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A friend of mine was recently lamenting that his 4yo son had dropped the father’s cell-phone into the family pool.
Now, I don’t have a family pool, but there of plenty of other “liquid holding” devices around the house, and I have a 2yo daughter who thinks my cell-phone is the coolest invention since the Cheerio.
Given the likelihood that I will one day be forced to fish my phone out of some body of water, I thought I’d better do some research on what, if anything, we can do when the time comes. After some online research, and conversations with my cell-phone provider, here’s what I learned.
First of all, if you have a flip-type phone that comes on when you open it…never, never open it when it’s wet. I was told by the pros that the most common cause of DOA cell-phone is that the first thing the customer does is flip it open to see if it will come on, which causes it to short out.
Instead:
1. Without opening, or turning on the phone, dry it off as much as possible with an absorbent cloth.
2. Remove the battery. This helps the phone dry quicker, and prevents it from turning on if someone calls you. Once the battery is off, you can open the phone. If your phone has a sim card, remove that as well.
3. Dry the battery and set it aside.
4. Place the phone and battery side-by-side on a towel in front of a fan. Turn the fan on and direct the air onto the phone. Allow to sit like this several hours, or overnight. (Use a fan, not a hair dryer…heat = bad.)
5. Once the components seem as dry as they are likely to get, reassemble it and see if the phone now works.
If the phone doesn’t work, try plugging in the power cable (REALLY be sure the phone is dry first) to see if it might just be the battery that’s damaged. If it still doesn’t work, it’s probably time to shop for a new phone.
If the phone gets wet and you can’t dry it off immediately, at least take the battery off and remove the sim card as soon as possible.
Another tip I found online was to let the phone sit in rice.
Your thoughts?
-Perry
Comments
Directed, high temperatures are bad. Low level, radiant heat is another story. You can also put the phone on a towel on the top rack in the oven, and place it on the "warm" setting, and leave it there for a few hours. The other thing to remember is to orient the phone so that it can drain, letting gravity work for you. Just see which side of the phone has the greatest number of openings, and put that side down and you should be fine.
In our case, one of the twins threw my wife's phone into the bath. We have a friend who worked at a radio repair place at the time, so we handed it over to him. He took it apart, yes, voiding the warranty in the process, and gave it a solid working over with the fine cleaning tools at his disposal, cleaning all the contact points and such. This was done because of the soap in the bathwater, as that will cause corrosion to contacts on the PCB at the core of the phone. Aside from that, he used pretty standard drying tactics, leaving all the parts lying ou
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