Water Damage: What to Do Straight Away and What to Leave Alone

Water damage: what to do straight away and what to leave alone

A wet device rarely breaks because of the water itself. It breaks because of corrosion, and that starts the moment water, current and metal are together. It carries on as long as there is moisture inside, even if you do nothing, even if the device still works in the meantime. So everything you do in the first minutes comes down to two things: the power off and the moisture out.

What you do straight away

1. Turn the device off. Really off, not just the screen locked. A device that is on sends voltage through wet traces, and that is precisely what does the damage.
2. Pull the cable out if it was charging, and do not charge it afterwards. Charging is the quickest way to turn a wet device into a broken device.
3. Take the case off and open the SIM tray. Leave that open.
4. Dab the outside dry and hold the device for a moment with the connectors facing down, so that whatever is inside can run out.
5. Put it down in a dry, cool place, switched off, and leave it lying there.
6. Make sure it is lying open in a workshop as soon as possible. Hours count here, not days.

What you should above all leave alone

• Do not charge it, and do not just try whether it still turns on. Every attempt is voltage on a wet board.
• Not in rice. Rice does not draw water out of a sealed housing. The moisture sits under shields and between components where no airflow reaches. What you are left with is dust and starch in the connectors, and above all lost time while the corrosion carries on. It is the best-known tip about water damage and at the same time the most harmful, precisely because it makes people wait.
• No hairdryer, radiator or oven. Heat sets the moisture moving towards places where it was not yet, and attacks glue, battery and display.
• Do not blow compressed air into the openings. You push the moisture deeper inside, right under the shields where you can no longer get it out.
• Not in the freezer, no shaking, and a sachet of silica gel is not a treatment but at best a postponement.
• Do not pour alcohol or contact spray into the openings. Cleaning does work, but only when the device is lying open and the board is out.

Why opening and rinsing quickly does work

In the workshop the device is taken apart. The battery is disconnected, the board comes out, the connectors and the shields come off. The board is then cleaned with isopropyl alcohol, often in an ultrasonic bath, so that salts and residues are gone before they attack traces and solder pads. Then drying, and checking under the microscope: green-blue deposits on connectors, dull solder joints, damaged contact surfaces. Whatever is affected is repaired at board level with micro-soldering. That is also the way data is retrieved from a device that no longer starts up. A battery and a display are parts; the board is the device.

Moisture indicators

An iPhone contains small indicators that change colour on contact with liquid. On many models one is visible in the SIM tray. White or silver means that no contact has been established, red or pink means that liquid has been inside. They do not say how much and not when, only that it happened. They can also be triggered by steam in a bathroom or by sweat. For you they are relevant for two reasons: liquid damage is not covered by any warranty, not even at Apple, and on a sale or a trade-in they are looked at, because a device that has been wet can still fail weeks later.

Not all water is the same

Clean water is the least bad. Sea water conducts strongly and attacks quickly, and chlorinated water from a swimming pool is aggressive too. Coffee, beer, fruit juice and soft drinks leave sugar behind that stays sticky and conductive after drying, and that keeps working until you remove it. In those cases opening and cleaning quickly is even more important, and it still works means a good deal less.

The device still works, and then

This is the most common trap. A device that has survived a splash and simply starts up feels like a good ending. Meanwhile the corrosion carries on, and the failure comes a week or a month later, often at a connector or at a power or audio chip. Do two things then: make a backup immediately, and still have the device checked and cleaned. If you can only do one thing, do the backup.

Water resistant is no longer water resistant

New devices are tested against water up to a certain level, but that is a test on a new device in controlled conditions. Glue and seals age, a repair changes the sealing, and a crack in the glass undoes it locally. So an older device is at best splash resistant. Swimming, diving and a hot shower do not belong in that, and that standard has never meant that liquid damage is covered by warranty.

If it is too late after all

A device that can no longer be saved still contains data and still-working parts. So ask what can still be got out of it before you throw it away; that is possible more often than people think, precisely because the work is done at board level. If you are going to replace it, it is worth knowing that a device that has been wet is always described as such, and that devices with a SIM lock, an MDM lock or an active iCloud account are not bought in. How the assessment and the price work is set out at sell your device.

In short

1. Turn it off.
2. Do not charge it, do not turn it on.
3. Case off, SIM tray open.
4. Put it away dry and cool.
5. Have it opened, rinsed and checked as soon as possible.
6. Backup at the first chance that the device works again.

Rice is not on that list, and that is the most important rule of the whole story.