Strange situation - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: Madvoltage
author_rank: Newbie
timestamp: February 08, 2016, 04:52:36 pm
content: Hi guys, and Dave!First of all, I've been watching Dave's videos for a quite while now and I have to say, those have had a huge positive impact on my life and pretty much got me "back to my feet". I have a Schizophrenia and getting back into electronics has helped me a lot with my life, and for this I'll have to say thank you to Dave and others who've been there when I've needed it the most. These forums are amazing too, I've got so much valuable information from here.A brief background of mine. I'm a 21 year old guy from Finland and I've been interested in electronics my whole life. I performed my first teardown operation at the age of 5, it was a computer, and ever since I've been accused of destroying everything I touch, you know how it goes. A little shy of a year ago my best friend, who was an electronics engineer and physicist died and left me some of his electronics stuff to me. He was the one who initially got me really interested of electronics some 15 ish years ago and had beed teaching me ever since, I don't have any formal training on this matter, yet.I'm more of a lurker type and I don't usually write on forums that much, but something remarkable happened and I would like some kind of feedback/advice. If nothing else I hope you guys can at least get a good laugh from this mess.It was a lovely monday night, I had gone to sleep at around ~12:00, I wake up at 19:00 and there is water everywhere. My first reaction was to check my diary, I must have forgoten to take my medication, nope, everything seemed to be ok. I do a few relaxing/breathing exercises, but no, the water just won't go anywhere, at this point I'm thinking that soon a pirate ship will sail trough my bedroom wall. I gather my courage and sweep a pen from my table to the water, it sunk like a stone, I just don't get it, everything seems "normal", nothing fancy going on, though for some reason my apartment is like an Amazon rainforest.Before I dare to even touch the water I make a call to my psychiatrist, she tells me that I don't sound psychotic at all (I've been psychosis free for over a year now.) and instructs me to investigate more. The chain of unlikely events continue and I find my shoes floating on the water behind me, I grab them and put them on, into the abyss we go. The water is real, and the stuff floating all around me is real, now my mind is working overtime and I wonder "How's my lab?". I go towards my lab, when I get there I say to myself "Great, we have an undersea lab now.", various component packages, datasheets, and even a multimeter floating around (Shoutout to Fluke.).Turns out the water pipe got busted during a party in an apartment, which was above mine and nobody bothered to report it to anyone, apparently I was the first one to call about the flood...Damage recap. I don't really care so much about my furniture and other stuff, they're pretty much covered allready. The most precicious item I lost is The Tektronix 564 oscilloscope, I got it from my friend, it was his favourite scope, it was old, had a footprint of an elephant, consumed more power than the the rest of this town, but it was beautiful and did what it was supposed to do, I loved that machine. I don't exactly know what's wrong with it, I haven't got the time to look into it yet, hopefully I can revive it eventually. My first piece of test gear I ever got, 6 years ago, the Tektronix 465 was completely under water and did not survive either, I don't know if it's nescessarily toast, but there are some transistors missing from it. On my 20th birthday my friend gave me a real gift, a fully equiped Agilent MSOX3014T, yes you guessed it, it's dead. It was literally the most expensive item I've ever owned and a most amazing piece of test equipment.Now to my actual problem. I'm not going to get any kind of coverage on the Tektronix 564 and 465, the reason, they're ancient and not worth a cent, it's fucked up, but I can understand it, maybe I get those working by myself. Now on the Agilent, I was told, that it has to be "investigated" by the insurance company and this is where I'm in a need of some kind of input. Here's the kicker it will take from a year to two years depending on how many insurance cases they have before that. I've called the insurance company countless times, I've called into many other places asking what the law says etc. etc. etc., and everyone says, that they can't do anything about it. I even asked the insurance company if it would be possible to get it back as broken, I would much rather try to squeeze a few thousand from somewhere and send it to Agilent (I live on a social security at the moment, but I'm going to school in 6 months if everything pans out.), than wait a year or two for it. The answer is no, once it's in, it's in... This goes for other damaged gear too, only the furniture was saved from this eternal limbo.TLDRA good month or so ago something got really fucked up in the apartment above mine, as a result my apartment got pretty much flooded, and as you can guess, yeah there goes the scopes and other goodies.So, has anyone ever had experiences like this? I understand it's very dependent on coutry and all that kind of stuff, but I'm at loss here and would really appreciate any kind of input.Thanks to everyone and thanks to Dave for awesome videos, keep doing them please.

author: station240
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 08, 2016, 05:16:51 pm
content: First thing is to clean the equipment inside and out. Start with the Tektronix 564, as the missing transistors from the other scope could be problematic to re-install.Get yourself a manual, and take photos of what goes where before before you unscrew/unplug things.Here is a recent thread on repairing a water damaged item, hopefully your stuff doesn't have corrosion.https://www.eevblog.com/forum/repair/corroded-pcb-repair/

author: helius
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 08, 2016, 05:17:26 pm
content: "Water damage" to electronics is a bit of a misnomer. The damage occurs after the items are taken out of the water, so that oxygen in the air can get to them. When they are fully submerged nothing has happened. If they are disassembled and cleaned at that time of removal from the water, damage can be avoided. But after a month the odds are much worse.

author: AF6LJ
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: February 08, 2016, 05:27:07 pm
content: Quote from: helius on February 08, 2016, 05:17:26 pmThis is true and NEVER power up ANYTHING UNTIL IT IS COMPLETELY DRY AND HAS BEEN INSPECTED.

author: G7PSK
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: February 08, 2016, 05:40:27 pm
content: Water has to be really deep to be truly anoxic, so anything that gets submerged in a few meters of water will corrode just more slowly than wet and in free air.