Spilled liquid on your laptop? What to do in the first few minutes

Published 27 October 2026

A knocked-over coffee, a glass of water or a child’s juice across the keyboard is one of the most common reasons laptops arrive on our bench. What happens in the first few minutes after the spill makes a real difference to whether the laptop can be saved, and how much the repair costs. Here is what to do, what not to do, and why a laptop that seems fine after drying out can still fail weeks later.

The first few minutes

1. Switch it off straight away. Hold the power button until it shuts down. Don’t wait to save your work: electricity flowing through wet components is what causes the most serious damage, because liquid lets current flow where it shouldn’t.
2. Unplug the charger and disconnect anything plugged into it: USB drives, mice, cables.
3. Remove the battery if you can. On most modern laptops the battery is inside and can’t be removed without opening the case, so don’t force it. Switching off and unplugging is the important part.
4. Tip out what you can. Open the lid as wide as it will safely go and turn the laptop upside down in a tent shape, keyboard facing down, so liquid can drain out instead of soaking further in.
5. Blot, don’t rub. Use a lint-free cloth or kitchen towel to soak up liquid from the outside. Rubbing can push it further into the keyboard.
6. Leave it off. However tempting, don’t switch it on “just to check”. A laptop that powers up once can still short out when it does.

What not to do

• Don’t put it in rice. Rice doesn’t draw moisture out of the inside of a laptop in any useful way, it leaves dust and starch behind, and it wastes the hours when cleaning would help most.
• Don’t use a hairdryer or put it on a radiator. Heat can warp plastics and screens, and blowing air can drive liquid deeper into the machine.
• Don’t keep testing it. Each attempt to power up a wet laptop risks a short circuit that can take out the motherboard.

Why “it dried out and works now” isn’t the end of it

Water evaporates, but what it carries doesn’t. Tea and coffee leave sugar, milk and tannins; juice and fizzy drinks leave sugar and acid; even tap water leaves minerals. Those residues sit on the circuit board and slowly corrode the copper tracks and the tiny components around them. That is why liquid-damaged laptops often work for a few days or weeks and then develop faults: keys that stop responding, a battery that won’t charge, a dead trackpad, or no power at all.

The only reliable fix is to open the laptop, take it apart, and clean the board properly to remove the residue and stop corrosion before it spreads. The sooner that happens, the better the chances, and the more likely it is that only a part such as the keyboard needs replacing rather than the whole board.

What the repair usually involves

When a liquid-damaged laptop comes in, we take it apart, inspect the board under magnification, and clean away residue and corrosion. Damaged components are replaced where needed, and parts that liquid commonly ruins, such as keyboards and trackpads, are tested and replaced if they have failed. On MacBooks, liquid tends to run along the keyboard and onto the board below, so a careful strip-down is especially important. You can find more on our laptop repair and Mac repair pages.

If your files matter most

If the laptop won’t start and the files on it aren’t backed up, say so when you get in touch. On many laptops the storage can be read separately even if the board has failed, and getting your files back can be handled first. See laptop data recovery for how that works.

Spilled something on your laptop in Fulham or Central London?

Switch it off, keep it off, and get it to us as soon as you can. Call the workshop on 020 7237 6805, Monday to Saturday, 9am to 6pm, or send the details through our free estimate form. Estimates are free and there is no obligation.