If your phone fell in the water, or got wet some other way, and you're reading this - STOP! Pull the battery out NOW! If your phone doesn't have a removable battery (iPhone, HTC, etc) you have a fast decision to make. "Do I spend a few dollars to repair the damage I'm about to do by following this advice, or do I throw the phone into the garbage?" TAKE THE BATTERY OUT!
(I tell people that if your pants fall down as your phone hits the water, get the battery out of the phone and do the rest of the steps in this post, then pull your pants up. Five seconds can mean the difference between "oh, my phone got wet" and "which new phone can I afford to buy?")
If that means cracking the back cover off the phone, that's what you do. (Batteries unplug now, so just ease the plug out - but don't take more than a couple of seconds. The longer the battery stays in the phone, the more damage occurs.)
It will cost a few dollars to have the back replaced but, unless the phone is an old one worth only a few dollars, you're still ahead of the game.
The worst thing you can do to a wet phone is charge it. You just electrocuted your phone. R. I. P.
The second worst thing you can do is leave (or put) the battery in. Leaving the battery in a wet phone causes current to flow where it's not supposed to (across wet places), causing damage. It also causes electrolysis, taking metal from one place and plating it onto another, causing more damage. The chemicals in the water slowly erode the phone. Even if you dry it, every humid day wets them again, causing more erosion, corrosion and electrolysis.
The next worst thing you can do is turn it on. If it's turned off, only a small portion of the phone (on some phones) gets destroyed. On others, all the circuits get fried.
The fourth worst thing you can do is just dry the phone off, or dry it off and put it in rice. (Whoever invented the "bag of dry rice" trick should be sentenced to life in a bag of dried rice. He's destroyed more phones than a crusher in a landfill.) (Or maybe that's the very worst thing you can do. All 4 things are pretty closely tied for first place.)
Get a non-metallic pan large enough to hold about a quart of alcohol, plain old 70% rubbing alcohol. (A glass meat loaf pan is about ideal for most phones, but a Tupperware or other plastic container is fine.) 90% alcohol is fine too (it's been reported that 90% alcohol will remove the coating on the back of a MotoG, so you might want to stick to 70%), if that's what you have. Plain old rubbing alcohol, surgical spirit - ethyl or isopropyl alcohol. (Don't use drinking alcohol - the esters and flavors and colors are about as bad for the phone as sea water.) Put the phone (the battery has been removed) in the alcohol and swish it around vigorously for about 5 minutes. You want to wash any minerals, dirt, impurities, etc., out into the alcohol. Don't worry about wetting the phone - alcohol isn't water, it absorbs water (I've been corrected by a chemist - it's not adsorbtion, it's absorbtion in this case). It's actually drying the phone. (It's also why you get hangovers - alcohol dries your cells out. If you drink 3 times as much water as alcohol, you'll wake up feeling a lot better the next morning.)
After about 5 minutes of this, drain the phone, dump the alcohol (it's got water, dirt, minerals, etc. from the phone in it), replace it with fresh alcohol and repeat for another 5 minutes. Then one more time. Three baths in all.
If the phone has an SD card or SIM card in it, take them out now and give the phone one final wash in clean alcohol (to clean out the card ports), and put the cards into the alcohol and gently rub the contacts with your fingers to get any film of chemicals off.
Wipe the battery down with alcohol on a paper towel or cloth, or just dump it into fresh alcohol and wipe it down. The battery is sealed, you just want to keep from putting any crap into the phone when you put the battery back in. If it's a plug-in battery, give the plug and cable the same treatment you gave the phone, just shorter - a few 15 second vigorous washings will do - then hold the whole thing with the open end of the plug facing away from you and whip your arm a few times. You want centrifugal force to throw out any remaining dirt, or any drops of any liquid, from the holes in the plug.
