A number of recent incidents have prompted me to write this article.
You try to take good care of your personal electronics, but eventually, you might have a “liquid incident”.
Everyone has heard some advice about how to fix wet electronics. There is some good advice out there, some ineffective techniques, and some really bad advice.
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BAD ADVICE
Let’s start off with things you should NOT do to fix wet electronics:
- BAD ADVICE: Microwave. Do. Not. Even. Microwaves are designed to vibrate water molecules, but they also melt plastic and vaporize metal. Your phone has a lot of plastic and metal. If you microwave your phone, it will melt and / or explode.
- BAD ADVICE: Hair dryer. Hair dryers blow out hot air, but not enough of a focused blast to do any good, and the heat can (and has!) melt the plastic case. I knew a guy once who tried to dry out his laptop after getting it wet, using a hair dryer. All he accomplished was to melt the keyboard.
- BAD ADVICE: Isopropyl alcohol. The theory here, is that alcohol will displace the water. First of all, unless you have pure alcohol, the stuff you buy at the drug store is typically anywhere from 60% to 80% water anyway. Second, like water, alcohol is a solvent. Solvents and delicate electronic traces don’t get along well. Third, and perhaps the MOST important reason this won’t work is that alcohol is less dense than water, and essentially, floats.
- BAD ADVICE: Kitty litter. Most kitty litter is made of clay, that can damage your screen or other parts of your phone. The dust from kitty litter is toxic. The newer “eco-friendly” kitty litter is shredded paper – not very absorbent nor useful. Some kitty litter uses silica, but it’s not that effective in “litter” form as a desiccant.
INEFFECTIVE ADVICE
These things might or might not work, but are not tremendously effective:
- Bowl of rice. Rice is hygroscopic, meaning it absorbs water, but only up to a point. Rice will absorb SOME ambient moisture, but it takes a long time, and it won’t absorb very much. Rice is pretty much at its saturation point all the time, because it pulls moisture out of the ambient air.
- Silica beads. Silica can absorb a huge amount of moisture, WAY much more than rice, which is good, but it could still take hours or days for the silica to absorb enough moisture. The water INSIDE the phone has to evaporate, in order for the silica to be effective.
- Vacuum. Vacuums have a lot of power, but they may not be able to suck all of the water out.
ANALYSIS
There are several factors that come in to play when your favorite personal electronic device gets drenched.
- Many liquids conduct electricity, creating conductive paths between components that should NOT normally be connected! For example, shorting a trace to ground could cause the CPU to fail, or could prevent the CPU from accessing other components. Shorting the battery can cause a high-amperage condition that is capable of burning out small traces! If a trace gets burned out, you’re done! Everything else can be solved by removing the water.
- Water can corrode most metals, and the thin traces inside your phone or other device are extremely susceptible. If left for any significant duration, thin traces such as contacts between components can corrode and even de-laminate (peel off of the substrate material). Liquids need to be removed quickly to prevent permanent damage.
- Tap water, soda, wine, beer, and pretty much everything can leave sticky and or conductive mineral deposits. Sometimes, just removing the moisture won’t completely solve the problem.
- Water and alcohol are solvents, and can dissolve the adhesive that binds metallic traces to their substrate. If the metallic traces come off, they either must be carefully repaired, or it’s all over.
HOW TO FIX A WET DEVICE
Summary: USE CANNED AIR
- ACT QUICKLY. The longer your device stays in contact with water or any liquid, the more chance that it might sustain permanent damage.
- Take off the case and backing. The case can hold a significant amount of moisture. After a recent incident, I removed my “BodyGlove” case from my phone, and POURED water out of it. If your device has a removable panel or backing, remove it!
- Remove the battery / batteries. If your poor device is experiencing a short circuit, it’s like someone is zapping it with a stun gun – its little CPU can’t send or receive signals to the rest of the device.
- Remove any memory cards or SIM cards. Moisture can gather between contacts.
- Use a paper cloth to pat-dry the phone, case, backing, battery, memory card, and SIM card.
- If the liquid in question was sticky or salty, you may need to apply a few drops of FILTERED water in each area where the liquid may have entered in to the phone. Water will help dissolve soda, wine, or other sticky substances. This may sound counter-intuitive, but trust me – you DO NOT want a sugary mess inside your phone.
- Use canned air
- Blow any remaining moisture off of the SIM card and memory card
- Blow any remaining moisture off of the battery
- At the back of the device (where the battery connects), blow as much air as possible in to every nook and cranny.
- Blow as much air as possible in to each port and slot, such as the earphone slot, charging slot, any memory card slots, etc
- If your phone was submerged, you may need to fully-disassemble it. For “casual contact”, AKA, “a spill”, the above should be fine. If you need to disassemble the phone, look up the proper procedure on the internet for your phone, and then spray off both halves of the case, and all boards / board components, then reassemble.
- Inspect each component. If there are damaged traces, try to repair them with glue and copper foil.
- Once everything is dry and repaired, reassemble the device.
SUMMARY
Canned air does a superior job of restoring soaked equipment
My personal “opportunities” include the following:
- A washed remote – fully-restored and operational. I had to crack it open and dry the board with canned air, because the buttons were trapping moisture.
- Spilled coffee on my cell phone.
- Spilled a significant amount of water on my cell phone.
Canned air has been 100% successful in restoring the above devices, with a few other minor incidents included.
Update: 12/23/2014 – Left my phone out in the rain all night. NOT a good month for my cell phone. I had to remove the back, the memory card, the SIM, and unscrew the back panel of the device, but canned air worked just fine! I had a few glitches for a little while, such as with the headphone jack and the touch sensor, so I kept at it until they worked properly. After charging the battery, the phone is now 100% operational.