My wife once accidentally wrapped her cell phone inside a baby shower gift but of course it turned up with the unwrapping. Last Oct, she misplaced her phone inside the house and we never could find it until today when she was getting something from the bottom of the freezer and found it. I don’t know if will work. Should be interesting to find out. lol.
Thaw it (do you thaw phones?) in a zip lock bag. The problem isn’t going to be the freezing, it’s going to be the condensation that forms on it. If it’s in an airtight bag, that’s less likely to happen, even better if you can vacuum seal it.
If it’s already warming up, I’d suggest putting a fan on it to help keep it dry. Beyond that you could try the rice thing, but I have no idea how well that does or doesn’t work.
Also, if it has a removable battery, remove it.
Except for the battery, I don’t see any reason it wouldn’t still work. Once frozen, the duration shouldn’t really influence whether the phone lives or dies. I’ve left my phone in the car overnight in freezing temps and I’m using it to write this message now.
I can’t be the only person who opened the thread just because they were curious how a cell phone gets left in a freezer for half a year.
Let it thaw out, then let it dry out for a few days. The most important thing is to get the battery out of the phone. Unfortunately, many phones these days do not have batteries that can be easily removed.
Rice is a mild desiccant, but as a practical matter it isn’t going to do anything useful. People put their phone in rice and it works afterwards, so it must be the rice, right? No. If you had built a shrine to the Flying Spaghetti Monster on your kitchen counter and laid your phone on top of that, it would have been just as effective as the rice.
But, unlike other internet remedies, the rice doesn’t do any harm, so I’ve given up on telling people how useless the rice is. If it makes you feel better to stick your phone in a bag of rice, go for it.
The battery may be fine too, as long as you warm it up before attempting to charge it. Though if the battery was allowed to drain completely before or during storage, it may not have survived.
As others said, let it thoroughly dry out. I would recommend putting it in a sealed (zip-lock) bag first before warming it up, so warm air doesn’t get into the phone and cause condensation. Once it’s warmed up, take it out of the bag, or put some desiccant packs in the bag, and let it further dry out. Maybe even put it in a warm (not hot) environment, like an oven with the oven light on (oven heater turned off, obviously).
In my experience rice and other passive dessicants are largely useless. Forced air drying, preferably with as warm and dry air as can be produced without being too close to the heat source and damaging the phone is ideal. A powerful stream of air like a mattress inflater or similar output vs a house fan is also useful as the ports you can force air into on the phone are tiny. Assuming the battery is nonremovable it’s a crap shoot as to whether you will fry something during drying. Under no circumstances try to charge up the phone or turn the phone on until it has been force dried and then left in front of a warm fan for at least a day or two.
The main problem is moisture inside the phone that condensed to water then froze to ice when the phone was being frozen initially. Being in the freezer for months is worse than being in a car overnight since there would be a lot of air exchange as the freezer was opened and closed that would have allowed additional moisture to get inside the phone’s tiniest crevices and freeze. That ice is going to turn to water immediately when you take the phone out and it will be trapped in a lot of places in the phone airflow cannot get to. The phone has to be brought up to a warm enough but not damaging temperature, where the water will evaporate and gas out. That may take more time than you think. In many cases at least a few days.
It should be okay. Here in the great white north it’s pretty common for phones to get really cold - like, colder than the inside of your freezer. Workmen wear their phones in holsters externally, and the phones can drop to ambient temperature, which could be -40.
I am an amateur astronomer, and I’ve had phones, laptops, and of course the telescope electronics out when it’s -20. They’re fine afterwards. I am careful not to put the caps on the telescope optics until they warm up to prevent trapping the moisture between the cap and lens, and I’ll wipe down external surfaces if there is visible frost on them (except for the glass), and everything is always fine.
I’ve had my phone go dead because it got too cold, but it’s always fine when it warms up again.
The caveat is if the phone has built up a whole bunch of frost from the freezer - I’d scrape all that off and wipe it dry before it fully warms up. It also couldn’t hurt to put the phone in a bag with some dessicant packets while it warms up if you’re really worried about it.
Nope, you’re not. And I thought my ADD was bad.
And I opened up this thread because I currently have a Bluetooth earpiece in my freezer. Because it seemed like it was less likely to harm it than baking it, and rubbing alcohol didn’t seem to be penetrating enough to be effective.
But I sealed it in a Ziplock bag before putting it in, with as little air in the bag as I could. Doubtless there’s still some moisture in there, but hopefully not too much.
What does effective mean here?
I’m guessing the wife is in sales and uses the phone to make cold calls.
I have no reason to doubt you but now I’m curious… is this your opinion or has there been testing/studies to prove/disprove this?
God, I have done this exact thing. Frozen phone never worked again. I’m sure I wasn’t careful enough thawing and drying. I didn’t take the battery out. But there was the time I dropped my phone in the pool. Took kids a few minutes to fish it out. Opened it took the battery out. Let it dry on the picnic table. It was working by later that afternoon. So, you never can tell.
Seconded, sounds like hes trying to kill something.
:smack:
You know that little rubber horn piece, the part that actually goes into your ear? Turns out that at least four bedbugs can fit inside that thing. Ugh.
Find My iPhone has saved us several times when a phone was misplaced in our house.
Yes - mostly the ones whose model name starts with “i” and ends with a number.
It’s most brands now. None of the phones I’ve had in the past few years (Samsung, LG, HTC) had user-removable batteries.