A friend reports that her iPad got wet when its waterproof case failed. She’s been saving all of her silica gel packets for a while now, and wants to use the desiccants to dry the thing out. It hasn’t failed completely, but it does flash on and off, so it doesn’t look real good.
What’s the best way to use the desiccant packs to accomplish this dehumidification? I suspect that the powdery residue from rice wouldn’t be very good for a device such as this one. Is supplementing the desiccant with warm air (like from a blow dryer) likely to be beneficial?
Unless those desiccant packs have been stored in an air-tight container, they are probably fully saturated. So the first step may be to cook them.
(I recently had a tablet computer get wet in the bottom of a roll bag. I disassembled the thing and dried every component on it (that wasn’t under a soldered metal cover) both by blotting them and blowing warm (but not hair-dryer hot) air over them. No luck, the sucker was dead.)
You need to immediately take it apart and remove the battery. (Which Apple doesn’t make easy.) And you definitely don’t “test it” or anything until it is completely dry.
Desiccants, rice, etc. are useless. Swabs, tissue and a source of warmth done right away might work.