Cellphone in the Toilet

[Cookie]

Cellphone in the Toilet
It could happen to anyone: you dropped your cellphone in the toilet. Take the battery out immediately, to prevent electrical short circuits from frying your phone’s fragile internals. Then, wipe the phone gently with a towel, and shove it into a jar full of uncooked rice.

 

[Achutch]

A fall in a brook

Cookie,

On Halloween 2005, I was carrying a box of lily bulbs across the snow covered foot bridge between my camp and the neighbor's property where I had parked the truck (freak snowstorm brought down 2 apple trees across my road), when I slipped and fell into the brook (Google the Huntington River in Vermont and the infamous Huntington Gorge). My cell phone, pager, wallet, and yours truly got soaked. I went under water and had to grab the rocks on the side to pull myself out.

I was more worried about the cell phone and pager, both new that year, than I was about anything else. I don't know why, but both of them made it and are still in use today. Maybe it was because I set them both on the defrost ports inside the truck and turned the heat and fan on high.

The pager got soaked again the following year while I was trying to unplug a culvert in the smaller brook on my property that had stopped up during a rain storm. Water was going all over the road, and while trying to unplug it with an old shovel (in which the handle broke). I slipped, and once again ended up getting soaked, the pager along with it. It survived again, I don;t know why.

Thankfully neither device has ended up in the toilet. But when I fell into the Huntington River, I felt like something being flushed down a TOTO!!!

Pager, cell phone, and the curator of the Antique China Hutch remain alive and well!

achutch in Vermont

 

[Sponsor]

 

[Furd]

This trick won't hurt anything, but most cell phones will be toast a nanosecond or two after hitting the water.

I suggest that the rice be tossed in the garbage and not cooked and eaten after this experiment.

 

[Macman]

Who would want to carry, hold, or use a cellphone that had been in a toilet?

 

[Cass]

It is common knowledge that rice absorbers at least 2 X it volume of water...if it fell in a toilet and the battery was removed it would make all the sense in the world to under stand that it would dry out the phone by causing all the water trapped in the phones crevices to migrate into the rice....I would guess that the warmer it was the faster it would be absorbed...rice placed into a salt shaker will prevent the salt from clumping in high humidity conditions by absorbing the vapors...this is elementary science.

There is no way any one can know how long a cell phone would have to be under water before it was ruined...except maybe the Great Carnack...

 

[hj]

phone

IF you turn the phone off immediately, or it is already turned off, and you do not turn it back on for a day or so, it may survive the dunking. There is a small dot under the battery that changes color when the phone gets wet so they can tell if the failure is under warranty or not.

 

[Donn2390]

Cookie,

On Halloween 2005, I was carrying a box of lily bulbs across the snow covered foot bridge between my camp and the neighbor's property where I had parked the truck (freak snowstorm brought down 2 apple trees across my road), when I slipped and fell into the brook (Google the Huntington River in Vermont and the infamous ). My cell phone, pager, wallet, and yours truly got soaked. I went under water and had to grab the rocks on the side to pull myself out.

I was more worried about the cell phone and pager, both new that year, than I was about anything else. I don't know why, but both of them made it and are still in use today. Maybe it was because I set them both on the defrost ports inside the truck and turned the heat and fan on high.

The pager got soaked again the following year while I was trying to unplug a culvert in the smaller brook on my property that had stopped up during a rain storm. Water was going all over the road, and while trying to unplug it with an old shovel (in which the handle broke). I slipped, and once again ended up getting soaked, the pager along with it. It survived again, I don;t know why.

Thankfully neither device has ended up in the toilet. But when I fell into the Huntington River, I felt like something being flushed down a TOTO!!!

Pager, cell phone, and the curator of the Antique China Hutch remain alive and well!

achutch in Vermont

After reading your story about the snow and the cold, I wondered why you would want to live there, then I saw your pictures and I knew...!

 

[Achutch]

WOW! It was a surprise to open up this thread and find photos of Huntington Gorge and the link to it added to my post. Thanks, Terry!

I don't know why the cell phone and pager survived that dunking, but they did.

The part of the river where my property is located is well to the south of the gorge, near the mountains where it originates from. I have to literally drive through it to reach the camp; no bridge, but it's a solid rock bottom, and under normal conditions, it's no problem. But in heavy rains or in the early spring, it rises quite a bit. I've once seen it high enough to slap the bottom of the foot bridge after an afternoon of heavy thunderstorms.

Here is a photo of the pool where I landed the day that I slipped off the bridge. There was quite a current, and my jacket weighted me down when it got wet. I remember my face going under and feeling myself being forced downstream. Thankfully those roots were close enough to grab onto so I could regain my footing.

It is amazing how powerful water can be.

achutch