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