cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16155441
rice absorbs moisture.
Curious if this works to recover notebooks or other electronics.
Use desiccants instead of rice and never power it on until completely dry
Yeah the rice is only going to get tiny particles of rice inside the device and otherwise not assist in drying out even slightly making the issue worse
Use airflow instead of a desiccant. Much more effective.
Stuff like silica gel can work fine, but you need to use a lot of it in an enclosed space (even better if you can circulate warm air through it) but, yeah, airflow does work just fine pretty much anywhere.
Maybe where you live haha
It works in Louisiana, so it’s not climate dependent.
The humidity is near 100% most of the year here
Same with Louisiana. There were several times when it looked like it was raining, but it was just so humid water was condensing into droplets.
Like fog?
No, there wasn’t any fog. It seemed like it was drizzling, but it wasn’t
And open it up and clean the shit out of it because non-distilled water leaves a lot of contaminants even after it dries.
Just an important bit of context: Water doesn’t damage most electronics, especially not the solid-state hardware in a modern computer.
What does damage is short circuiting the electronics, which water can do.
As long as you cut power ASAP, remove and dry the battery (the most water-sensitive part of most computers), and make sure that everything is 100% dry before powering it back on again, you should be good, no matter how wet things got
This assumes that your electronics are wet with water. If you poured something more sinister into your computer, like sugary soda or beer, you probably need to rinse things off with alcohol and distilled water (therefore making things a LOT more wet) before drying it out and powering it back on.
The caveats are:
- LCD screens: they have lots of layers. Water between layers should be avoided if at all possible, as it will likely degrade the picture quality.
- Optical drives: moving greased parts with high precision optics and microscopic tolerances. Any dissolving of lubricant or deposition of residue could compromise the function of the drive.
- Hard Drives: should be sealed quite well with inert gas, but if any water gets in, it will fail catastrophically and will require disassembly for any chance of data recovery.
- Batteries: They can’t be turned off, and can explode if shorted out.
- Oils: if you spill oil into a computer, it probably won’t short anything out (depending on the oil), but you’re going to have to completely take whatever you dumped oil into apart and meticulously clean it with a toothbrush and dish soap.
What does damage is short circuiting the electronics, which water can do.
And corrosion, which water can catalyze, which is why your suggested steps should be done ASAP. Great write up though
In particular, salt water (ocean or even pickle brine) will need to be cleaned out. It leaves condictive salt film behind.
Rice is a terrible desiccant. Yes, it absorbs water when boiled
If you want to save your electronics after they’ve taken a bath, here’s how to do so.
- Turn it off and disconnect from power ASAP. If you can, pull the battery.
- Dry as much standing water as possible
- Set a fan to blow on it for a day or two.
Airflow is the solution to drying something out, and rice blocks airflow.
My entire family’s logic:
_Drop electronic devices in water
_Pick it up
_Swing it a few times
_Immediately and furiously try to turn it on to see if it’s still work.
Immediately remove the battery/power, then use a bunch of silica gel packs that have been dried out instead of rice: They’re commonly available and won’t get into things and cause problems down the road. Alternately, just take it apart as much as you can and set it in front of a fan to dry out.
Keep in mind, it might be too late but it’s worth a try.
If you really want to try and save it and are tech savvy, try tearing it down and giving it an isopropyl alcohol bath but if you aren’t, it’ll do more harm than good. Keep in mind ISO can damage some parts.
Keep in mind ISO can damage some parts.
I’ve never had isopropyl damage anything - what kinds of things are sensitive to it (so I know what to lookout for)?
Now acetone on the other hand…do NOT use it to clean plastic unless you know what you’re doing, lol.
Acrylic for sure, I think it can damage some screens too. Acetone will definitely mess up a lot of stuff.
I had no idea acrylic and ISO didn’t get along. Good info.
I use ISO to strip the acrylic paint from my miniatures when I fail at their paint job.
I learned the hard way lol, glad you can learn from my mistake!
Put the laptop in a sealed container along with a container of Damp-rid. Wait about 3 days, and the laptop will be dry*.
* this does not mean that the laptop will work
Assuming it is a paper notebook, the determining factor is how soaked the pages are. If it is too wet, they may start to meld together making the notebook unusable.
The best thing to do is to actually heat up the book. I’ve cooked mine in the oven at very low heat, which allows it to dry out fast. My dad does a variant of the rice method for wet books where he fills a bag with rice and then places it in the sun. However, if the notebook is too wet and the pages are sticking together, doing either of these will instead turn your notebook into a solid block of wood. Instead, your best course of action is to try and fan out the pages by individually peeling them apart, then putting the splayed-open notebook somewhere moderately warm where it can slowly dry out under your careful observation.
The two things water does are
- act as a short circuit, since it’s conductive and spreads over everything rapidly
- leave residue/corrode, coincidentally doing the opposite by blocking circuits over time
You can extract all the water, but unless it’s producing vague bios errors, there’s no way of knowing what has failed. Similarly for corrosion, you would need to thoroughly pull apart and clean off residue.
There is, however,.a chance everything’s fine like the device wasn’t powered on at the time to have voltage short circuit across components and just needs a clean.
So, I think your success rate with drying out notebooks would indicate that it’s more effort than it’s worth.
Typically the damage is done.
It’s when corrosion sets in things get unfixable. If you get to its insides before then some IPA and a decent scrub with something like toothbrush can clean it up.
The exception to this would probably only really be the battery and yeah that should be disconnected as the first step.
IPA will likely ruin your laptop screen, so be careful.
True I’ve had screens on smaller devices go very distorted for a few days after ipa was used elsewhere. They did actually clear and go back to normal mind you and I’ve never actually went near an actual screen with ipa intentionally.
I mean the soft screens of laptop monitors. IPA will destroy them.
I get it, ipa is good and fixes surprisingly a lot but only ever use it on boards, components and things like buttons and connectors. Keep it away from screens and batteries.
I’ve always done this honestly maybe I didn’t explain well. It does do a miracle job on water damage if done early enough though.
I know of this one time (last year) a window that was purposely kept shut was opened by a visitor and the notebook was rained upon. completely soaked. Kept in rice for about a month (changing the rice on some schedule), it booted up fine for a while. then died completely after a few weeks.
rice is only going to absorb water if it’s directly touching the water. if it were good it absorbing humidity, you wouldn’t be able to store it almost indefinitely in burlap as we’ve been doing for centuries.
I don’t remember what I did afterward anymore, but I did once have a laptop get wet getting caught in a downpour in backpack that wasnt waterproof. It needed a new power supply.
No, this method did not help. Once water touches what it’s supposed to, it can’t untouch.
This isn’t strictly true, besides the fact that using rice will only do more harm than good.
