50.000 plus km of motorcycle navigating (using Navigon) - so of that in hard rain with the BA "slightly" unprotected ....
So it doesn't like rain or vibration ...
Besides losing the two screws visible on the left and right top edges of the phone, another problem cropped up.
On a recent 6 hour ride, the main connector suddenly became intermittent. I have always hated that connector and I believe it's one of the weaker points on an otherwise less than quality device -but I digress.
I know how quickly the battery will empty using BT and the backlight all the time so I tried to jiggle the cable to get it to work while I was driving. It was not possible, and to add insult to injury, the intermittent connection kept interrupting the MP3s playing and would sometimes cause the SD card to crash, requiring a hard reset. Ugh.
In the hotel I was able to rig the connector so that the device would charge and the next day while at work I figured the device was toast anyway so I took a look inside.
4 screws out from under the battery compartment, and another three screws to get the mainboard loose enough so I could see the connection.
I found the connector so loose that with the slightest touch it fell out in my hands.
Apparently, all of the solder joints had been loosened by the rainwater.
I think this should be a caveat here for all devices left in the rain. I understand that rain water or distilled water is very "agressive". You may be able to get your device to work again. For a while.
I don't think toilet water or moisture from tap water is as bad.
- but again I digress.
Before I went any further, I went out and got an O² XDA-III. HAving safely restored my ability to communicate, I proceeded with the fiddeling.
I was actually able to get the connector resoldered onto the board using a 25+ (pre SMD) year old soldering iron. I actually don't believe it myself but it still works.
I was also able to correct an annoying rattle the phone had almost since I bought it.
The telephone antenna is a raised plastic piece on the back of the board. That raised piece forms a box in which one of the screws for the board onto the frame was "stored". Don't know how it got there but I guess the production people at HTC should listen up.
Well I thought it was fun. anyway.
Related
My Touch Pro 2 is currently sitting in a bowl of rice while I gather the courage to install the battery and test my methods of drying it out.
Yesterday, my sister walked into the swimming pool with the phone in her back pocket. It only took her a second to realize her error and thankfully I was right there. I popped the battery out without turning on the screen and layed the seperate parts out in the sun for a few hours. When I got home, I dumped the phone into a bowl and filled it with rice in the hopes that the rice would absorb any excess moisture.
This morning, I broke out my tools and broke the phone down, looking for water damage. I found some residual water under the screen, but with so many layers of plastic, I would rather not take it completely apart. To help with this little bit, I placed the phone screen up on the dash of my car for 1 hour. Since sunlight is deadly to a phone, I didn't dare leave it longer.
We have a central heating and air unit outside, so I placed the phone atop the unit outside (it blows warm air from the top) for another hour.
I checked the screen for moisture and can't see any now, but with all of the various layers, it is hard to say for certain.
The last thing I will try is to hook up a universal air pump used for blowing up air mattresses and such to the bowl of rice. With a cover on top and a few vents on the side, I am hoping to blow dry air in and the last remaining moisture out.
If anyone has any other tips or tricks to add, I would be happy to give 'em a shot. I am in no hurry and a few days is worth the wait if it means the chances of the phone recovering are greater with other methods.
If you can create a vacuum (use duct-tape creatively to form a seal between the container* and the universal blower, and have the suction end of the blower making the connection) that would probably be best. Water between button contacts and on the circut board, in my past experience, has been the most lingering after-water problems.
When my blackjack ii took a dive in the doggy dish, it was about a week before it was completely dry, as evidenced by the lack of odd behaviour from the power button. I considered myself pretty lucky in that one. Good luck.
*The best you can probably do for a vacuum container would be to use a good-quality plastic baggy. Cut the zip-lock part off, insert the phone and a folded piece of cardboard to keep the bag from completely colapsing/getting-sucked-up, and duct tape it to the suction end of the universal blower, or even better, the suction end of a cleaned electric leaf blower. -Just a thought.
Update
After allowing the phone to spend yet another night in the bowl of rice (I decided against introducing forced air out of laziness), I plugged the battery back in and tried to boot it up.
The phone did not respond, at all.
I plugged the phone in via the official charger and noticed a momentary blip of the orange LED near the speaker. This seemed familiar, so I pulled the battery out and tried plugging the charger in again: Sure enough, I got the exact same response. The battery was either dead or the phone wasn't recognizing it.
The replacement phone came in Tuesday, but with some medical emergencies in the family, I didn't attempt anything until this evening. I removed the new, charged battery from the replacement phone and put it in the one I have been working on.
Voila! The phone booted straight up with the new battery!
