Wet Cell Phones

Image borrowed from the Internet

This past week, my wife dropped her cell phone in water. It stayed there for perhaps 2 to 3 minutes totally submerged.

Not knowing what to do, we fished the phone out of its watery bath and took a hairdryer to try to dry it up. Then we made the fatal mistake of powering up the phone. While the display did work for a short time, it eventually died. No amount of effort could bring it back to life.

Four days later, my daughter (who is home on a short break from school) accidentally "washed" her phone in the laundry. It was probably in the washing machine for a couple of minutes as well. I could not believe that in less than a week's time, both of them had submitted their phones to a watery punishment!

This time, I checked the internet to find out what to do. We found that using a hot hairdryer is not a recommended remedy. However, having spoke to a Verizon sales rep earlier in the day, he suggested using the hair dryer on low heat to help blow out as much water as possible. So we did that. Another suggestion is to use a can of compressed air (like the ones sold to blow out computers.) Unfortunately, I had used up all of our compressed air cans and only a little remained. That small amount of air left in the can did seem to blow some of the water out by the buttons.

One suggestion on the web was to put the phone into an oven at perhaps 180 degrees to "cook" out the water (or leave it on the dash of a hot car.) At this time of year, the car just isn't all that hot, so we put the phone in the toaster / oven at 150 degrees and left it there for perhaps 15 minutes. Upon further web searching, I read that excessive heat like this could melt some of the glues in the phone... so we took the phone out immediately. It was hot, but not melting hot.

Another suggestion on the internet was to place the phone inside a sealed zip-lock bag of uncooked rice. The rice is there to help dry out the phone... similar to how silica gel packs are supposed to work. So, after the oven trick, we put the phone in the rice and left it overnight to do whatever it can.

This morning, I reinserted the battery and powered up the phone. It worked! While we can still see some traces of water in the LCD display screen, the phone is working! We decided that the phone needed more time in the rice so back it went, but we are confident that the rice trick will do a better job after it has a litle more time with the phone.

So if you ever drop your phone in water...even submerged for a long period of time like being in the washing machine... dry it quickly by blowing compressed air in the openings to get as much water out as possible. Avoid excessive heat from hair dryers and stick the phone in a sealed bag of uncooked rice for at least overnight and preferably for a couple of days. And never turn on the phone until you are sure all the water is out of the circuits! If you do all this, you might just be able to bring the phone back to life! By the way, my wife is now using my phone and I have gone back to using the old phone that I had before switching to the phone I gave my wife. Interesting how the one person who did not do damage to his phone is the one having to use his old phone now, huh? Actually, I think that old phone performs better than the newer one anyway, so I'm ok with it.