We’ve all been there: you carry your phone everywhere, so it’s bound to get wet. But there’s all kinds of advice out there about what you should do if your phone takes a bath. We decided to get to the bottom of this once and for all. Here’s a step-by-step plan for what you should do to save your phone from a watery demise:
- First, dry it off as much as possible with a towel. Get any obvious moisture out of there quickly. The faster you can do this, the better. Blow, shake, vacuum, hold it next to a fan – anything you can think of to drive out moisture, do it.
- Second, stop worrying about voiding the warranty. Once you get the phone wet enough to set off the water damage indicator, you’re out of luck as far as your warranty goes.
- Third, place your phone in an absorbent material. While you’ve almost certainly heard that you should drop your phone in a bag of rice after it gets wet, rice is actually not the best option. What you’re looking for is something that soaks up liquid readily, and better options than white rice are oatmeal, instant rice, or silica gel (you know those little packets that come in shoe boxes and tell you not to eat them? Well, still don’t eat them. Just use them for your phone.). Use several cups to cover the phone entirely, and wait 24 hours.
- Fourth, check your phone by using it as you normally would. If it doesn’t act as you’d expect, it’s best to get it checked out.
There’s plenty you can try at home, but once you’ve exhausted your options, bring your soaked phone to the experts at Fix It Fast. Even if we can’t dry out your phone, we may be able to save your data, and you don’t want to lose that on top of the phone itself!