OT: Edit System hung out to dry

thrillcat wrote on 5/25/2004, 10:46 AM
So, last night I'm in my basement office working on a project, and I spin my chair to check something on my laptop, and I notice that when I put my foot down, my sock immediately gets soaked. We were about an inch & a half in to getting 3 inches of rain in an hour. I powered everything down immediately, and pulled all the machines out and took them upstairs with no incident (they're all raised off the ground 6 inches on a platform).

By the time all the machines were upstairs, there was a good half inch of water on the floor in my office.

My question: The in-line transformers for things like my DVCam deck, firewire drives, etc. were all sitting in water for about half an hour, and got thoroughly wet. Is it safe to use them, once they dry out? Or should I just pick up new boxes? I don't really have time or money to order new ones, but I'm just wondering if it will be safe to plug them in in a couple days.

First time I'd ever gotten any moisture in this basement. It figures that 95% of it would come into the office. :(

Comments

riredale wrote on 5/25/2004, 2:24 PM
If it's fresh water (as opposed to sea water) then give them a couple of days to dry out, and plug them back in. Be careful that you're not standing in water and wet when doing so.
farss wrote on 5/25/2004, 2:40 PM
I've had a bit of experiece with gear that's gone underwater. As it wasn't powered up at the time should have had not damage done by the water. Possibly some salts were in the water and you should try to get rid of that if possible. Open the gear up if possible and rinse out with distilled water, then rinse with ethanol, if you cannot get the pure stuff metho will do, idea here is to remove any residual mositure. Let to dry out for a little while or use a hair dryer just to make certain and you should be up and running.
Mostly electronic gear these days is cleaned in water since the ban on flurocarbons so the odd dunking will not hurt it so long as it's not powered and it isn't salt water. In the case of salt water you need to rinse it in clean water asap, The real trap is that a lot of gear has things like lithium batteries for clock backup so when that gets into salt water big damage can happen due to electrolysis.

Bob.