Posts Tagged how to

How to rescue an iPod Touch that’s been dropped in water

The patient

Jane and I both love our iPod Touches, the iPhone for people who don’t want or can’t have an iPhone. Jane in particular has been using hers loads during her pregnancy. She’s got a lot to lug around without adding a laptop.

So it was rather awful when she announced grim-faced at the weekend that she’d dropped it in water. I won’t say which body of household water she dropped it in. She had it in a back pocket of some baggy pregnancy jeans, you can use your imagination.

It was only in the (clean, I hasten to add!) water for about 10 seconds, but that was enough for the water to get in through the interface port and kill the thing stone dead.

Not good.

We left it sitting on the boiler for a day, hoping it would dry out, but it still remained steadfastly brick-like. I started looking up stuff on the internet, and came across the old chestnut of leaving a water-soaked mobile or other gadget in a bowl of dried rice to “draw out the moisture”. How this is supposed to work, I have no idea, does the water deep inside the gadget somehow know the rice is outside, and wanders out to have a look?

If rice were some kind of high-powered dessicant I think they’d put a Vesta risotto in the bottom of hi-fi boxes, but they seem to stick with those little sachets of silica gel.

(As an aside, have you ever wondered what would actually happen if you ate one of those little sachets? I can only imagine it would be something like when Jerry tricked Tom into eating alum powder and his mouth puckered up like the end of a party balloon.)

Anyway, in desperation we tried the kill-or-cure solution: cooking it.

We put the oven on a low heat (about 50), with the door slightly ajar to allow the moisture to escape and stop the temperature getting too high (in theory). The iPod was positioned near the back, with the hole for the interface cable facing the fan at the back of the oven.

And left it for about an hour.

After removing it with oven gloves, and allowing it to cool, I tried the power button. Miraculously, the boot screen appeared.

And wouldn’t go away. There was also a kind of mottled pattern behind the display. Looking kind of like a lot of moisure behind a display would look.

So tonight I returned the iPod to the oven for another hour-long stint at 75 degrees C.

It seems to have worked! The screen is back to normal, and it’s now sitting up in bed and taking fluids. Well, when I say fluids I mean electricity, it’s learnt its lesson there.