I noticed some residual damage to the dispersal plastic behind the screen as the phone booted with a white background, but once the phone booted completely up, I couldn't see any difference from before the accident.
While I haven't been able to completely test every aspect of the phone, I plan to update this thread once the new battery (buy dot com, ftw!) comes in on Monday.
I am very pleased with the results and it was definitely worth the time and effort I put into the drying process.
If anyone stumbles upon this tiny thread, please keep in mind a few things:
The phone was only briefly immersed in water for about 30 seconds, inside a pocket
After removing the phone from the water, I pulled the battery before turning on the screen
I allowed the phone to dry over the course of five days
I consider the fact that the phone is now working to be a freak coincidence, results are not typical
a friend of mine had his immersed in water for about 3 min before he realized he had it in his pocket....since we are airplane mechanics, we deal with A/C alot, therefore we have a vacuum pump handy for evacuating A/C systems. He put his phone (dunno what kind, it was touch screen though) in to a vacuum chamber ( a glass jar with a hole tapped in the cap to allow for vacuum to be pulled) and pulled a vacuum on it for a day...it is still working and it was 2 months ago. So just an idea, i realize the equipment is not available to everyone, but it worked for him.
planedoc said:
a friend of mine had his immersed in water for about 3 min before he realized he had it in his pocket....since we are airplane mechanics, we deal with A/C alot, therefore we have a vacuum pump handy for evacuating A/C systems. He put his phone (dunno what kind, it was touch screen though) in to a vacuum chamber ( a glass jar with a hole tapped in the cap to allow for vacuum to be pulled) and pulled a vacuum on it for a day...it is still working and it was 2 months ago. So just an idea, i realize the equipment is not available to everyone, but it worked for him.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
This is interesting!
Chemistry suggests that reducing the air pressure to a near vacuum would reduce the temperature needed for the water to evaporate, allowing it to do so at a highly increased rate... but keeping the phone inside an air-tight (and thus water-tight) container would actually prevent the water from escaping.
What am I missing here?
Snarksneeze said:
This is interesting!
Chemistry suggests that reducing the air pressure to a near vacuum would reduce the temperature needed for the water to evaporate, allowing it to do so at a highly increased rate... but keeping the phone inside an air-tight (and thus water-tight) container would actually prevent the water from escaping.
What am I missing here?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
The vacuum pump has a way of letting the vapor out of it in the process of pulling the vacuum...you can see the vapor as it escapes from the vacuum pump and by the time you reach 29.92 or close, you usually never get a perfect vacuum, but close....moisture is mostly gone....let it set, with a set of guages of course (forgot to mention that) monitor the vacuum, anytime it goes below 28-29 or so, turn the pump on again to remove the moisture....untill it holds for several hours making sure its all gone...a little overkill never hurts with these expensive devices.
I figured I would share my experience, as I was pretty surprised. I fried an epic 4g touch by setting it down in a miniscule patch of water on a table a while back, so I didn't really have much faith my s3 would pull through.
Here's what happened, and what I did:
I had the PT waterproof case. Long story short, the earpiece membrane tore, and it was thrown in the pool. Didn't notice until I got out. Phone was still powered on, and water was all up inside of the phone, there was condensation on the inside of the camera lenses, etc.
I turned it off, took the back off, pulled the battery and SD card out, and dried up as much water as I could. Once I got home, I unscrewed and removed the 2 back panels and carefully dried up what I could with qtips and paper towel. I had to remove the rear camera block to dry up water underneath it. I then let it sit out all taken apart overnight for a full 12 hours.
The next day, I put everything back together, popped the battery in and plugged in the charger.
Nice, charging animation.
Let it fully charge then powered it on...
Everything seemed to work just fine. I expected the worst, and was quite surprised. I mean, it wasn't just a splash of water, it was literally everywhere throughout the inside of the phone.
The catch - launching any camera apps causes a FC. I'm pretty certain I plugged the rear camera back in correctly, as and I only detached the little connector rectangle in order to get the water under the block. Luckily rear cameras are 25$ on Amazon, and fronts are about 6$. I have one of each on the way so well see how it goes.
I've been using the phone for almost a week since then and everything seems to be working as it should. Speakers, microphones, light sensor, buttons, gyro, touchscreen, SD mount etc. are all fine.
Am I mistakenly under the impression that water logged phones don't usually pull through, or something? I didn't even power it off until at least an hour after the water got in it. It was even rebooted once while filled with water, before I noticed it.
Funny side note - my uncles flip (yes, flip. You can still get flip phones through sprint. He was recently forced by sprint to upgrade from his old brick phone, because they were literally discontinuing support for it on the network. I believe the brick was technically a nextel. It had an *extendable antenna* and no text capabilities. Sprint left him a message and said he had so many days to get a new phone because on X date, his would no longer work lol) phone got thrown into a lake. Apparently it rang when it was called for a full day while it sat on the bottom of the lake, until the battery finally died.
