[kwlug-disc] fire damage to electronic equipment

[Steve Izma]

Hi folks,

We had a serious fire in our house on 2 December. We lost one of
our two cats but the rest of us are fine and living in a house
across the street from our home. It looks like the insurance
process is working fine in respect to most things.

A lot of my computer equipment, including several laptops, a
couple of desktops and two printers were in my office directly
above the garage, where the fire started and was most intense. It
turned out that the dry-walled ceiling of the garage prevented
the upper room from catching fire, but there is considerable
water and smoke damage.

I grabbed two of my laptops before leaving the house, although
without the power supplies, and I got my main desktop out the day
after the fire. I cleaned the outside and used compressed air on
all the exposed internal electronics. It didn't boot until I
removed the NVME card, sort-of cleaned it, and re-seated it.
I thoroughly cleaned the keyboard (an Ultimate Hackers split
keyboard, which is easy to disassemble and clean). Just the same,
it took me four or five days to piece together a reliable setup
and Internet connection.

Monitors in particular seem to be a problem. My newest one got
thrown to the floor when the firefighters needed to tear open the
ceiling looking for a hidden fire in the house's roof, and there
is considerable water damage to anything that was on the floor
(my main machine, under a desk, seemed unaffected by that). Over
the first two or three days after the fire, I couldn't get any of
the monitors to work, and the best one would turn on then rapidly
cycle through all the settings of the monitor's menu, as if the
touch-buttons (which I dislike anyway) were being continually
pressed. I figured that smoke and soot had seeped in and shorted
out the "switches". A week after that, desperately needing
another monitor for family members, I tried it again and it
started working as if completely unaffected by the fire. I've
never tried to open up a modern monitor, and it appears to me
that any cleaning would require prying the front and back pieces
apart. Is that a worthwhile thing to try?

Also, some power bricks seem not to be working, and I'm having
difficulty determining whether cables are okay, especially USB
and HDMI.

Has anyone had experience with equipment damaged in this way? I
could leave everything up to the insurance and restoration
people, but I think they will tend to discard older equipment
rather than fix those things up.

I'm particularly worried about several printers I have, e.g.,
Xerox Phaser solid-ink printers, still the best thing around for
printing in quantity, but they've been off the market for years
and are likely irreplaceable. They are largely mechanical (and
thus easily cleaned and re-adjusted), but have some circuit
boards that may need treating. Would an anti-oxidizing spray be
worthwhile here? I haven't been able to find this at Canada
Computers or hardware stores, but I suspect I can get it from
Orion Electronics.

Any advice here would be appreciated. And don't worry about our
living situation, we rescued almost 200 jars of preserves that I
had been working on since August, and quite a bit of other food;
our neighbours filled the fridge with donations, and the house
we've got is fully furnished. We realize that we're extremely
lucky, especially as we follow the news about Gaza.

	Thanks.
	-- Steve

-- 
Steve Izma
-
Home: 35 Locust St., Kitchener, Ontario, Canada  N2H 1W6
E-mail: sizma at golden.net  cellphone: 519-998-2684

==
The most erroneous stories are those we think we know best – and
therefore never scrutinize or question.
    -- Stephen Jay Gould, *Full House: The Spread of Excellence
       from Plato to Darwin*, 1996