Does Instant Rice Work To Draw Out Moisture

A woman uses her phone while wearing a plastic poncho along Victoria Harbour during heavy winds and rain brought on by Typhoon Hato in Hong Kong on Aug. 23, 2017. Typhoon Hato smashed into Hong Kong on Aug. 23 with hurricane force winds and heavy rains in the worst storm the city has seen for five years, shutting down the stock market and forcing the cancellation of hundreds of flights.

SAN FRANCISCO — Smart phones and water just don't mix, every bit millions of people suffering through this flavour's massive hurricanes are learning.

Experts say even if a phone is drenched, in that location are steps you can take to recover it — merely it takes patience and the power to leave the phone alone.

What kills a wet phone is electricity, said Gary Tan with DE iPhone repair, a San Francisco-based company that offers multiple sites for smart phone repair and drying.

"Practice not charge it. Do non plug it in to see if it works. If information technology's on, electricity will flow, it will impact the water that'south inside and that's when your fry the (circuit) board," he said.

This is also true fifty-fifty if your phone is still working subsequently it was dropped in h2o.

The inside of an iPhone that had gotten wet and then corroded.

"Yous didn't get lucky. Turn it off!" said Craig Beinecke, co-founder of TekDry, a Denver, Colo.-based company that has more 600 sites nationwide where consumers can quickly get small electronics stale out.

"We run across a lot of people who come in and say, 'I dropped it in water and I pulled it out actually fast and I figured I got lucky, and then the next 24-hour interval the touch screen didn't work,'" he said.

What really happened is that it took a while for the water to reach sensitive connections inside the phone. Once information technology did, the water shorted them out.

In a small-scale number of cases swamped phones are able to dry out on their own over the grade of days or weeks. But it's not common.

And while some newer phones are water resistant and tin can withstand a quick drib in a bucket or toilet, none are h2o proof.

Related:Dropped your phone in h2o? The fix isn't rice

Drying on the counter is equally fast as the rice treatment

Multiple websites suggest sticking electronics that have been submerged in liquid in a bag of uncooked rice, to draw the water out. Only that actually doesn't work and tin can introduce grit and starch into the phone too, said Beinecke.

"Nosotros did a study, and rice was slower to work than just leaving the phone out on the counter. And neither worked fast enough. After well-nigh 48 hours in rice, only 13% of the water came out of the phone," he said.

By the time the phone had fully dried out, corrosion volition have had fourth dimension to damage the fragile electronics inside, he said.

The preferred method to safely dry phones is to boil off the water within them at low temperatures under vacuum.

Craig Beinecke puts a cell phone into the TekDry drying machine in Denver.

San Antonio, Texas-based DryBox has about 60 such sites in Texas and Florida that offer cocky-service vacuum drying for electronics. The items are placed in a sleeping accommodation slightly smaller than a shoe box and so put under vacuum while existence heated.

The lower the pressure, the lower the temperature at which water boils. The motorcar allows the water inside the phone to boil off at temperatures that tin't damage the components, usually within nigh 30 minutes.

The sooner a telephone is dried out, the better chance it has of surviving a dunking unscathed, said DryBox president David Naumann. In his experience, within 36 hours the chances for success are three out of four. After that information technology drops down to less than 50%.

"Just that'due south only if they didn't try to charge it or turn it on," he cautioned.

Both DryBox and TekDry charge $69.99 per phone. They also do car key fobs, hearing aids, fettle trackers and TV remotes.

Though for those who can't get somewhere to take their telephone professionally dried, at that place's still hope. In San Francisco, Tan said he'd had people bring in phones that stopped working after being sent through a washer and didn't bring them in for vi months, figuring they were dead and gone.

"We opened it up, dried it, cleaned information technology and in a couple of cases we've got them working over again," he said.

Ocean h2o is a unlike story

The iPhone 7 is water resistant, as are some other new phones. But even water resistance has its limits.

Evidently water, or even toilet or flood water, is bad enough. Table salt water is another affair entirely, say experts. The salts in ocean water are strongly corrosive to electronics and tin much more rapidly impairment a phone.

If it's incommunicable to get a phone dried out nether vacuum within several days, in that location'due south ane final-ditch fob Naumann has to offer.

"If, and only if, it was in salt water, so we recommend putting the phone in a Ziplock bag with some bottled, purified water and merely a pinch of baking soda. It seems counterintuitive, but the baking soda counteracts the corrosiveness of the salt water until you lot tin can get it cleaned out professionally," he said.