Update: installed new cameras and now it says it cannot connect to them. Before it would just crash.
In case someone out there, at some point in time, for some reason cares: I bought an s3 with a cracked screen off ebay for the motherboard. Swapped the boards and lo, the cameras work perfectly! I moved over the nv data from my board to the new one. I currently have 2 phones which are technically the same phone. Mine isn't getting 3g/4g, only network and wifi. Trying to sort it out but other than that my phone is back to normal, and double the internal storage (cracked s3 was a 32gb, got it for 120$). Total spent - 150$. Actual labor and repair was a breeze, and the replacements cameras were dirt cheap. I have insurance but this way i didn't have to file a claim and the actual repair was pretty fun (to me at least).
So the lesson is: no matter how bad you want to impress your 5 year old nephew, don't let him throw your waterproof phone in the pool.
Sent from my SPH-L710 using xda app-developers app
Hi Folks,
I recently dropped my phone in water. Put the phone in uncooked rice for 2 days, removed sim tray, put it under direct sunlight., tried everything I could possible to dry it. After 4 days, powered on the device, it turned on fine and most of the things working as normal. I did a hardware test with *#808# and most of the tests are passed.
But Speaker, Mic (also the headphone jack) and Vibration isn't working any more. I also noticed that it is charging fine but discharging very fast, even the battery stats shows 100 to 70% as a vertical line. So, I guess battery needs to be replaced. Other than that, on normal use it is heating up.
I did some google search and few forums says, the speaker and vibration connector goes under battery and connect to the top of motherboard. Considering battery is screwed up. I guess the connector is removed or damaged may be.
Has anyone faced the same problem before or anyone can advice something?
_Saul said:
Hi Folks,
I recently dropped my phone in water. Put the phone in uncooked rice for 2 days, removed sim tray, put it under direct sunlight., tried everything I could possible to dry it. After 4 days, powered on the device, it turned on fine and most of the things working as normal. I did a hardware test with *#808# and most of the tests are passed.
But Speaker, Mic (also the headphone jack) and Vibration isn't working any more. I also noticed that it is charging fine but discharging very fast, even the battery stats shows 100 to 70% as a vertical line. So, I guess battery needs to be replaced. Other than that, on normal use it is heating up.
I did some google search and few forums says, the speaker and vibration connector goes under battery and connect to the top of motherboard. Considering battery is screwed up. I guess the connector is removed or damaged may be.
Has anyone faced the same problem before or anyone can advice something?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
You can't dry a phone completely without opening it. So if you are upto it, open it up (provided you are out of warranty) and disconnect all the connectors and clean them with alcohol or other suitable liquid, leave it to dry and then reassemble.
It's hard to guess exactly what happened inside, but it seems there are two possibilities:
- it could be that your top (main) board is damaged, which causes malfunction of connected bottom board OR
- you may have damaged both parts of the phone...
Either case, repairs won't be cheap, motherboard is the most expensive part of the phone.
I would suggest disassembling the device and inspecting internals. Corrosion should be visible.
Check some teardown videos (recommend Jerry Rig Everything or iFixit) before doing anything if you haven't yet.
Sent from my OnePlus 3 using Tapatalk
Thank you @Explorer23 and @tnsmani will do a tear down to check for visible damage part if any.
Took the phone to OP service centre, the repair guy opened it in-front of me for diagnosis. The phone was in dry condition but there were traces of water deposits. He checked few things and suggested that needs to replace mother board as there was no signal coming to speaker receiver and this will cost ~17k.
For me replacing motherboard for such a huge cost isn't of any worth.
Any suggestion if it can be repaired in someway or shall I start to think about selling/exchanging it online.
Hello,
Last week my mother came to me with the H818 G4 dripping wet. She dropped it into the toilet, then thoroughly washed it with tap water and soap (!.... yeah... ), then tried multiple times to power it on until finally giving it to me few hours later to "at least save the data from it".
I put it in 99,9% isopropyl alcohol and held it there for a few hours. Then left it for ~30h in a warm place for all moisture to evaporate. Fully charged it. It seemed like it came back to life, with the only problem of showing some bubbles under the display (the isopropyl alcohol must have eaten some of the glue that holds the digitizer). Barely managed to copy the contacts to the SD card when the screen started to show some artefacts, 15s later completely turning black and unresponsive.