Put the battery and the phone into a container of UNCOOKED rice (or silica gel if you happen to have some that's dry [freshly heated, but then cooled]. Some people use a plastic bag, but I prefer a gallon jar or a LARGE plastic container that can be sealed. (Five pounds of rice all over the kitchen floor because the plastic bag ripped and you'd better live alone - or you will be.) Make sure the phone is completely covered on all sided by the rice. Put the battery in there too - not touching the phone, but covered by some rice. Seal the container. Leave it for a week. (After that, seal the rice in 2 heavy duty plastic bags [freezer bags should be thick enough] and throw it out. The alcohol it absorbed makes it poisonous to animal life [and bacterial life too]. Check with your local drug store (Chemist in Old Blighty) about local laws regarding disposing of rubbing alcohol-soaked absorbents. Some places require you to contact your sanitation people, so it doesn't end up in the landfill, killing hundreds of birds.)
The reason for the rice at this point is to get any remaining water molecules out of the phone. You've dried it with the alcohol, but any remaining water drops, even if it's triple-distilled, deionized water, will be ionized by any electricity flowing through it, cause a short, which can char the motherboard, which leads to more current flow (char is a decent conductor), causing more current flow - and the phone will eventually fail.
If you immediately remove the battery, you have a 50-50 chance of saving the phone, but I've saved phones that were in a lot worse places than a lake or a washing machine. Toilets are some of the cleaner places I've rescued phones from (wearing 2 pairs of surgical gloves, shoulder-length rubber gloves and goggles). If the water is clean, and you remove the battery within seconds of the phone getting wet, your chances are about 99%. If it's ocean water, sorry, but if the phone fell into the ocean without having a battery in it, it's probably too late. Ocean water (any water with a lot of electrolytes in it) is as bad as charging a wet phone - it does the same damage. By the time you get home, even 5 minutes, the phone is well on its way to being electronic scrap.
After a week in rice, the phone may turn on and seem to work, only to start failing over the coming weeks. That means that there was still some impurity that started causing a short and eventually something got fried. That usually means a new motherboard and other new parts, maybe a screen. Then you have to get a repair estimate and decide whether it's worth putting that much money into that phone. New motherboard in an S5? Sure. $50 into a Samsung Precedent? You can buy a better phone for that price. Compare the price of the repair to the price of outright purchase of the phone. (It's not the subsidized price you paid, if you're in the US. That $49 phone actually costs a few hundred dollars. Even one of those "free" phones is about $100.) If you're up for a new phone in a couple of weeks, you can pick up a cheap feature phone on Craig's List for #20, so you have a phone in case you need one, and wait it out. If you need a larger SIM card, or it's a CDMA phone, just go to your carrier, tell them wha happened, and that you need to do an "equipment swap" until you're eligible to get the new phone. (Don't be surprised if the sales associate goes into the back, then comes out and tells you that he or she got your renewal date shortened, so you can get the new phone now with no penalty or additional charge. Some carriers are great that way.)
If you're going to be near water, not only on a boat, but in a downpour, or hiking near a stream, get 2 zip-lock bags large enough to put the phone in. Put the phone into one of them and zip it shut. Put that one into the second bag, zipper-first. Leave some air in the second bag - not blown up, just not all sucked out either. Zip the second bag. (The best ones are the ones in which the plastic of the bag itself is the zipper, not the ones with the little plastic "zipper" you run from one end to the other - those are NOT waterproof.) You can hear, talk, read the screen, press the screen and press the buttons through the bags. You may drown, but your phone will be safe. (They sell waterproof cellphone bags for about $10, but I'll sell you 2 zip lock bags for only $5 if you want to waste your money.)
If you're really going to be around deep water - like on a boat - use an old boater's trick. Wrap some thin wire around a corner of the bags - tightly. Put the end through a "popper" or fishing float or some other large piece of cork. They make them for keys, and boating stores sell them. Use one for the bags on your phone. (Do not punch a hole in the bags to hold the wire.) Experiment with how much buoyancy you need for that phone before you drop it into 250 feet of water filled with feeding whales. You want the cork to stay at the surface when the phone is in the water. If it sinks in the 2 feet in the bathtub, you can reach in and get it back - and use a larger float.
Or you can just leave the outside bag filled with air. If your phone floats like that in the bathtub, it'll float like that in the middle of the Pacific. (Better, even, since salt water provides more buoyancy.)
