Burnt Samsung Galaxy S III singed by external source, probe reveals Pictures showing a heat-damaged Samsung Galaxy S III smartphone were seemingly the result of a bonkers bid to dry out a wet handset by heating it in a microwave oven. The snaps appeared online last month. They showed an S III with burn damage down near the phone's Micro USB port. The battery was intact and undamaged. Samsung …
Some say that putting the phone in a bath of de-ionised water (ideally in an ultrasonic cleaner) before drying it out (over days) can help. Any comment?
But yeah, remove battery ASAP in such situations. I'm impressed that a Sansa Clip mp3 player of mine cheerfully survived a trip through the washing machine- with its battery. Its micro SD card turned up a few months later in the washing machine's filter.
If your device gets internally contaminated by tea/coffee/beer/curry sauce/sewage/urine/etc, then drying it out will leave a probably conductive and possibly corrosive residue. In these cases, I can imagine that washing it by soaking in clean agitated water would be the only (faint) hope of making it work again after careful drying.
I once ruined a laptop keyboard by spilling tea on it. I've saved a calculator (after spilling coffee on it) by washing it in soapy water, then rinsing in clean water, then drying it in the airing cupboard for a few days.
The trade school that I attended used to load all of the labs' keyboards in the industrial dishwasher in the cafeteria for cleaning. I'll admit I was a little leery when I first saw that, but I've had 100% success doing the same. Just have to make sure they dry out completely before use. My favourite drying method is propping them upside-down over a forced-air heat vent.
In my experience of this, you're more or less right. So long as you stop it running power through it ASAP.
I've managed to save keyboards and whole laptops from coffee spills by yanking the power and the battery and actually cleaning the circuit board with clean water then drying throughly. Not always an option on newfangled tiny integrated devices that're held together by adhesives but laptops don't need to die due to coffee.
Spot on. I've had a PSP ruined by an Orange Juice fail returned to full health after (repeated) immersions in distilled/deioniser water to remove all of the crud inside and then left to dry for a number of days. Given pure water is an insulator (OK OK a very poor conductor) it may be possible to use it after this treatment before drying but better safe than sorry.
As always BATTERY OUT when performing any of the above.
@ Disco
Pure water is only an insulator under very special lab conditions, the moment you expose it to air it becomes ionised as it absorbs gases from the atmosphere. Are you ready to disprove me and join the Darwin Awards by standing in a bucket of "pure water" whilst holding a bare 240v cable ?
PS you have won the bad science award by the way.
> Standing anywhere, or even floating in mid air, while holding a bare 240 v cable would give you a bad shock because of the way AC works.
You are wrong. You need to be earthed in order to get an electric shock.
I have often handled live bare 240v AC cables without any problems. The important part is to ensure you are NOT earthed (rubber soled shoes) and that you do NOT touch the neutral wire. That way you will not get an electric shock.
Cleaning off any residue left by your liquid bath of choice is essential. So yes, sometimes the best thing to do when your electronic device gets a bath in one liquid, is to pull the battery and clean it with the purest water you can find. Melted ice from the freezer is pretty good in that respect (just filter out the peas and sweetcorn).
Then just dry with a cloth, place in a sealed bag with something to absorb the water (rice as mentioned or silica gel as used in packing) and put it somewhere warm for a day.
I've saved a laptop from orange juice (complete with pulp bits - this required gentle scrubbing with a soft tooth brush), another from a pint of beer, and a mobile from coca cola using just this technique.
I would hasten to add only the beer on the laptop was my fault. The orange was neither my fault, or my laptop. The mobile was mine, and 2 weeks old when my brother managed to spill an entire glass of cola on it.
once the power is removed, the main risk is the LCD panel. You don't want liquids getting inside that, so if you can remove it, do. If not, be very very careful.
The other nice hack to know, if you want something that dries more fiercely than the rice, is to go to a camera shop and get some of those teabag-sized packs of silica gel (they are cheap, and even available in useless places like Jessops).
Wash your device out thoroughly (deionised water if you have it), and pack it with silica gel, abusing a radiator/airing cupboard in the usual way. You'd be amazed what this can fix.
(As everyone above said, take the feckin' battery out, kids)
You can also buy bigger bags of silica gel on eBay and the like.
But battery out before anything, immediately!
I took the screws off my submerged Nokia E61 6 years ago, took the casings off, put it in a bag with big silica gel bag, in airing cupboard, for 2 weeks, and it's now still alive and my main phone.
