How to Fix Your Water Damaged iPhone

By Paul Thomson :: 10:03 AM

So you dropped your iPhone (or any other small electric gadget) into the sink – or left it out on the deck overnight in a rainstorm, or the kids spilled their juice on it – you get the picture, it doesn’t turn on any longer. You may not be completely out of luck if you move quickly.

For a long time, the old wive’s tale has been to drop the afflicted gizmo into a ziploc storage bag full of rice. And if that’s all you have lying around, it might work okay, but rice isn’t the best tool for the job.

To really pull liquids out of all the nooks and crannies of an electronic device, you’ll need a desiccant. You know those little bags of “Do Not Eat” silica that show up in your new electronics boxes? Yup, that stuff.

The folks at iFixIt have come up with something called the Thirsty Bag (see picture above). This is an entire enclosure filled with desiccants that surrounds your soggy iPhone to pull all the liquid out of it quickly. The liquid absorption bag is specially designed to dry all the water out of your phone after it gets wet, protecting it from liquid damage. However, there’s a catch. You can’t wait until your phone is wet, and then go out and buy or order one of these things – you have to have it on hand, and put your phone in immediately after it takes a bath.

Using the bag will dry out your phone, but it is not guaranteed to fix it. Depending on the type of liquid your phone was exposed to, and what types of circuits were shorted out or grounded during the dunking, makes the difference in whether your phone will come out of this experience dead or alive.

[More information: Thirsty Bag]