8 easy ways to rescue your smartphone from WATER damage
You dropped your smartphone in WATER, what should you do?
If you are reading this, most likely you’re in panic right now because your phone has dropped into a sink, pool or any other wet place. Keep calm and be smart. Once you have your reasoning back, just act fast and save your gadget without spending a penny on it! We tell you 8 actions you have to take immediately.
First and obvious – remove the phone from the water as soon as possible. Once you are fast with it, you will most likely avoid more water seeping through the openings of your phone. What’s next?
What you should not do!
- Do not turn it on. This is the most important. Once the gadget is turned on there is probably no way back to using it ever again.
- Do not press any buttons or keys, unless this is to immediately switch off the phone.
- Do not plug your phone in. You must wait 72 hours before turning it back on.
- Do not blow on it or shake hard. This could send water into other internal parts of the phone that it hadn't already reached, causing more damage in the process.
- Do not heat it up by means of blow drying or microwaving it. The heat can damage the delicate electronics inside.
- Do not cool it down. Yes, the freezer is not an option as you understood.
And these are the 8 easy steps we recommend you to do.
- Turn it off immediately if it isn’t yet.
- Remove the protective casing and film if you have it
- Open the back of your phone and remove the battery alongside with the SIM and microSD cards.
- Now it’s time to dry the phone and the parts you took out. Use a good liquid absorbing cloth, paper towel or a sleeve can work too. One important thing is that you make sure to not spread the water around the gadget as it can push water into openings instead. Soaking the water up is the right way to describe what you should be doing.
- If you see that there are traces of water trapped inside the case, very carefully blow it out using compressed air.
- Now the tricky part comes. Many people out there claim that burying phone in the uncooked rice for 24-36 hours to absorb any remaining liquid is what has to be done. The experiments show that silica gel, cat litter and couscous work a lot better than rice. In our opinion this should be your option B though.
- What we suggest doing is having synthetic desiccants on-hand. They work far better, more efficiently and don’t leave the negative effects as rice does. We like Bheestie Bag (around 20$) and Dry All or similar products (just 6$ on Amazon). Find out more about those and it might be a good idea to order one and have it handy.
- No matter which method you prefer, let your phone dry for a day or two. It goes without saying that during the drying process the battery is NOT inserted into the device, it’s getting dry separately. After a couple of days put the parts back together and turn the phone on.
- It might happen that it wouldn’t turn on though. Try charging. If that doesn’t help either, consider replacing a battery with a new one or take the phone to the repair service.
Preventive measures
If you are serial Phone dropper (into water) kind of person. It sure will help to avoid using the phone near places with water. There are other options of course. Brands such as Otterbox, Griffin and Survivor came up with waterproof phone cases, the reviews are quite favorable.
Water resistant phones, maybe they are to be your choice? Even though that feature is guaranteed only under certain conditions of usage, there are some models worth of your attention. We will through light upon the best waterproof smartphones in one of our next articles, stay tuned.