Phone only shows charging when turned off after water damage, any chance to fix?

[Android Central Question]

Hello everyone
My Huawei P9 plus phone dropped into the water and stayed there for probably around a minute, completely submerged. After getting it out and letting it dry for ~two days I tried to recover it and now it is in a weird state. It kinda works but I'm really not sure how much damage was done. I will try to describe anything I noticed and hope that someone knows if there is anything I can do in order to get it into better shape.

-First off, it will only charge when turned off. Because it automatically wants to start up when charging it instantly dies again (sometimes I manages to get it running at 2% but any further actions will cause it to shutdown again). I could get it charged by plugging it in and putting it into recovery mode (hold volume UP when starting). However it only got to 40% when I charged it for about 6 hours for some reason.

-When I have the phone in recovery mode and plug it in, it actually shows me the charging symbol.

-When I charge the phone while it is turned on, the charging symbol will appear for around half a second and then it is gone again. However in the lockscreen it tells me the phone is "charging". But the battery% does not move at all. Apps that monitor battery life tell me that it is plugged in but not charging. (Also if this helps, the app I used (Ampere) tells me that the temperature is always at 0°C for some reason)

-I also can connect it to my computer and have complete access to all the data, no problem.

-When starting to play around with it the battery suddenly dropped to 30% in an instant and later today it dropped to 20% in the same way. Since then it stayed there but I did leave it plugged in at all times.

-Also I have the option enabled to prevent it from going to sleep when charging and that actually works when I have it plugged in and turned on.

-I have not yet performed a factory reset. I'm still backing everything up and will try it after I'm done. But I'm not really sure if it is software-related as I have already tried resetting the cache and starting in safe mode without success.

From what I read on the internet this might be some mainboard issue. But I'm really curious if anyone has experienced something similar or knows what might be the cause. Is it possible at all that it's just the battery% that is showing the wrong numbers and the phone is actually charging? Because it doesn't seem to shutdown when I leave it plugged in.

Thank you very much for your help!

 

[belodion]

All I can say is, water damages phones. It’s said in much more detail by the author here:
https://r.tapatalk.com/shareLink?sh...tral.com/showthread.php?t=477140&share_type=t

 

[Rukbat]

Ans, by that author (thanks, belodion), once the phone is damaged like that, about the only way of "fixing" it is to replace what's inside the case. Considering that a new phone with a warranty is about US$600, it probably pays. (It would cost less than replacing it.)

Make absolutely certain that everything in the phone is backed up while you can still get to it!

 

[carqq]

Hi, OP of the question here with an update to this issue

So I checked out the linked article which was very helpful. So after I made a full back up of everything I had on the phone I figured I have nothing to lose and took it apart and soaked it in alcohol. I used 70% alcohol though I read that there are also a lot of people recomending stronger concentrations. In my case 70% did the trick though. I let it dry for weeks.
In the meantime I ordered a very cheap replacement screen because the screen has suffered some damages before and I always wanted a reason to learn how to replace phone screens anyway.
So after that arrived I put the completely dried phone back together and everything worked just fine after. I can't really tell right now if the battery has suffered some remaining damage but for now it doesn't look like it.
The phone now charges again with the symbol on and everything. I didn't actually expect the alcohol to help fix the damage because I didn't do it immediately and waited for days before doing it. I'm actually not even sure if it would have started working again if i just didn't touch it for some days but I'd like to believe that it did help.

So thanks to both of you for the writing and linking this tutorial


If anyone comes here with the same problem of a phone that won't charge after water damage, try charging it in recovery mode. If this works you,probably do have a good chance to fix it.

 

[belodion]

Excellent. I hope that the fix lasts.

I'll just emphasise - what you yourself obviously know, but others may not understand - that charging a water-damaged phone should only be attempted after the alcohol-treatment and subsequent drying, as I'm sure that that author up there ^ would agree.