Chosen Solution

Ok, here is the story: Day 1. I spill a full glass of water on top of my closed, powered-down, but plugged-in macbook. I have a case on it, but I’m sure it trickled down into the DC-in board and it pooled around the bottom of the macbook. I quickly unplugged and dried the thing. I put it on rice, and set up a small space-heater about 4 feet away to blow warm air on it. Day 2. I try to turn it on (24 hours after spill). No luck. Continue to dry it by opening the bottom up, and setting it up like an air tunnel, blowing continuous warm air on it. Day 3. 48 hours - the must be dry as a bone. Still will not turn on. I plug in the charger to see what happens - and I see a breif flashing amber, then nothing. Day 4. I take it to Apple. They hear me say ‘water damage’ and they say ‘450 bucks’… but we’ll look at it for a second. The girl does a quick SMC reset, plugs it in, light goes green, and it turns on! Day 5. I notice that my charger cable has actually been dim green all along - never bright green. (hence, trickle charge). I order a DC-in from ifixit, I install it (I feel good about that process). But still, we’re at a trickle charge. I also soaked and dried the previous DC-in with alcohol, and tested that. And I soaked and cleaned my logic board some. There seems to be some black ‘charring’ on the teeth of a connector just above the DC-in board. Is there any solution besides a new logic board? Should I clean it more thoroughly? [OH, also. I’ve troubleshooted the charger… it works on other computers fine.. and working adapters show the same dim green light on my computer. ] Thanks for your help! Keith

Dim green light means that the charger (AC adapter) doesn’t adequately communicate with the SMC (main power circuitry). A shorted top case (and/or other internal damaged components) could cause this situation. Disconnect the AC adapter from the machine, disconnect the battery, unplug the top case from the logic board, connect the AC adapter to the magsafe port and check if you get a normal green led on the magsafe tip.

It is usually the DC-input board. These go bad almost instantly and are made to pop during a water spill situation to filter out dirty power. kind of a fail safe. You can get chinese replacements on ebay that seem to work fine for under ten dollars shipped, and OEM ones are about 30 bucks. Too many logic board replacements have happened instead of just fixing this input. There are voltages you can test for to see if it is the magafe