first of all, you have a very entertaining blog, I check it out frequently.

second, try vinegar, and leave it in for a while(like 30 minutes)as I recall an old childhood trick, that you put corroded pennies into vinigar and it cleans them completely.

Regards,
daniel

I think one could easily put ten hours at $50/hr into cleaning the surface and reflowing chips; and given the corrosion that I’ve seen (particularly in the power supply), I’d give maybe a 20% likelihood of success. If you buy my figures, that’s $500 on 5:1 odds to refurb the main board of a $1500-list switch that we buy at 41% State of Kansas discount. Bad investment.

Yes, it’s disappointing to give up on a new $1500 switch; but it’s my job as a manager to get past the emotions and make the right financial decision for my university. That said, it’s my entertainment as a hobbyist to look deeper and see whether anything simple can be done — and in this case, I think not.

On another note, do you know anyone who owns firearms? They can be amazingly therapeutic.

Due to a certain lack of forethought on the part of the office manager at my gliding club a vase of flowers got emptied into a CRT monitor resulting in the building circuit breakers tripping. Luckily I happened to be in the office at the time so, having made everything safe, I restored power and left the CRT for a short while in case of charged capacitors then took it apart and dried everything out as best I could. I then left it opened up to dry out thoroughly for a couple of days, put it back together, warned everybody that the power might trip again and plugged it in. It worked fine.

We woz lucky but I suspect dealing with it immediately was important, too. Removing power, including any internal batteries, seems like the first step not just from the point of view of human safety but also to reduce the risk of damage to electronics as water wicks into connectors, etc. Just because something’s had a good dousing doesn’t mean that all the damage which could be done has already happened.

Also, if the water which has got in is not pure then washing any muck out quickly would probably help, too. As Steve Roberts says on the subject of marine electronics: water corrodes, salt water corrodes absolutely.

alternatively you could employ the use of a reflow oven and the expertise of someone with experience in these matters.

reflow the chip off the board, remove all solder from that part of the board, apply stencil paste, seat chip back on board, and back into the reflow oven. might work, and you have very little to lose.

As a side note I always enjoy reading your blog so thank you for sharing your experiences.

Regards,

-Ian