Speaker 1: Welcome to Brainstuff from house stuff works dot com where
Speaker 1: smart happens. Hi am Marshall Brain with today's question, is
Speaker 1: it possible to rescue an electronic device that's been dunked
Speaker 1: in water? In the brain household? For reasons that are
Speaker 1: not necessarily the best thought out in retrospect, the key
Speaker 1: rack hangs on the wall and the dog's food and
Speaker 1: water bowls are on the floor underneath it. So one day,
Speaker 1: about two weeks ago, I was grabbing Lee's keys for
Speaker 1: I had a bunch of other things in my hands,
Speaker 1: including the GPS, and in the process of grabbing the keys,
Speaker 1: the loads shifted and I dropped the GPS. It landed
Speaker 1: predictably right in four inches of water in the dog's
Speaker 1: water bowl and submerged. Ah is approximately what I said.
Speaker 1: I quickly grabbed the GPS out of the water and
Speaker 1: shook it off. It was on when I dropped it,
Speaker 1: and it was still on when I shook it, and
Speaker 1: I was relieved. In fact, I was amazed. But three
Speaker 1: minutes later my relief was replaced with dismay as the
Speaker 1: GPS had completely died. The on off switch had no
Speaker 1: effect at all. I assumed I would need to buy
Speaker 1: a new one, and I wasn't really happy about this.
Speaker 1: I left it on the counter overnight. The next day
Speaker 1: it remained dead, but I had an idea. I hooked
Speaker 1: it up to the USB port on my computer, curious
Speaker 1: to see if I could extract any of the data
Speaker 1: on it. I was surprised to see it turn on
Speaker 1: and enter data transfer mode. The screen was discolored, but
Speaker 1: I was able to move the data on and off,
Speaker 1: and this indicated to me that there still might be hope.
Speaker 1: The on off switch still did not work, however, so
Speaker 1: then I plugged in the charger, thinking that this would
Speaker 1: warm the GPS up a little. In this mode, it
Speaker 1: would turn on automatically, but the on off switch still
Speaker 1: would not work, and opening the TENNA had no effect.
Speaker 1: It saw no satellites, the screen discoloration was getting better.
Speaker 1: I left it plugged into the charger. About two days later,
Speaker 1: the on off switch started working again, and about a
Speaker 1: day after that, the satellites started coming in for perhaps
Speaker 1: thirty seconds at a time, followed by several hours of
Speaker 1: no satellites. Over the next several days, the GPS got
Speaker 1: completely back to normal. Today, it's as though it was
Speaker 1: never dropped in water. So what is the moral of
Speaker 1: this story. Number one is the fact that the dog's
Speaker 1: water bowl needs to be nowhere near anything important. Number
Speaker 1: two is that sometimes electronic devices need a week or
Speaker 1: more to dry out, even if they appear initially to
Speaker 1: be dead on arrival. You can try the rice treatment,
Speaker 1: which you can find all over the internet and YouTube.
Speaker 1: What you do is you take dry, uncooked rice, put
Speaker 1: it in a temperware container, and then bury your phone
Speaker 1: or GPS or whatever you've gotten wet in that rice.
Speaker 1: The idea is that the rice will absorb the moisture
Speaker 1: kind of aggressively, as opposed to just letting it air
Speaker 1: dry and take a lot of the water out of
Speaker 1: the device quicker than what if you just left it
Speaker 1: on the counter. So you can try the rice treatment,
Speaker 1: or try just leaving it on the counter, try plugging
Speaker 1: it into the charger if that helps warm it up,
Speaker 1: or maybe leave it in a warm car or something
Speaker 1: like that to try to get the water to have
Speaker 1: a reason to evaporate more quickly, and then just give
Speaker 1: it time, give it a week or two weeks to
Speaker 1: see what happens. It's not gonna help in every case,
Speaker 1: and if you drop it in soda or salt water
Speaker 1: or something like that, it probably isn't gonna help at all,
Speaker 1: But if you've dropped it in fresh water, there is
Speaker 1: some possibility that the device will come back to life
Speaker 1: over time. For more on this and thousands of other topics,
Speaker 1: because a house staff works dot com