(Permission is granted to link to this or repost it anywhere on the internet, as long as credit is given to Rukbat as the author.)
(I tell people that if your pants fall down as your phone hits the water, get the battery out of the phone and do the rest of the steps in this post, then pull your pants up. Five seconds can mean the difference between "oh, my phone got wet" and "which new phone can I afford to buy?")
If that means cracking the back cover off the phone, that's what you do. (Batteries unplug now, so just ease the plug out - but don't take more than a couple of seconds. The longer the battery stays in the phone, the more damage occurs.)
It will cost a few dollars to have the back replaced but, unless the phone is an old one worth only a few dollars, you're still ahead of the game.
The worst thing you can do to a wet phone is charge it. You just electrocuted your phone. R. I. P.
The second worst thing you can do is leave (or put) the battery in. Leaving the battery in a wet phone causes current to flow where it's not supposed to (across wet places), causing damage. It also causes electrolysis, taking metal from one place and plating it onto another, causing more damage. The chemicals in the water slowly erode the phone. Even if you dry it, every humid day wets them again, causing more erosion, corrosion and electrolysis.
The next worst thing you can do is turn it on. If it's turned off, only a small portion of the phone (on some phones) gets destroyed. On others, all the circuits get fried.
The fourth worst thing you can do is just dry the phone off, or dry it off and put it in rice. (Whoever invented the "bag of dry rice" trick should be sentenced to life in a bag of dried rice. He's destroyed more phones than a crusher in a landfill.) (Or maybe that's the very worst thing you can do. All 4 things are pretty closely tied for first place.)
Get a non-metallic pan large enough to hold about a quart of alcohol, plain old 70% rubbing alcohol. (A glass meat loaf pan is about ideal for most phones, but a Tupperware or other plastic container is fine.) 90% alcohol is fine too (it's been reported that 90% alcohol will remove the coating on the back of a MotoG, so you might want to stick to 70%), if that's what you have. Plain old rubbing alcohol, surgical spirit - ethyl or isopropyl alcohol. (Don't use drinking alcohol - the esters and flavors and colors are about as bad for the phone as sea water.) Put the phone (the battery has been removed) in the alcohol and swish it around vigorously for about 5 minutes. You want to wash any minerals, dirt, impurities, etc., out into the alcohol. Don't worry about wetting the phone - alcohol isn't water, it absorbs water (I've been corrected by a chemist - it's not adsorbtion, it's absorbtion in this case). It's actually drying the phone. (It's also why you get hangovers - alcohol dries your cells out. If you drink 3 times as much water as alcohol, you'll wake up feeling a lot better the next morning.)
After about 5 minutes of this, drain the phone, dump the alcohol (it's got water, dirt, minerals, etc. from the phone in it), replace it with fresh alcohol and repeat for another 5 minutes. Then one more time. Three baths in all.
If the phone has an SD card or SIM card in it, take them out now and give the phone one final wash in clean alcohol (to clean out the card ports), and put the cards into the alcohol and gently rub the contacts with your fingers to get any film of chemicals off.
Wipe the battery down with alcohol on a paper towel or cloth, or just dump it into fresh alcohol and wipe it down. The battery is sealed, you just want to keep from putting any crap into the phone when you put the battery back in. If it's a plug-in battery, give the plug and cable the same treatment you gave the phone, just shorter - a few 15 second vigorous washings will do - then hold the whole thing with the open end of the plug facing away from you and whip your arm a few times. You want centrifugal force to throw out any remaining dirt, or any drops of any liquid, from the holes in the plug.
Put the battery and the phone into a container of UNCOOKED rice (or silica gel if you happen to have some that's dry [freshly heated, but then cooled]. Some people use a plastic bag, but I prefer a gallon jar or a LARGE plastic container that can be sealed. (Five pounds of rice all over the kitchen floor because the plastic bag ripped and you'd better live alone - or you will be.) Make sure the phone is completely covered on all sided by the rice. Put the battery in there too - not touching the phone, but covered by some rice. Seal the container. Leave it for a week. (After that, seal the rice in 2 heavy duty plastic bags [freezer bags should be thick enough] and throw it out. The alcohol it absorbed makes it poisonous to animal life [and bacterial life too]. Check with your local drug store (Chemist in Old Blighty) about local laws regarding disposing of rubbing alcohol-soaked absorbents. Some places require you to contact your sanitation people, so it doesn't end up in the landfill, killing hundreds of birds.)
