The Glade 4.0

My cell phone did not appreciate being left in the bottom of the log flume ride for about a half hour.

Because I systematically destroy phones, I have a protection plan from Best Buy that covers everything but complete inundation.

I dried it out as best I could, but the touch pad doesn't work. I don't want to take it apart any more, because there's a cover over one of the screws that says "Void" (as in warranty).

It's probably void anyway, but before I go down that road do you guys have any suggestions? It's a HTC Incredible, if that matters.

Pull the battery, leave it in a warm spot for a while. It might evaoporate any water inside, but if it had power while it was shorted out with water, there's a good chance its toasty.

Motorola is advertising the DEFY as being water resistant and a number of other companies are doing similar.

I also found http://www.liquipel.com/ -- donno how well it actually works.

Most phones have a water detector though, and in most cases the warranty is void if that happens. Consider buying insurance for your phone through your carrier?

Buy a box of Uncle Ben's Minute Rice and drop your phone in for about an hour.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

My previous employer (5 years ago) had a strict budget for upgrades, but the repair/replacement budget was necessarily more flexible. As a consequence, the CFO would miraculously break his smartphone every time a new model came out. "Your blackberry is not working because...you went surfing with it? Really?"

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Well Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherezade had a thousand tales
But master you in luck 'cause up your sleeves you got a brand of magic never fails...
...Mister Aladdin, sir, What will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, Jot it down -You ain't never had a friend like me
█ ♣ █

Liquipel is amazing. I will be doing it to all of my future phones until they come out of the factories that way.

This may be a boat that's sailed, but I've had excellent luck recovering functionality in submerged phones.

The really important thing is to not turn it back on before it's fully dry! Resist the urge to check!

Take the battery out, and take the phone apart as much as is reasonable. Then dry off any obvious water.

Then either put it in rice, or some other dessicant for 3-4 days. Or, if you have access to it, a vacuum dessicator works wonders.

Once it's fully dry, then put the battery back in and give it a shot.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

I wish I had known of these techniques when my wife ran her phone through the washing machine.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

A common misconception is that a short circuit automatically ruins electronic devices, and this is not the case.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

Quite true. Although, much of the damage is done by current running through wet components, rather than just the components themselves getting wet.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

I went swimming with my phone in my pocket last fall. Pulled anything off the phone that would come off and left it in my car for a day or so. Don't put it somewhere the sun will reach it directly. If your car gets REALLY hot, this could possibly warp some of the components inside, so something to be careful of.

Phone worked great afterwords. When I traded it in the salesman at the store was very confused because the stickers inside were pink because they'd been wet but the phone was obviously working.

Yes and no. It doesn't change how much current a component can carry, it changes how much the component is carrying. Water is unfriendly, because it's chaotic and random, and causes numerous short circuits throughout a device. Ultimately, it's just changing the current path. That might be catastrophic, or it might not.

Here is a simple amplifier as an example:

The big resistors on the left control the base current into the transistor, which determines how much current flows through the 10k resistor. The voltage drop across that resistor determines the Collector-Emitter voltage. (These terminals are where you hook up the speaker.)

Now we're going to short out the voltage-divider circuit.

The two big resistors have been removed from the circuit. The base current is now huge, which melts the transistor. The current through the 10k resistor is somewhere between 100*huge and 150*huge, which melts that resistor.

If the short gets moved to a different spot, however...

The 10k resistor is out of the circuit. The large resistors on the left aren't. The base current is unchanged from the original circuit, which means the short circuit current is the same as the current that would have been flowing through the 10k resistor originally. The Collector-Emitter voltage changed. As a result, the device isn't going to work properly, but nothing is damaged. You can run it like that all day, listening to distorted-sounding music. Dry it out, and it's as good as new.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

You're thinking of it from a different perspective than I am. Juice running through something in water is more likely to cause fast corrosion and degradation of the piece.

From an electrical standpoint, I completely agree with you.

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Darksiege: You are not a god damned vulcan homie.

There's a reason for that. Water does cause corrosion, and does so faster if there's a steady supply of energy to fuel chemical reactions (such as electrical current). While true, it is vastly overshadowed by the conductive properties of water. Water makes electrical current, sometimes a lot of it, go where we don't want it.

Consider the last image. That circuit is safe to run. It doesn't work right, but it's safe. Water seeps around the circuit through the various properties of liquid water. It isn't just going to stay in one place. So, five minutes later, the water may have created the configuration in the middle image. In that configuration, the transistor blows immediately. Any corrosion caused by the water over that time is now completely irrelevant.

You have millions of those transistor circuits packed into a tiny little chip. Water is altering the current path in a myriad of unpredictable ways. Water seepage may be slow, but it doesn't have to move far. Just a few micrometers, and five transistors blow. Corrosion takes time. It may not take much, but it takes a lot more time than a current spike does. It is more likely that the random flow of the water through the device causes a catastrophic short circuit. A wet device doesn't degrade over time until it no longer functions, either quickly or slowly. That isn't how they fail. Wet devices suddenly stop working. That type of failure is consistent with short circuit conditions and overcurrent.

The reason I posted that wasn't to dispel the notion that you want to turn your device off as quickly as possible. That's still true. Rather, I posted to counter the idea that wet = dead.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

With zero power to the system, corrosion becomes the significant factor though, correct?

Its been a while since I took Chem, but with the vast variances in electronegativity of the various metals involved in electronics some funky things can happy pretty fast, iirc

Still no luck with the touch pad.

And now I've lost my phone.

To put it into perspective, it's like comparing obesity to gunshot wounds. Obesity is a huge problem in the United States that puts vast quantities of people at severe health risk. It can be fixed through diet and exercise before an appreciable amount of long-term damage can be done to the body. Gunshot wounds can kill you before the ambulance arrives, even if they don't hit any vital organs.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

If you're looking for a phone that will withstand abuse and water I can attest to the Casio Commando. I use it for work every day and it handles massive abuse, and I listen to the radio on it in the shower and wash it off at the end of the day with my hands. The only time I change the screen protector is when I drop it face down on gravel and step on it. It's not quite as fast as some others but if you want rugged, it's your baby.

Excellent info in this thread. Kudos all around.

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