New hope for water-damaged phones [telecom]

Jan 21, 2015 1 Replies
New hope for water-damaged phones [telecom] open original image

Carmel entrepreneurs, Verizon revive water-damaged cellphones



by Jeff Swiatek



Using some old-fashioned workbench tinkering, Joel Trusty revived his wife's cellphone after a full cycle through the washing machine, only to get another challenge from her:



Make a business out of it, she suggested. The world needs a reliable fix for water-damaged cellphones.



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It's one thing removing the moisture from electronic circuit boards and components with heat etc., it's another to remove any residual muck left behind that can either cause corrosion or conductivity problems in the future.

If the process had the device dipped in a bath of circuit board cleaner I'd be more confident of it being a longer-term fix, but with the short lifespan of these devices it may not be an issue.

I once had a situation where a customer had a server sitting on the floor of a meeting room and it became unreliable after a couple of years, it turned out that the motherboard had a slimy film on it caused by six-monthly carpet steam cleaning which was sucked into the always running server by its fans, a good clean of the motherboard by the appropriate product fixed it but there would still have been long-term corrosion problems.

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