We get this call all the time: “Do you guys fix water damaged phones? I just dropped mine in the toilet.” Yes, the toilet is one of the top 5 reasons for water damage repair. A few others include “I dropped it in my coffee,” “My friend tipped her beer over on it,” and “I was taking a bath.” I’m not kidding about that last one. You’d be shocked how many people use their phone while taking a bath.
But I digress…
The point of this post is to let you know that fixing a water damaged phone is, at best, a 50/50 proposition. We know because we have made several different attempts to make this repair work and the best that we can do, or anyone else we’ve ever heard of, is about a 50% long-term success ratio.
It’s not uncommon for us to “fix” a water damage phone and everything seems to be working fine. Then 3 days (or 3 weeks) later, we get a call that the wifi is out… or the camera… or it won’t charge… or the phone just completely dies… And we could go on.
You get the idea.
Let’s start with how liquid damages a cell phone. There are three basic things it can do (and it can do 1, 2, or all 3 of these):
The biggest problem with water damage is this: It doesn’t all happen at once.
Think about a rusting car. Your car doesn’t rust the first winter you drive it on salt-covered roads. But after 10 years of winter driving you start to see rust. Then every year a little more rust. It develops slowly over time.
The same thing happens with water damaged cell phones – only instead of years we’re talking days or weeks. You can clean everything out using a sonic cleaner and electronics safe cleaning solution. That might remove 95% of all corrosion and debris. But that other 5% doesn’t stay put. Like rust on a car, it slowly starts to grow over the course of a week, a month, or 3 months. It will begin to spread until one day your wifi won’t work, your camera goes out, your phone stops charging, the screen goes black, or some combination of all those things.
This really depends on your objectives. If you expect to get back a fully functioning phone that works like new and continues to work like new for the next 2 years, then no. You shouldn’t get your water damaged phone fixed because you will likely be upset at the results.
Here are the two cases where I would say water damage repair is worth pursuing:
We do offer a service to fix water damage phones. However, we refer to it as data recovery because that is what we are offering. We don’t make any promises about the phones functionality immediately afterwards or any time in the future.
There is no warranty on our water damage repairs.
This is because our main goal is to bring your phone far enough back to life to get your data off the phone. Any additional functionality is great, but we can’t guarantee that will happen, or, if it does, that the functionality will last.
One thing we do promise on water damage phones: If we can’t get the phone operating well enough to get your data, then we won’t charge you anything.