"William R. Walsh" wrote in
message news:meCFf.749378$x96.404278@attbi_s72...
Hi!

Fires are not great for electronics. That said, I think a lot of your
chances lie in how hot the devices got.

If they didn't get very hot, you might only need to clean them up.
Depending
upon the device, an exterior cleaning may be all you need to do. Devices
that handle tapes, or contain sensors of any type should be probably be
disassembled and have any sensing, tape path related or optical devices
inside cleaned.

For devices that were exposed to temperature extremes...you'll just have
to
try them and see. It really depends upon the quality of the device
and...to
a certain extent...luck. Some devices will shrug off even severe abuse.
Others will turn upside down and die if you just look at them wrong.

I'd expect that your refrigerator, dishwasher, speakers, stereo and phones
will be fine, depending upon how hot they got. At most I'd expect these
devices to need nothing more than a simple surface cleaning. Your TV and
computer stand a pretty good chance of being OK as well. (However, I'd
make
a backup of the important things on the computer.)

The cameras and DVD player may need to have their optics cleaned. For a
camera, cleaning the lens would probably do, depending upon how far the
smoke got. As for the DVD player, it should probably have the laser pickup
cleaned.

Ceiling fans and lights should be fine as long as they're intact. Your
outlets should be OK too. Any of these that have melted or deformed should
probably be replaced unless you can be absolutely sure the melting has
caused only cosmetic damage. Outlets are so cheap that if they're even
minorly deformed I'd still replace them.

William



Don't forget the smoke smell - sometimes they can't get that out - and the
DVD laser pickup gets contaminated inside, at the turning mirror, wnich
cannot be cleaned.


Mark Z.