Your phone got wet: what to do (and not do) in the first hour

Let us start with the part that matters, because if you only read one paragraph, read this one:

Do not switch it on and do not charge it. Putting current through a damp board is what turns a scare into a serious fault.

This guide is about phones. If the liquid landed on a laptop the procedure changes quite a lot — the keyboard funnels it straight down to the logic board and the battery has to come off fast — and it is set out step by step in what to do with a MacBook that has had liquid spilled on it.

What to do, in order

1. Get it out of the liquid and switch it off. If it is on, shut it down completely. If it is already off, leave it off and resist the urge to check anything.
2. Take off the case and, if it has one, the SIM tray. It helps it drain and breathe.
3. Dry the outside with a lint-free cloth, without rubbing the ports.
4. Stand it on edge or face down, connectors pointing at the floor, so the liquid leaves the way it came in.
5. Do not handle it more than you have to while you wait.
6. Get it looked at as soon as you can. The same day, ideally.

What not to do

• Do not switch it on “just to see if it works”. It is the number one cause of irreversible damage.
• Do not charge it. Not by cable and not on a wireless pad: wireless charging is still current running through the board.
• Do not use a hairdryer or a radiator. Heat damages adhesives, screen and battery, and it pushes moisture further in.
• Do not put it in rice. It does not work: it never reaches the sealed inside and it does not stop corrosion.
• Do not shake it hard. You will spread the liquid into areas that were dry.
• Do not trust the speaker water-ejection trick. Vibrating the membrane clears the speaker cavity and brings the sound back, nothing more. The board is exactly as it was, and the sound coming back gives you a false sense that the problem is solved.

Water does not break things: it corrodes them

The real damage is not the water itself. It is what the water leaves behind, and what happens while there is current.

Two mechanisms run at once. The first is electrochemical: any liquid that is not distilled water conducts, so with the board powered, tiny currents flow between points at different voltages, metal migrates from one track towards another and the track thins until it opens. That is the heart of why switching it on is such a bad idea: with no current, the process very nearly stops.

The second is residue corrosion. Liquids carry salts and minerals that stay behind on the board and underneath the chips once the water evaporates. That residue conducts and it is also hygroscopic: it pulls moisture out of the air, so the phone never truly dries out inside. Months later there is still a damp film doing its work.

Which is why two confusing things happen:

• A wet phone can carry on working for days or weeks and then die.
• A phone that will not switch on after a soaking often comes back entirely if it is cleaned in time.

The variable that matters most is how many hours pass before it is opened and cleaned.

Not all liquids are the same

• Fresh water: the least bad case, if you act fast.
• Sea water or pool water: much worse. Salt and chlorine corrode very quickly.
• Soft drinks, sugary coffee, beer: the sugars leave a sticky film that traps dirt and moisture indefinitely.
• Washing-up or soapy water: surfactants break the surface tension and creep into places plain water would never reach, seals included.

How to tell whether it really got inside

Without opening it you can gather a fair number of clues. None is conclusive on its own, but all of them help:

• The liquid contact indicator. On models with a SIM tray you can see it inside the slot with a torch: white or silver means it has not tripped; red means it has. Apple uses it to decide coverage, so it also tells you how that conversation will go.
• Stains or halos under the screen glass, or patches of the panel that look lighter. That is liquid inside the laminate and it does not dry out.
• The speaker sounds muffled or the microphone sounds distant. Usually water in the grilles, and it often clears on its own, but it tells you where the liquid went in.
• Face recognition stops working. The front sensor module is sensitive to moisture and it is one of the first things to go.
• Charging becomes unpredictable. The port is the way in and the first area to corrode; if the phone got wet, skip the cable tests and have it opened.

What we do with a device that has been in liquid

1. We open it and disconnect the battery immediately, so there is no current anywhere on the board.
2. We strip the board completely and remove the shields, because the residue hides right underneath them.
3. We clean it ultrasonically, which is the only thing that genuinely lifts deposits from under the chips, and dry it.
4. We inspect it under a microscope: corrosion, eaten tracks, consumed pins, damaged components.
5. We repair whatever is affected and test block by block.
6. We give you the real diagnosis and the quote before any repair starts.

This is microsoldering and logic board work, not a parts swap, which is why it is not done everywhere. The detail of what gets checked is on iPhone repair in Barcelona, and what moves the price of a repair is explained separately, because here it depends on which liquid it was and how many hours have gone by.

If what you care about is the photos

Say so the moment you walk in. On a device that has been in liquid, every attempt to switch it on reduces the chances of rescuing the data, and on an iPhone the memory is soldered and encrypted alongside the processor: it cannot be lifted out and read elsewhere. The approach changes — the board is stabilised just enough to reach the data, and only then do we talk about repairing the phone — and it is set out on data recovery.

When we’ll tell you not to repair it

It doesn’t always work out, and we’d rather say so early. When corrosion has already reached under the processor or the memory, when the phone spent weeks switching itself on and off before it got here, or when the work adds up to nearly what that model is worth, we tell you with the diagnosis in front of us and you decide. We’d rather lose the job than charge you for a repair that doesn’t pay off, which is why that conversation always comes before you authorise anything — where it sits in the job is set out on how the process works.

And about water resistance

Recent phones carry an IP rating, but the small print is worth reading: it is measured in a laboratory, with fresh water, on new devices, under controlled conditions. Age, knocks and any previous opening all cost the seals and adhesives their effectiveness, and the rating does not cover salt water, soap or sugary drinks.

Translated: water resistance is a safety net, not an invitation. The same goes for an iPad or an Apple Watch: aluminium and good sealing hide the moisture, but the corrosion keeps working away inside.