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Comment by h0l0cube | Hacker News Reader

> dry the outside of the phone with paper and put the phone in an open box with a lot of rice

iFixIt claims this is just psychological comfort and offers this advice:

> The real secret to water damage? You don't want to dry it!

> What you want to do is first displace the water—or more specifically, all the conductive stuff in the water. You can do this best by using 90%+ isopropyl (rubbing) alcohol and a toothbrush. Open your device as soon as you can, take out the battery, and get scrubbing. Submerge the whole motherboard in alcohol, and scrub away.

https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/Don%27t_Put_Your_Device_in_Rice.......

(as noted in the reply, there's 3 dots that are filtered from the end of the URL, so try adding them manually or copy below)

    https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/Don%27t_Put_Your_Device_in_Rice._Here%27s_Why...

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That link is broken because the real link has 3 dots at the end.

Thanks for that. It seems like they get stripped out by HN, and I don't know a workaround

> a workaround

https://www.ifixit.com/Wiki/Don't_Put_Your_Device_in_Rice._H...

http://enwp.org/URI_encoding

I feel a bit foolish now. Not sure why I thought that percent encoding wasn't mapped before it was routed by the web server

iPhones are all locked up, so ifixit's advice is worse than useless... it just serves to frustrate. What use is telling people to open up an iPhone when regular people don't have the tools to do so?

iFixit sells the tools to do so and provides detailed guides on how to use them.

It might sound like a racket to you, but at this point they've saved me something like half a grand net, minimum, on phone repair and replacement, by making it possible for me to do that work myself and thus not have to replace phones nearly so often.

Most recently, this came in useful when I actually did drop a phone in water, just like we're talking about here, and was able to not only clean it out but also replace the battery, which swelled quite alarmingly in the aftermath.

But surely it'll almost always be too late? Say I drop my phone in water and google how to fix it. I find this article and buy their tools. By the time I get them, my phone has been corroding for two days.

It is possible to obtain the tools and skills prior to the accident.

Corrosion is a relatively slow process. As long as the display seal is intact and the phone isn't immersed for too long, it should prevent the kind of water ingress that's immediately fatal, and you very likely can get the tools and arrest the process before it damages any functionality.

The phone I dropped in the sink had a compromised seal due to a prior drop that bent in a corner of the case - something I did actually have the tool to fix, but hadn't got to actually fixing before the drop, thinking I had time. Of course, I thought I didn't need screen protectors either, until I dropped a phone and broke a screen for the lack of one - so, while I'm apparently pretty good at learning to fix phones, my ability to learn from experience may need improvement. It was the damaged seal that let in enough water to compromise the battery, but even so it stayed working long enough for me to pull a backup before I shut it down and took it apart. They're tougher than their size and cost make them seem, and these are just 1st-gen iPhone SEs - I expect the newer ones with glued-in displays are better still at preventing moisture ingress.

(Glued-in screens are harder to work on, but not impossible; I've fixed a phone with one, for a friend. You just need a heat gun and a lot of patience, is all. Regluing a new display seems like it'd be the hardest part; my friend just needed it working enough for data recovery, but maybe next time I'll get to find out.)

> Regluing a new display seems like it'd be the hardest part; my friend just needed it working enough for data recovery, but maybe next time I'll get to find out.

If he has the phone laying around still, you could practice putting the screen back. This way when you need to do so on another phone in the future then you already know how to do it :D

It's a good idea! Unfortunately, this particular phone had one side so badly bashed in that there'd be no fitting the display properly back into it, in any case. I'm sure I'll get my chance sooner or later, though!

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