Your phone went in water. Here is what to do (and why rice does not work)

Right now, in order

• Get it out of the water and turn it off if it is on. Do not press anything else.
• Do not plug it in. This is the big one. Power plus moisture is what actually destroys a board — far more than the water on its own.
• Dry the outside and get as much liquid out of the ports as you can.
• Do not apply heat. No radiators, no airing cupboards, nothing hot. Heat drives moisture further in, it speeds up the corrosion, and on a battery that has been in water it is the one thing that can turn a bad day into a dangerous one. Moving air at room temperature is fine — heat is not.
• Get it to a repair shop the same day if you possibly can.
• If you cannot get to us until tomorrow, use silica gel. Those little “do not eat” packets that come in a box of trainers or a handbag. Raid every box in the house, put as many as you can find in a sealed food bag with the phone, ports facing down, and leave it overnight. Silica gel is a real desiccant, which is exactly what rice is not — think of the bag as a temporary home for your phone until we can properly sort it, not a fix.

Why rice does not work

Rice cannot pull moisture out of a sealed phone. It is not a desiccant in any meaningful sense, and the liquid inside your phone is not sitting somewhere it can be drawn from. What rice actually does is cost you the two or three days that matter most, while corrosion quietly eats into the board.

By far the most common reason a phone that could have been saved arrives too late is that it spent the first week in a bag of rice.

Silica gel is better — but it is a temporary home, not a cure. Those little “do not eat” packets are a real desiccant, which is exactly what rice is not, so they genuinely pull moisture out of the air around the phone. What they cannot do is reach the liquid sealed inside it, or lift the corrosive residue already sitting on the board. Use them overnight, or until you can get to us. Do not use them instead of getting to us. And be aware that packets out of an old shoebox are often saturated already — free and worth a go, but do not count on them.

It still works. Am I fine?

Not necessarily. A phone that survives the dunking can carry on working for days or weeks and then fail, because corrosion keeps spreading long after everything looks dry. If liquid got inside, it is worth having it opened and cleaned while it is still working — that is a much cheaper job than repairing it after it stops.

What a proper water damage repair involves

Not drying it out. The phone comes fully apart, the battery comes off first, and the board is removed and cleaned to lift the corrosion and residue off the circuitry. Then it gets inspected under magnification, component by component, to find what the liquid has actually damaged — and those parts get repaired or replaced.

What it costs

There is no single price, because no two water-damaged phones are the same. One needs a clean and it is back to normal; another has a shorted component that needs replaced at board level. We look at it, tell you honestly what it needs and what that costs, and you decide before anything happens.

And if it genuinely cannot be saved, we will tell you that instead of chasing it with your money.

More on how we handle it on our water damage repair page.