Then I took it apart to find the golden felt strip covering the screen ribbon still damp. I left the motherboard in alcohol for a few hours (there were whiteish oxidation spots all over) and ordered a new complete and refurbished screen for the H818 from a reputable ebay seller, thinking that the screen data ribbon and/or controller got shorted and toast.
Now with the new screen, it still won't turn on. It makes the power on sounds, but nothing else. I did a hard reset holding the power button pressed for a while with the battery off, and then it showed a completely white screen before turning black again.
What do you think it is wrong with it? Did the motherboard get toast?
PS: just retested it and with a sim inside it is receiving calls. It's just that the screen is fully "dead"...
Your going to need to remove oxidization with brush then a qtip and alcohol propyl that is near 100 percent....no 90 is not good enough
Then your going to need a lamp....with heat to dry it off, or maybe a blow dryer on cold air setting and let it sit
After that you really need a magnifying glass....if there is any white oxidation left your are still short circuiting (the phone won't power on properly)
This takes time and patience not dumping it in iproply, not letting it dry, and hoping your oxidized mothrerboard will boot
Guess what 90 percent means 90 percent alcohol 10 percent water
Are you sure u didn't damage the cable connector to screen or bent it any other way?
Before you waste your time you might want to show me your motherboard before things get sloppy and u really ruin it, or it it is ruined. In this case the oxidation turns brown (corrosion)....or it is simply not worth it because a components is damaged
There are absolutely no signs of burnt circuits on the motherboard, and no (longer any) visible signs of oxidation.
I've found the service manual, and looking at the schematics, I'd bet that it's either the DW8768 dc/dc converter or one of the surrounding capacitors/resistors that shorted and died. Replacing such small components is beyond my expertise and tooling, so it seems like I'll have to take it to someone...
ghostrider888 said:
There are absolutely no signs of burnt circuits on the motherboard, and no (longer any) visible signs of oxidation.
I've found the service manual, and looking at the schematics, I'd bet that it's either the DW8768 dc/dc converter or one of the surrounding capacitors/resistors that shorted and died. Replacing such small components is beyond my expertise and tooling, so it seems like I'll have to take it to someone...
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Are you sure all the solders are clean?
---------- Post added at 12:36 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:32 PM ----------
You might want to try one more time with a brush ....if things start flaking off...its not clean
You will then need a qtip again.
Something as small as a solder point will cause short circuits
The brush is key
I would tlit while your brushing it off into a dark surface so u can see where it is coming off and and clean area with qtip again
Last thing you can try is electrical contact cleaner.....clean all connectors with it. Automotive section has it. Ie. Screen cable
After that next step is throw it against the wall or bang it like tvs back in the day
No one is going to guranteee reflexing the board and solder points after a machine did it.....it would take some precise mouse hands .... no one has to play around and try and mimic what a robot did. Not worth it nor are parts available other than the power controller chip
Just came back from the shop, the guy said it's either (more likely) a filter that shorted from oxidation, or (less likely) the cpu got damaged from water ingress by the memory chip, as there are no signs of oxidation or burning.
He asked me to come back on Monday, as today is fully booked and he's not "comfortable with customers items sitting in the shop over the weekend". So I guess I'll find out on Monday...
Hi Team,
I love my phone and am not looking to change it,I was in a meeting with my client and my phone dropped in water while doing so, but I had immediately pulled it out and cleaned and switched it off without any further damage.
Just to let you know that I had a back cover for this also which would have protected it to a good shot, however i am more concerned about the front panel and bottom side of charging port speaker, mic and headphone jack.
I could not open it from back else i would have done that and just put that in the rice bag for about 36 hours or more. then i put it under the morning sunlight for about 20 minutes.
Due to the sun I believe that the back panel now near o the bottom side appears to be pulled out a bit.
I have not swtiched it on yet even once, however, I have again put it back in the rice bag.
Any helps here, what should I do and when do i need to turn it on to see any damages.
I do want to go to service center for experts to get it cleaned it inside. However due to lock down i can't do it.
Can anybody guide me what and how to do from here.
I am really not in a mood to get a new phone. There are a lot of stuff saved on the phone that I even don't even have the backup for.
Please help me with this ASAP!
Definitely something shorted in your phone, unfortunately we can't just guessing which part is shorted, usually some diodes, but it can also be an IC.
arif_kholid said:
Definitely something shorted in your phone, unfortunately we can't just guessing which part is shorted, usually some diodes, but it can also be an IC.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
Hi arif, I have just tried working on my phone yesterday and seems like it is working fine for now. It's juts that it s lagging a bit.
everything is functional. I guess I'll have to wait until something strange starts to happen.
Hopefully then lockdown is over and we can get it fixed permanently.