cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/16155441
rice absorbs moisture.
Curious if this works to recover notebooks or other electronics.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
I usually find that ballpoint pens work poorly if paper has gotten wet, if it dries though you’ll probably be able to keep writing in it, best to throw it out though tbf