the purity of the water is also an issue, especially on optics, residue can be left as the water evaporates.
if something has been immersed, for some amount of time, it probably won’t get any wetter. if the item was in water that had something dissolved in it then it would probably be good to dunk in deionized water a bunch of times before attempting to dry it.
Yes, alcohol will mix with water, but that doesn’t mean it won’t displace it. You’ll get out most of the water, say 95% of it, just by shaking it or whatever. Then you dunk it in alcohol, and the alcohol and water mix together, and you end up with a solution of 5% water and 95% alcohol. Then you shake most of that solution out, and you’re left with 5% of a solution that’s 5% water. Let the alcohol evaporate out of that, and you now have something that’s much drier than it was before.
Quoth Gbro:
What a lot of cell phones do have is a little sticker inside that changes color the first time it gets wet. That way, when you take the phone in for repairs, if it’s changed color, they can claim that it was water damage, which isn’t covered under the warranty. Unfortunately, the stickers can also change color gradually just from being in a humid climate.
I dropped my cell phone into a tumbler of bourbon, and the dang thing stopped working.
Oh. Maybe I should switch my drink choice to pure ethanol. Do they sell that at Bevmo?
legal beverage alcohol tops at 95%. if you drink it straight it will suck the water out of what it touches on the way down, a very strange feeling.
with the power off i don’t think that any alcohol is less harmful to a device than water. some alcohols would certainly be more harmful than water. both have to evaporate out. without the device open to the air i don’t think there would be a lot of difference.
any thing damaged by a short exposure to water is damaged already.
if the water has things dissolved in it then those substances need to be rinsed out, drying or having them inside for a long time would be damaging.
I’ve laundered and tumble-dried my motorola pager multiple times in the last few years, and it STILL would not die.
You don’t need 100%. Alcohols of the nature being discussed form an azeotrope with water. They will draw the water off when they evaporate.
I think that’s a practical limit, not a legal one: It’s much, much harder to produce (and maintain) alcohol at greater than 95% purity, so nobody ever does so unless it’s really important (like in some laboratory settings). But for beverage purposes, 95% Everclear is basically just as good as 100% laboratory ethanol, so getting the last 5% isn’t worth it.
Id love to see a moisture sensor on portable electronics that immediately cuts power once its tripped. Im sure it will lead to a lot of false positives, but it would save a lot of electronics. With that you just need to waterproof the sensor and its own little circuit and not deal with the costly and bulky solution of waterproofing the whole device. Heck, it could be built into the battery.
Second the notion of getting the batteries out ASAP. I bathed my faithful HP32S calculator in the Pacific Ocean (yes, in salt water), and didn’t take the batteries out. I soaked it in fresh water, but the keyboard contacts still corroded. I did find an on-line repair shop that was able to fix it (which kept me from having to commit seppuku) and they gave me the advice about battery removal. Causes horrendous electrolysis.
Not including the postage, the repair bill was less than 50 bucks, which I thought was extremely reasonable. Particularly as those wonderful 32Ss aren’t available any longer.
That is because you laundered it for the express purpose of getting a full nights sleep:D,
Motorola has sealed them up a lot more than the old minitor II.
The VISAR 2-way would die when a dark cloud passed by:dubious:
But then again the remove battery information is great to know, Thanks all!
water mixed with the alcohol isn’t drawn off, it evaporates along with the alcohol. if you mix 95% ethyl alcohol with water you get more dilute alcohol.
i don’t think that with out heat or being open to the air the evaporation of the alcohol is different from water.
what production methods for 100% are beverage legal?
Alcohol has a much higher vapor pressure. It will certainly draw water off as it evaporates. Chemists constantly use this technique to get “dry” glassware. You don’t have to take my word for it though. Take two identical wet glasses then submerse one in alcohol. I guarantee the one you submersed in in alcohol will dry much faster.
Of course I had to put “dry” in quotes because it’s not dry enough to do water sensitive chemistry in but neither is anything open to air.
in your case the glassware is open to the air that makes a big difference. i said i thought it would make no difference (i mean in a practical sense for electronics) if it wasn’t open to the air.
Won’t you have to pull it out first?
Well, yes, but I thought that was obvious enough to leave out. I could have extended the entire experimental instructions out to a paragraph if I wanted to be thorough.
It has to be at least somewhat open to the air. Water was able to get into it in the first place, wasn’t it?
A friend called me Monday afternoon in a great panic. He had just gone for a quick swim in the ocean failing to notice that the key/security transmitter for his VW Golf was in his pocket.
I told him to get the batteries out of it and get it into fresh water ASAP. He didn’t know how to get it apart.
By the time he got it to me, it had been at least three hours since it’s dunking and I didn’t have much hope for it. I did get it apart and and surprised to find that the batteries still had some life in them. I soaked everything in fresh water and scrubbed the circuit board gently with an old toothbrush then tossed everything (not the batteries) into 95% ethanol.
After a while I blew it all out with dry compressed air and finished it off wth a warm hair dryer.
After all that, it was still dead. :mad:
My friend went home resigned to visit the VW dealer the next day. He called me about an hour later to say that all the functions on the remote had started working.
Salt water is usually death to electronics.
In the Aubrey/Maturin novels, whenever the doctor wound up falling into the sea, he would clean out his watch by dipping it in “sweet oil.” That wasn’t electronic, however, but rather a mechanical device about the size of his fist.