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.
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.
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.
Use desiccants instead of rice and never power it on until completely dry
Use airflow instead of a desiccant. Much more effective.
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
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
And open it up and clean the shit out of it because non-distilled water leaves a lot of contaminants even after it dries.
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
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.
- Call me Lenny/Leni ( @shinigamiookamiryuu@lemm.ee ) English0•11 months ago
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.