If your phone got wet, don’t do this
Smartphones and water just don’t mix, as thousands of people in Texas are learning to their distress during the flooding there.
Experts say even if a phone is drenched, there are steps you can take to recover it — but it takes patience and the ability to leave the phone alone.
What kills a wet phone is electricity, said Gary Tan with DE iPhone repair, a San Francisco-based company that offers multiple sites for smartphone repair and drying.
“Do not charge it. Do not plug it in to see if it works. If it’s on, electricity will flow, it will touch the water that’s inside, and that’s when you fry the (circuit) board,” he said.
This is also true even if your phone is still working after it was dropped in water.
“You didn’t get lucky. Turn it off!” said Craig Beinecke, cofounder of TekDry, a Denverbased company that has more than 600 sites nationwide where consumers can quickly get small electronics dried out.
What actually happened to those “lucky” people is that it took a while for the water to reach connections inside the phone. Once it did, the water shorted them out.
And while some newer phones are water-resistant and can withstand a quick drop in a bucket or toilet, none are waterproof.
Multiple websites suggest sticking electronics that have been submerged in liquid in a bag of uncooked rice, to draw the water out. But that actually doesn’t work and can introduce dust and starch into the phone as well, Beinecke said.
“We did a study, and rice was slower to work than just leaving the phone out on the counter. And neither worked fast enough. After about 48 hours in rice, only 13% of the water came out of the phone,” he said.
The preferred method to safely dry phones is to boil off the water inside them at low temperatures under vacuum.
Even so, salt water is another thing entirely, experts say. The salts in ocean water are strongly corrosive and can quickly damage a phone.
If it’s impossible to get a phone dried out under vacuum within several days, there’s one last-ditch trick, says David Naumann, president of DryBox, which dries phones. “If, and only if, it was in salt water, then we recommend putting the phone in a Ziploc bag with some bottled, purified water and just a pinch of baking soda. ... The baking soda counteracts the corrosiveness of the salt water until you can get it cleaned out professionally,” he said.