My fp4 took a dive in the toilet…I dried it in my boiler room for a few hours. Then it started and worked for an hour or two, but suddenly it didn’t start and it didn’t charge. I disassemble it and I could see drops in the camera. Even now after 48 h it doesn’t work (I’ve put it togheter again) . What should I do?
For info on dealing with water damage please consult our waterwiki .
Bonjour, en cas d’immersion, il faut enlever au plus vite la batterie, ensuite mettre l’appareil ouvert dans une boîte étanche avec du riz quelques jours.
Si des dégâts se sont fait par courts circuits avec la batterie, ça devient du dépannage électronique. Donc dans un GSM du remplacement de cartes !
No!
Évitez juste le contact direct du riz. Mais le riz dans la boîte absorbe l’humidité.
Still no, even if there is no direct contact, dust and small parts of the rice can immerse into the phone, There is no reason to use rice.
Rice needs direct contact to really absorb moisture (I had to learn that, too). Please simply stop giving the long debunked rice advice to users.
Le mieux c’est silicagel, mais a defaut, du riz seche tres bien. Je ne vends rien. C’est juste mon expérience.
Unfortunately water can stay very long on PCBs. Capilar effect will pull the water under components.
There is different ways to get this out again:
pushing it out through a solvent bath (replacement of water). The solvent should evaporatable easily. ( They did it here for a full pc: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jNm2g4Tkf3E)
putting it in vaccum chamber for a day (actually there is something managable at home nowadays: zwilling has vaccum tuppers [not tested by me but it should speed up the evaporation how much is a question mark] )
Another option is baking at 80degC however it might be that the screen does not like this. The battery definitley wont like it.
If you turned it on and then it died your chances are high that the device is dead.
The device has to be 100% dry internally when it is turned on. If it turns off after exposure to water contacts have been electrochemically modified. What you can try is to use contact spray to reduce it again but I’m not sure you can bring it back with that.
What should help is bakeing it at 260 degC to remelt the solder ideally with flux. But you can not do that with the whole phone so you would have to find the component which is broken.
If what I am writing here doesn’t tell you anything I would contact fairphone and/or a repair shop.
Thanks everyone for your help! @AnotherElk @Eric_De_Brueker @Incanus @Geron It’s still dead. The battery seams to be ok, at least its V is OK, but I can’t charge it when it’s in the phone. I will look into it again this weekend, havn’t got time until then. If I understand @Geron right, the phone is probably dead even if I buy new parts? or?
The problem is, nobody can foresee, what is damaged and what is not. There’s probably just a short in one of the modules, which can be changed easily, but there is a chance, that something is corroded on the core module.
Please stay in EN. If you dont feel in answering in EN use e.g. Deepl. com to translate and copy it.
I’m planing to order new parts. Don’t wanna buy a new phone. Which part should I start with? The display? Or can I send it to Fairphone for mending? When I try to charge I can hear /feel a vibration, but nothing happens (same when I try to start it). The display is completely dark. The only part that I could see got water in it, was the camera. About 1 inch didn’t got wet (lower part).
I would indeed try FP support. They can swap out parts to see what’s broken. They have the highest chance of getting it running again.
For posterity if anyone finds this and is the same situation:
You need to keep the thing powered off until completely dry. This you haven’t done and maybe you’ve damaged something. Maybe you’ll get lucky though
At this point what you need to do is disassemble the phone as per the guides and buy some desiccant and a sterlite container with a seal/gasket. You need to put the desiccant into the container, place the phone parts (not directly on the desiccant) in there with it and seal it up. Wait a few days for it to pull moisture out.
You want basically get it as dry as possible as fast as possible to avoid any corrosion from occurring. As it was water as long as something hasn’t been damaged most of it is probably salvageable. The display may not look correct anymore though but you can buy replacements for that.
Hi! Just want to let you know how it ended. I could get a phone from my job, a Samsung. It was quite alright! Eventually I send my FP4 to mend it. I got three options. 1. Fix it, 562E. 2. Send it back to me as it is, 39Euro. 3. Destroy and recycle No costs. Over 500Euro to fix an “old” cellphone…I hesitated what to do. But when I found a new FP4 on sale at Elgiganten.se for less money i bought it and the old was sent to recycling. Not what I really wanted but it was to expensive to fix it, sadly. Cordon was the company (French?) who contacted me and from who I got the options, the links to the page where I should choose what to do was partly in French, so I didn’t understand it. It was hard enough to understand everythiong in English for me as a Swedish citizen. That was my story, I’m happy with the FP4, it works OK, but not 100%…
For reference …