Water Damaged Phones Revisited
There is a general consensus around the internet that the proper way to treat a water damaged phone is to stick it in uncooked rice and cross your fingers. You might as well cross out your phone from being anything but reliable from now on because this is just plain wrong. Sure there are those lucky people that swear by this method, but that just means the initial damage to there phone wasn't severe enough to disable it.
It is important to understand what the dangers are to your device as related to liquid ingress. The top killer of phones is shock. Power is running through your phone, it takes a high dive into the pool, circuits in the board are bridged, power goes where it's not supposed to, bingo bango good night phone.
The second danger, and this is the quiet killer, is corrosion. Corrosion starts to build up on the phone's logic board and circuitry as the liquid it's in contact with dries. I'll just repeat that last bit, because it's pretty important. As the liquid in your phone dries, corrosion builds up on the components inside. The sediments and impurities in the liquid react with the metals and leaves a conductive residue that will, over time, weaken solder joints and make components brittle. Even the smallest of vibrations could cause joints to break apart, and so that capacitor that is responsible for lighting up your screen suddenly isn't attached to your phones logic board. No more screen. Or perhaps the chip that is required to get a signal on your phone has slowly disintegrated. No more calls. There is literally a myriad of issues that can arise from your slowly decaying phone. Don't believe me? Check out this picture of an iPhone 5 logic board. Every single one of those chips and capacitors does something and the regular operation of the phone relies on them being in tact.  |
| (iPhone 5 Logic Board with EMS Shields removed) |
So how the heck does one repair something like this? Short answer, you don't. Repairing a water damaged phone for the sake of having an operational phone is an exercise in throwing money into the toilet (similar to what you did with your phone). No amount of cleaning will repair a broken solder joint, or make a chip magically work again. So what's the point of doing a repair? To retrieve the data from the phone. This is the only viable reason I can come up with to do this repair.
Anyone who says they've done a reliable water damage repair for cheap is lying to you or incompetent.
I am not saying that completely recovering a phone to fully operational status is not possible, I am just saying that it is an extremely extensive (you should be reading that as 'expensive') process and anyone who says they've done a reliable water damage repair for cheap is lying to you or incompetent.
So, here is what you need to do if you drop your phone in water:
- Check for personal safety, if it is safe to retrieve the phone, do so
- Avoid a phone that is bulging, bubbling or getting excessively hot
- Power off the phone or remove the battery
- Put it in a bag and do NOT let it dry out
- Lower your expectations about being able to use it as a phone again
- Bring it in to a reliable repairer (insert not so shameless plug for Techrevive) ASAP and you might save your data
So that's the long and short of it and hopefully if you do accidentally drop your phone in liquid, when you go to get it fixed, you also don't get taken for a ride.
Don't forget to check out our website for all of your phone repair needs! www.techrevive.com.au
