Water damage: what to do in the first ten minutes

What you do in the ten minutes after a phone goes in the sink genuinely changes the outcome. Most of the common advice, including the famous one about rice, does not.

Power it off. Do not check if it works

The instinct is to press the button and see. Resist it. Water on its own is a poor conductor and does relatively little harm; water plus electricity is what kills phones, because current takes shortcuts across a wet board and burns out components on the way.

Hold the power button and shut it down properly. If it is already off, leave it off. Do not plug it in to see whether it charges — that is the single most damaging thing you can do to a wet device.

Get the water off the outside

Dry the outside with a cloth. Hold the device with the ports facing down and give it a few firm shakes to clear standing water from the charging port and speaker grilles. Take the case off, and take out the SIM tray so that opening can drain and vent.

What not to do: no hairdryer, no oven, no radiator. Heat drives moisture further into the board and can lift adhesive and warp components. And no compressed air, which pushes water deeper into places it had not reached.

Rice does not work

A bowl of rice is not a desiccant in any useful sense. It absorbs surface humidity slowly and does nothing at all about liquid sitting under a shield can on the logic board. What it does reliably is give people a reason to wait three days, which is three days for corrosion to spread.

Silica gel is genuinely better than rice, and if you have a decent quantity of it, use it. But treat it as a holding measure, not a fix.

Corrosion is the actual enemy

Here is what most people get wrong: the water is not really the problem, and neither is the moment it goes in. Tap water, sea water and anything with sugar in it leave mineral residue behind, and that residue reacts with the board over the following days and weeks.

This is why a phone that got wet on Monday and worked perfectly all week can die on Friday, or a month later. The failure is delayed. Corrosion eats through solder joints and traces long after the phone has dried out and everyone has stopped worrying about it.

A proper clean means opening the device, removing the shields, and cleaning the board in an ultrasonic bath with isopropyl alcohol to lift the residue before it does that work. That is not something a bowl of rice is going to achieve.

What to do about the sequence

The short version, in order:

• Power it off immediately and leave it off.
• Dry the outside, ports down, and shake gently to clear standing water.
• Take out the SIM tray and remove the case.
• Do not charge it, do not apply heat, do not use rice.
• Get it to a repair shop within 24 to 48 hours for an ultrasonic clean.

If it still works, come in anyway

A phone that survived the dunking and seems fine is the one most likely to be written off later, because nobody brings it in. Cleaning a working board is cheap and quick. Repairing one that corroded through a power rail three weeks later frequently is not possible at all.

And if the phone will not come back on, that still is not the end. Bring it in and we will tell you for free whether the data is recoverable — which for most people is the part that actually mattered.