Save a wet phone using rice

Save a wet phone using rice

Most phones now come with a degree of water proofing, so if you accidentally spill your drink over your device, it’s not a disaster. However, dropping your phone in the bath, sink or toilet is a lot more serious and can damage it for good. If your hand set suffers a dunking, don’t just gaze in horror as it lays  in water–the first and most important rule is to act quickly. The sooner you snatch it out of harm’s way, the better. A well-known trick for dry in gout a moist mobile is to put it in A bag of rice. The small, hard grains are inedible until they absorb enough water to plump up into alight fluffy side dish, and the theory is that they will suck the moisture from your phone–thus removing the problem. But can sticking a wet phone in rice really save it, and are there better options out there to try?

How we test edit the most common ruination of a phone is an accidental plunge in the toilet but we decided to go for a more sanitary reconstruction and just immersed it for a minute or so in a bowl of water. Having dropped the phone in the liquid, we simulated having a crazy panic, took some photo so fits till working, 1 then snatched it from the water as quickly as possible and turned it off.

2 If your phone has a removable battery, taking out the power source is the quickest (and therefore recommended) way to kill the power. Our test phone had a removable Cover but not a removable battery, so we took the back off, removed anything that could be removed(such as the SIM card and SD card) to allow water to drain out from any gaps, and dried everything off with paper towels (if we’d immersed the phone in muddy or salty water, we’d have needed to wash it in clean water before taking this step).For good measure, we also put the phone in a thick woolly sock and swung it around for a while, hoping the centrifugal force would fling any water out of the device. Well, it couldn’t hurt, anyway. When all that was done, we filled a Zip lock bag with rice, buried the phone among the grains, resealed the bag and left it to dry.

 3 The longer you leave the phone, the more chance there is of a recovery, so we manfully resisted the urge to keep checking if it worked for an agonising 48 hours.

The result- The phone turned on, and seems to work pretty much as before, although it doesn’t respond to touch quite as snappily as it did prior to taking a dip. There is a large element of luck when it comes to drying a phone, and your success or failure is partly down to the phone itself, and where the water manages to find its way inside. It’s difficult to say just how much of Our test phone’s survival is down to the rice, and how much is due to the device drying out naturally. Either way, we still have a working phone–so that’s a definite win. The trick is certainly worth a try if your phone gets soggy, but we wouldn’t recommend deliberately soaking it to find out.