As I run a repair shop, I get asked many times with following question:
“Does putting water damaged phone in a bag of rice help?
Answer is Yes and NO.

Rice does help a little. Many friend would tell you with wet phones is to use uncooked rice. I even heard that on Radio telling people to put their phone in dry rice after vacuming out the moisture!

Theoretically this would make sense, as it appears to do the same thing as Molecular Sieve while being readily available to anyone with a well-stocked kitchen.
Unfortunately, rice is not an effective solution for a couple of reasons. Rice has a low capacity for atmospheric absorption. It may absorb the liquid water on the case, but the real problem are the tiny drops inside. Also, as rice sits on your shelf, and the shelf at the store before you bought it, in unsealed boxes and bags it slowly sucks in water out of the atmosphere around it, reaching it’s absorption capacity.

Here is some pictures of what happens when tried to dry themselves.

Those white stuffs are hard water corrosion which eats the copper of the connectors. If these corrosion is not cleaned properly, the phone eventually will stop working as there is no way for the phone and the parts transmit the circuit.

Picture on the left is the logic board of the water damaged phone that was brought in after the phone stopped working after the customers thought they saved the phone by putting it in the rice or using hair dryer after water spillage and used it for a while.

As you can see, the corrosion was not cleaned, and it corroded the copper pins of the connector, thus repairing this board impossible.

This connector shows heavy corrosion of the connector. With this kind of corrosion, the phone will not work definitely. Again, these are the samples of the phone which the users were trying to save the phone by putting it into a bag of rice. If the water splashed a little to the phone, rice will be a big help, but when you have a phone submerged under the water, you will find yourself saving from buying another phone if you take the phone to the repair center who does water damaged treatment.

Water damage treatment takes a special knowledge of the schematic and circuit board, not to mention a special tools to clean and dry it. Please contact your local repair shop to find out if they do water damage repairs.

Good Luck.

www.ifixsmartphone.com