The reason for the rice at this point is to get any remaining water molecules out of the phone. You've dried it with the alcohol, but any remaining water drops, even if it's triple-distilled, deionized water, will be ionized by any electricity flowing through it, cause a short, which can char the motherboard, which leads to more current flow (char is a decent conductor), causing more current flow - and the phone will eventually fail.
If you immediately remove the battery, you have a 50-50 chance of saving the phone, but I've saved phones that were in a lot worse places than a lake or a washing machine. Toilets are some of the cleaner places I've rescued phones from (wearing 2 pairs of surgical gloves, shoulder-length rubber gloves and goggles). If the water is clean, and you remove the battery within seconds of the phone getting wet, your chances are about 99%. If it's ocean water, sorry, but if the phone fell into the ocean without having a battery in it, it's probably too late. Ocean water (any water with a lot of electrolytes in it) is as bad as charging a wet phone - it does the same damage. By the time you get home, even 5 minutes, the phone is well on its way to being electronic scrap.
After a week in rice, the phone may turn on and seem to work, only to start failing over the coming weeks. That means that there was still some impurity that started causing a short and eventually something got fried. That usually means a new motherboard and other new parts, maybe a screen. Then you have to get a repair estimate and decide whether it's worth putting that much money into that phone. New motherboard in an S5? Sure. $50 into a Samsung Precedent? You can buy a better phone for that price. Compare the price of the repair to the price of outright purchase of the phone. (It's not the subsidized price you paid, if you're in the US. That $49 phone actually costs a few hundred dollars. Even one of those "free" phones is about $100.) If you're up for a new phone in a couple of weeks, you can pick up a cheap feature phone on Craig's List for #20, so you have a phone in case you need one, and wait it out. If you need a larger SIM card, or it's a CDMA phone, just go to your carrier, tell them wha happened, and that you need to do an "equipment swap" until you're eligible to get the new phone. (Don't be surprised if the sales associate goes into the back, then comes out and tells you that he or she got your renewal date shortened, so you can get the new phone now with no penalty or additional charge. Some carriers are great that way.)
If you're going to be near water, not only on a boat, but in a downpour, or hiking near a stream, get 2 zip-lock bags large enough to put the phone in. Put the phone into one of them and zip it shut. Put that one into the second bag, zipper-first. Leave some air in the second bag - not blown up, just not all sucked out either. Zip the second bag. (The best ones are the ones in which the plastic of the bag itself is the zipper, not the ones with the little plastic "zipper" you run from one end to the other - those are NOT waterproof.) You can hear, talk, read the screen, press the screen and press the buttons through the bags. You may drown, but your phone will be safe. (They sell waterproof cellphone bags for about $10, but I'll sell you 2 zip lock bags for only $5 if you want to waste your money.)
If you're really going to be around deep water - like on a boat - use an old boater's trick. Wrap some thin wire around a corner of the bags - tightly. Put the end through a "popper" or fishing float or some other large piece of cork. They make them for keys, and boating stores sell them. Use one for the bags on your phone. (Do not punch a hole in the bags to hold the wire.) Experiment with how much buoyancy you need for that phone before you drop it into 250 feet of water filled with feeding whales. You want the cork to stay at the surface when the phone is in the water. If it sinks in the 2 feet in the bathtub, you can reach in and get it back - and use a larger float.
Or you can just leave the outside bag filled with air. If your phone floats like that in the bathtub, it'll float like that in the middle of the Pacific. (Better, even, since salt water provides more buoyancy.)
(Permission is granted to link to this or repost it anywhere on the internet, as long as credit is given to Rukbat as the author.)
Last edited:
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram