Rice Won’t Save Your Wet Smartphone
Rice goes well with many things: a Panda Express bowl, a wedding (no, the birds won’t explode ), cilantro stalks . What it doesn’t mix with is your wet smartphone, even if you’ve probably hammered it into you that the first thing you want to do when you accidentally soak your device is to throw it into a large bowl of raw rice. …
It turns out that rice does nothing. This is a correlation, not a causal relationship . But many people put their soaked devices in rice, let it sit for a day, and praise the dark gods for saving them hundreds of dollars when they find their device magically working again. Rice! Rice!
A brand new blog on iFixit is getting everyone’s admiration for this common disaster rescue trick. In it, “Water Damage and Micro-soldering Expert” Jessa Jones (Best Title) details why rice is not the best cure for watery injuries:
“When we put the phone in rice, it’s the same as doing nothing. It just FEEL like we are actively trying something. Corrosion occurs instantly when the phone is submerged in water. Sometimes corrosion attacks important components, sometimes not. If we resist turning on the phone until it’s dry on the table, in a bag of rice, or somewhere else, sometimes we’re lucky. If we had a phone in a bag of rice, we thought the rice saved him. But that did not happen! Even if the phone appears to be working properly, the solder joints on the phone will be loose and brittle. Corrosion will continue to spread inside the phone. We didn’t do anything except temporary luck. ”
So what do you do instead? Pulled out a hairdryer? Dampen the device with rubbing alcohol? Actually … yes, but just kind of. If you can, you’ll want to disassemble the device, remove the battery, and use isopropyl alcohol (at a concentration of 90% or higher) to displace the water before it dries on an expensive device. scheme.
As an iFixit writer (and Lifehacker alum) Kevin Purdy writes that there is a multi-step process you want to take when your device gets wet. However, if you can’t follow all of these steps or don’t want to because opening your smartphone might ruin any other manufacturer-designed features to prevent liquid spills, there is a shorter list of suggestions you can try. Switch off the device, tilt it so that as much liquid as possible flows out of the place where it entered the device, and allow it to come out before turning it back on. It’s not a panacea, but it’s the best you can do if you don’t take the device to a repair shop (which is worth considering depending on how wet it gets).
If you’ve got the skills or the tools, here’s a more complete list of Purdy’s suggestions when you accidentally extinguish your device:
- Minimize exposure to water as much as possible
- Turn off the device immediately
- Drain the device to drain as much water as possible.
- If you can remove the battery from your phone and see that it has been exposed to water, remove and replace the battery.
- Remove the motherboard and other parts that appear to be corroded (except for the camera and display) and immerse them in 90% isopropyl alcohol.
- Clean immersed parts, dry with alcohol, and re-assemble thoroughly.
And yes, we know we have discussed the method of adding rice several times here at Lifehacker. We will never mention this stupid technique again.