Stop reading in a moment and do these first. We’ll wait.
- Get it out of the water and switch it off. Hold the power button until it shuts down properly.
- Don’t press anything else. Don’t check if it still works. Every button press moves liquid further in.
- Don’t plug it in. Charging a wet phone is how a recoverable phone becomes a dead one.
- Dry the outside, stand it upright on a towel, and leave it alone.
- Bring it in today if you can.
Right. Now the explanation.
Rice does not work
It’s the most repeated piece of advice on the internet and it’s simply wrong. Rice absorbs a little ambient moisture from the air; it does nothing about the liquid already sitting on the circuit board. What it does do brilliantly is convince you the problem is being dealt with while the actual damage carries on underneath.
It also leaves starch and dust in the charge port, which we then have to clean out.
Hair dryers are worse — heat drives moisture further in and can lift components. Freezers, likewise, no.
The real damage isn’t the water
It’s corrosion, and it starts almost immediately.
Water alone is survivable. What kills phones is what the water leaves behind: minerals, sugars from a drink, salt from seawater or sweat. As it dries, those deposits eat into the tiny connections on the board. That process continues long after the phone feels dry to you — which is why a phone that seemed fine for two days suddenly stops working on the third.
The clock started when it went in. That’s the whole reason we push so hard on bringing it in the same day.
What we actually do
Not “put it in a bag of something and hope”. The board comes out and goes through an ultrasonic cleaner — a bath that drives microscopic bubbles into every crevice on the board and lifts corrosion out of places no brush will ever reach, including underneath components and inside connector housings.
Liquid damage assessment and repair starts from $99. If your data is the important part, say so when you drop it off — the priorities are different and we’ll approach it differently.
Salt water and sugary drinks are urgent
Fresh water is the best case. Seawater, pool water, coffee, soft drink, beer — all considerably more aggressive, and all leave residue that keeps working long after the phone is dry.
If it went into anything other than clean water, treat it as a same-day job rather than a tomorrow job.
Tell us what actually went in it
This isn’t us being nosy. Coffee, beer, soft drink, salt water and toilet water each leave a different residue behind, and that changes how the board gets cleaned and how urgently. “Some liquid” gets your phone treated generically. “Half a can of Coke, about an hour ago” gets it treated properly.
And if it went in the toilet, just say so. We’d rather know to put gloves on, and honestly, you’d rather we did too. It happens constantly — genuinely, it is one of the most common things we see — and nobody behind the counter is going to react. Thirty seconds of being a bit embarrassed is a fair trade for keeping your photos.
If it’s already been a while
Bring it in anyway. We’ve brought back phones that people had written off weeks earlier, and we’ve had ones that came in within the hour that were never going to make it. The odds are better early, but “not great odds” isn’t the same as “none” — and the assessment will tell you which one you’re looking at.
Worst case, we get your photos off it.
One last thing
If it’s still in the toilet, you are permitted to leave it there and come back when you’ve made peace with the situation. We do understand.
But genuinely — every hour counts on this one. Ring the store, tell them it’s a liquid job, and bring it straight in.