because the spill was severe, but because of what happened afterwards.

Some liquids are much worse than others

• Clean water. The most survivable. Still urgent — tap water is not distilled and leaves minerals — but the best starting position.
• Black coffee or tea, unsweetened. Acidic, but manageable if it reaches us quickly.
• Anything with sugar or milk. Sweetened coffee, fizzy drinks, juice, energy drinks. The sugar sets into a sticky, conductive film that spreads everywhere and is far harder to remove.
• Alcohol — wine, beer, spirits. Sugars plus acids, and the liquid's low surface tension means it travels further into the machine than water would.
• Salt water and soup. The worst case. Chloride ions drive corrosion aggressively, and damage progresses in hours rather than days. Seawater in particular needs a bench the same day.

Tell whoever you hand the machine to exactly what went into it. It changes the cleaning approach and it changes how we prioritise the job. Nobody is judging the wine.

What happens on the bench

1. Full teardown, usually within hours of arrival. Liquid-damaged machines jump the queue precisely because delay is the enemy. The board comes out and everything is inspected under a microscope.
2. Assessment and photographs. We look at where the liquid travelled, which connectors and components it reached, and how far corrosion has progressed. You get pictures of what we found.
3. Ultrasonic cleaning. The board goes into a controlled ultrasonic bath, which removes residue from underneath components and inside connectors — places no amount of wiping or drying will ever reach. This is the step that actually stops the corrosion, and it is the step a machine sitting in rice never gets.
4. Component-level repair. Corroded components are identified and replaced, traces are repaired where they have been eaten through, and connectors are re-soldered. This is microsoldering work, done under a stereo microscope.
5. A go/no-go verdict within 24 hours. Before you commit to anything, you get an honest assessment: recoverable, recoverable-but-not-worth-it, or not recoverable. If it is the last one, you pay nothing.
6. Staged power-up and extended burn-in. Rails are brought up one at a time on a bench supply, and the machine is soak-tested for far longer than a normal repair before it goes back.

The whole process is described on our liquid damage restoration service page. Typical turnaround is 2–4 working days.

Your data is a separate job

This is the part people most need to hear, and it is usually good news: even when a board is beyond saving, the data on the drive almost always is not.

Storage devices are comparatively well protected — they sit in their own housing or under a shield, and liquid tends to reach the keyboard, the board and the connectors long before it reaches the NAND. A machine we declare a write-off frequently gives up every file intact.

Recovering it is a separate job from repairing the machine, and it can be done first. If the data is the urgent part — a dissertation, a client project, photographs with no backup — say so when you book it in, and we image the drive before anything else happens. Our data recovery service starts at £199 for logical recovery.

One warning: if the machine still boots after a spill, resist the urge to sit there copying files off it. Every minute it runs is a minute of powered corrosion. Shut it down and let the drive be imaged properly.

Cost, and whether to claim

A few practical points on money:

• Accidental damage is usually not covered by the manufacturer's warranty. Spills are the classic exclusion, and most machines carry moisture indicators that make it obvious. Do not count on a warranty claim.
• Check your home contents insurance. Accidental damage cover, where you have it, often extends to laptops. It is worth a phone call before you pay for anything — and worth weighing against your excess and any no-claims effect.
• No fix, no fee applies. If we cannot recover the machine, you pay nothing and the £29 assessment is refunded, including free return postage on mail-in jobs.
• Sometimes the honest answer is "do not". A £320 restoration on a machine worth £200 is not a good trade unless the data is the point. We will say so — the reasoning is in our repair-or-replace guide.

Related guides

• Laptop Won’t Turn On? Work Through This First — if it went dead without a spill, the triage is different; start there.
• How Much Does Laptop Repair Cost in 2026? — every common fault priced, and how to tell a fair quote from a padded one.
• Repair or Replace? How to Decide Honestly — running the numbers when a restoration is close to the machine's value.

Get it looked at properly

Liquid damage is the one fault where the clock genuinely matters. Our assessment is £29, credited in full against any repair you approve, and liquid jobs are stripped and inspected within hours of arrival rather than joining the normal queue. You get photographs of what the liquid reached and an honest go/no-go verdict inside 24 hours, before you commit to anything.

If the machine is recoverable you get one fixed price covering parts, labour and VAT, with 12 months of parts-and-labour warranty. If it is not, you pay nothing and we recover your data instead. Call the workshop rather than emailing if the spill happened today — or read the full price list if you want the numbers first.