Source
r/hardware•
plus_EV

Question about exposing electronics to high temperatures.

I have been staying in temporary corporate housing and was notified today that bed bugs were found in the room. They are making us leave all of our stuff in the room to be heated. From some googling, bed bugs can withstand temperatures up to 114F. I have a couple of laptops, hard drives, routers and a GPU and am concerned about the effects of high temperatures. They say this is a routine procedure.

Are electronics at risk if they are heated to say... 120F for 15-30 minutes? For example, apple lists the max storage temperature of a macbook air is 113F. Laptops can die in hot cars, and this seems like a similar situation.

UPDATE: I ended up just keeping the hard drives. The laptops work, can't test the other hardware yet. They may not have heated the laptops as there appears to be some sort of residue on them from cleaning.

Posted Feb 9, 2012, 2:37 AM UTC · edited

26
BIO_Wolf•

Yeah, it can be damaged. Get your stuff out before you risk something damaged.

While a CPU and GPU can width stand even higher temperatures, I have doubts for the rest of the computer. If possible, get your stuff out and attempt to use some sort of electronic safe pesticide.

3
plus_EVOP•

I just found the site for a portable bed bug heating product: Packtite. It heats items over 120F and states in its manual:

PackTite™ is NOT recommended for treating electronic devices, including COMPUTERS, IPODS, MP3 PLAYERS, CAMERAS.

1
dontnation•

120 for 15-30 minutes really shouldn't be a problem. I've baked a laptop motherboard hotter for longer to reseat a BGA. Worked just fine afterwards. If it were me, I wouldn't really worry about it. But then I like living on the edge.

1
[deleted]•

It's not the PCB components you need to worry about, it's the hard drives.

Also (cheaper) PSU's have a bit of hot glue holding the wiring in places.

1
dontnation•

He's talking about a laptop. And 120 should be fine for hard drives as long as they aren't running at the time.

1
icba•

Ok, the only thing you need to do is to take out your HDDs, as BIO_Wolf said, semiconductor components are resilient to far higher temperatures 50C would not be an issue for them. However HDDs based on magnetic domains are inherantly weak to heat. If you heat them up to 50-60C (depending on make and material etc) then you will excite the domains enough for them to lose their polarity, and therefore your data.

I would take it out as a precaution, SSDs will be fine, also I might take the monitor out as well, some of the LCDs are senstive to heat as well.

In the end everything else should be fine, just be careful if the humidity is high, as it could cause damage to your computer if you turn it on with a super high humidity level.

Hope this clears things up :)

1