I do water damage repairs on daily basis. This is actually becomes very interesting when humans are involved, I mean, they treat their phones as their pet/ kid and expect they will be back to normal life once it’s been to the doctor.

Some of them of course will try to treat it with whatever they think works, be it putting in rice box for a couple of days, put it under hair dryer, put it into water and wash it, or simply try to charge it and see if it works.

Of course, some of them will work, and most of them won’t. Why?

I will show you two pictures, typical water damaged logicboard.

Looks nasty and typical, are they water? No.

Will these gone when you put it into rice? No.

 

Will these gone when you take out the board and wash it under water? Maybe.

 

But, now, let me show you another two pictures.

 

This is an audio IC that pulled from a water damaged iPhone 6s, I don’t think I need to explain anything here.

Lets ask the same question again, will these go away when you put it under water, alcohol or even ultrasonic cleaner? No.

Why? because they are under the chips. they need physical scrubbing.

 

Now, lets go to the point of this post.

When you have a water damaged iphone and send it for repair, will it go back to its normal life? Maybe.

 

Sometimes, yes, and I will say that when you pick up the phone. because it could be lucky and the damage was not too bad, I can clean it and fix existing faults and it should last awhile.

 

Sometimes, no, and I will say that as well, actually, you should always plan this, you should expect get the phone back, back up your data and expect it to die very soon.

 

Thats why most of the repairers only do data recovery on water damaged devices. Why?

 

Because you cannot physically clean the underside of every single chip, and it will becomes nasty some time later, for sure.

 

I hope you get a sense on what a water damaged repair looks like and we are on the same page now.