this post was submitted on 13 Oct 2025
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Fun fact: that's not how humidity works. It, in fact, DOES help to get water to evaporate by forcing the local humidity around the phone to stay low. Otherwise you may as well say all the people doing 3D printing that use desiccant to keep water out of their filaments are fools, too.
What it won't do is magically erase any gunk or minerals that were in the water that can short out traces on unprotected PCBs and chips even with the water gone.
So, yes, it is not magic that can fix any phone that saw water. Though it absolutely helps to get the water out of the phone. ... I mean, unless you live in a desert where the humidity should already be sufficiently low most days.
Sure, but rice is a shitty desiccant. If it weren't, it would cook easier and we would ship things with packets of rice rather than silica gel.
Silica gel is a great desiccant. Just because rice cannot match something basically designed for the task, doesn't make it awful.
You might as well be saying, "but my horse cannot run fast! He's always behind Secretariat!"
It makes it awful for the purpose of drying wet electronics. It actually impedes the drying process by preventing air from circulating. Plus rice is typically dusty, and you don't want rice dust in your damp electronics.
You'll have a dryer device much faster if you just point a fan at it.
That depends on your humidity. As I already said, if you're in a desert that's normally dry enough...
If you're not in a desert, though, you'll have to dry the desiccant for it to have an actually significant effect. Though that's true regardless of which desiccant.
Within the phone, general relative humidity is FAR more important than airflow.
Right but none of that makes rice a good enough desiccant to be more effective than airflow. I live in a very humid environment and an hour or so under a fan is sufficient to dry electronics.
lol no. Dried desiccant in a bag will absolutely murder any fan in a humid environment.
An actual desiccant, yes. Rice isn't that.
By definition, yes. Yes it is. It's just not amazing at it.
Good point. I'll use diatomaceous earth next time.
Dammit - now I'm cringing at the thought of datomaceous earth in the USB port!
Thank goodness DE isn't electrically conductive. It would definitely still be awful - the final boss of getting sand in your phone charging port.
Is this how I debug my phone?
Rice is literally one of the easiest things to cook on the planet.
We probably don't use rice for shipping because if it did get wet it would get moldy, unlike sciatica. Doesn't mean it isn't effective.
Dealing with humidity is one thing, but it's terrible at drawing "whole" water out of something.
And it's not the water that's the problem, it's like you said, it's the gunk and minerals it leaves behind.
Isopropyl alcohol will push water out of any cracks and crevices, if you're able to submerge bare boards in it. If you do it before the minerals have a chance to dry and corrode, it will get pushed out with the water.
Again untrue whatever you think is "whole" water, any dessicant will absolutely undoubtedly help with evaporation.
Not every person is tech savvy enough to open boards. Advice for most novices is still put phone between dessicant to get water out of the device is valid and good advice.
Would using isopropyl alcohol be better option? Sure it is. but telling my aunt to do it, and device will probably die because she doesn't know how to handle pcbs anyway. I'd much rather just advice using dessicant and hope mineral residue doesn't sort anything. And I'll continue with that advice forever.
But it doesn't help with evaporation. It actually prevents it by preventing air from circulating.
Bro you need to understand how relative humidity works. Evaporation is dependent on both air circulation and humidity gradiant. Now out of the two humidity gradiant is by quite a strong factor to the point where you can have very high air circulation of 100% relative humidity and you would see very little evaporation. Compare that a 20% relative humidity and no air circulation and you will see much more evaporation until relative humidity reaches 100%.
So what a dessicant does is take the relative humidity down by quite a lot in a sealed container and that forces evaporation quite a bit, and it will continue to dry the phone until relative humidity reaches 100% which will only happen once rice/desiccant has absorbed all the water it possible can at the given temperature and pressure.