I was quoted £119 when I walked into the Meadowhall Apple Store last week with my wife's 3GS. She'd left it outside all night in the rain. A reconditioned unit with some new, some original parts but a short warranty and locked to Orange as per the original unit. I thought that was a pretty good deal so say it's nearly three years old, well out of warranty, a bit battered, my old one and originally supplied by Orange.
In the end a bag of rice and a warm radiator got it going again less the Home button. But with the new 'virtual' Home button in Settings/General/Accessibilty/AssistiveTouch 'On' that's not too much of an issue now.
As much as I dislike th iPhone, I have to credit it for its ability to soldier on after being abused. I've fixed one that went through a wash cycle and one that had a bottle of water poured over it (they were corporate and the users had to come and explain their stories, cap in hand, so no reason to doubt them).
The 'washed' one's camera never worked again (even after a replacement camera unit), but after being opened up and left in a drawer for a few weeks and a new battery and home button each, they both lived to tell the tale.
@CCCP: No, the whole point is it's for phones that are out of warranty either by age or damage. It's £139 for the iPhone 4S (any) or £119 for any of the older ones (plus £7.44 shipping+return of the old phone if you don't have a nearby store)
Documented here: http://support.apple.com/kb/index?page=servicefaq&geo=United_Kingdom&product=iphone
under "Warranty & Service Pricing" > "My iPhone is not eligible for warranty service. What are my service options?"
Some person or persons put a wet mobile phone in a microwave to dry it out? Thus making sure that (apart from any direct effects of the radiation on the kit) the water would boil inside the phone - I am speechless. Then after having done this and wrecked said phone they go and inform World+Wife+Dog via the internet as if they were somehow proud of what they had done. How is it possible to be that brain-dead? The only way that they could have made bigger fools of themselves would have been to film themselves doing it and posting the result on YouTube.
Many years ago, my father in law dropped his Nokia into his garden pond (that's why you don't keep a phone in your shirt pocket). He just turned the phone on to see if it still worked. When it didn't, he just plugged the still damp phone in to charge.
He couldn't understand my amazement that he had done this! Strangely, after following my advice to remove battery and place in airing cupboard for 2 days, the phone worked again. Did need a new SIM card a year later though as the contacts on the old one looked rusty.
My flatmate burst into my room in the morning complaining that his socks weren't dry yet; he needed them for work that day and sought my advice. Me still being in my pit and trying to catch some Z's (typical student) I resented the intrusion, so I sarcastically told him to 'Microwave them dry', rolled over and went back to sleep. Only to be woken moments later by cries of 'Fire! Fire!'
we would strip phone down pop it into a sonic bath with Isopropyl alcohol, then take it out leave to dry and more often then not they would come back to life. ( you could rinse it with de-ionized water after isopropyl if wanted then leave to dry)
the sonic bath was from argos, all it was a plastic bath with what looked like the vibrator things off/out of mobile phones under it so they would vibrate the bath.
From know techniques, waterproofing is done by vapour deposition of a thin film over the finished parts. However this is a slow process and uniformly doing it in quantity (e.g. for whole trays of phones) IS rocket science (or fluid dynamics, which may be worse). Not sure how well that particular nut has been cracked yet. When you have production lines churning out millions upon millions of devices they can't afford to have slow bottlenecks, especially at the very end of production.
Seeing as this person was essentially trying to pull a fast one. Looking at the forum, he was trying to claim for a phone and damage to his car; shouldn't he have to pay for the investigation (which involved reproducing the fault by destroying other test units) and pay some compensation to Samsung for the damage done to their reputation? I feel he should be punished more than a bit of web ridicule.
Just as long as there isn't anywhere that water or air can get trapped until it's exerting nearly an atmosphere of pressure, followed by a tiny pop or crack that's nevertheless quite fatal.
The best places to dry out wet electronics are an airing cupboard, or a machine room with air-con. In both cases, leave it for a good few days.
My phone is water proof, just this weekend I abandoned it during a heavy downpour and it was sitting under 2" of water when I went back to it.
As for the earlier posts about electricity and buckets, Birds manage to sit on 500,000 volt power cables without a problem; and I have pulled 300amp fuses from a 660v gantry crane without feeling a thing.
(by accident I should add - I isolated the fuse board, or so I thought - some dipstick had wired it back-to-front!!).
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2025
