If a Phone Gets Wet How Long Does It Take to Dry Out Before Itll Work Again

SAN FRANCISCO — Smart phones and water just don't mix, as millions of people suffering through this flavour'south massive hurricanes are learning.

Experts say even if a phone is drenched, there are steps you tin have to recover it — only information technology takes patience and the ability to get out 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 smart telephone repair and drying.

"Do not charge it. Do not plug it in to see if it works. If information technology'south on, electricity will menses, it will touch the water that's inside and that'due south when your fry the (circuit) board," he said.

This is also true even if your phone is still working afterwards it was dropped in water.

"You lot didn't get lucky. Plough it off!" said Craig Beinecke, co-founder of TekDry, a Denver, Colo.-based company that has more than 600 sites nationwide where consumers tin quickly go small electronics dried out.

"We meet a lot of people who come up in and say, 'I dropped information technology in water and I pulled it out actually fast and I figured I got lucky, then the next day the affect screen didn't work,'" he said.

What really happened is that it took a while for the water to reach sensitive connections inside the phone. Once information technology did, the water shorted them out.

In a pocket-size number of cases swamped phones are able to dry out out on their ain over the grade of days or weeks. But information technology's not mutual.

And while some newer phones are h2o resistant and can withstand a quick drop in a bucket or toilet, none are water proof.

Related:Dropped your telephone in water? The gear up isn't rice

Drying on the counter is as fast every bit the rice treatment

Multiple websites advise sticking electronics that have been submerged in liquid in a pocketbook of uncooked rice, to draw the water out. But that actually doesn't piece of work and can introduce dust and starch into the telephone as well, said Beinecke.

"We did a report, and rice was slower to work than but leaving the phone out on the counter. And neither worked fast enough. Subsequently about 48 hours in rice, only 13% of the water came out of the phone," he said.

Past the time the phone had fully dried out, corrosion volition have had time to damage the delicate electronics inside, he said.

The preferred method to safely dry out phones is to boil off the h2o inside them at depression temperatures under vacuum.

San Antonio, Texas-based DryBox has nearly sixty such sites in Texas and Florida that offer self-service vacuum drying for electronics. The items are placed in a bedroom slightly smaller than a shoe box and so put under vacuum while being heated.

The lower the pressure, the lower the temperature at which h2o boils. The automobile allows the water inside the phone to boil off at temperatures that can't impairment the components, usually inside nigh 30 minutes.

The sooner a phone is stale out, the ameliorate take chances it has of surviving a dunking unscathed, said DryBox president David Naumann. In his experience, within 36 hours the chances for success are three out of four. After that it drops downwardly to less than 50%.

"Just that's merely if they didn't endeavour to charge it or turn it on," he cautioned.

Both DryBox and TekDry charge $69.99 per telephone. They also do machine fundamental fobs, hearing aids, fitness trackers and TV remotes.

Though for those who can't become somewhere to have their phone professionally dried, there's still hope. In San Francisco, Tan said he'd had people bring in phones that stopped working after being sent through a washer and didn't bring them in for six months, figuring they were dead and gone.

"Nosotros opened it up, stale it, cleaned it and in a couple of cases we've got them working over again," he said.

Ocean water is a unlike story

Plain water, or fifty-fifty toilet or flood water, is bad enough. Salt water is some other thing entirely, say experts. The salts in bounding main h2o are strongly corrosive to electronics and can much more than quickly harm a telephone.

If it's incommunicable to get a phone dried out under vacuum inside several days, there's one last-ditch trick Naumann has to offer.

"If, and only if, it was in table salt h2o, then we recommend putting the phone in a Ziplock bag with some bottled, purified h2o and just a pinch of baking soda. It seems counterintuitive, only the baking soda counteracts the corrosiveness of the common salt water until you can become it cleaned out professionally," he said.

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Source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2017/08/28/your-smartphone-got-wet-heres-what-do-first/609145001/

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