Phone meets dishwater...

Mijn probleem

Phone was sitting next to pan full of soapy water; during my cat's nightly rounds of illegally jumping onto the kitchen counter, he knocked a towel into the pan of soapy water. The towel then wicked water onto the counter..and into the iPhone, which was sitting on a stack of papers on the counter :(

Wet phone was discovered about 8h later; about a tablespoon of water dripped out when I picked it up. Turned it on briefly to power it down, as per Macworld's advice, and then put it in rice for 4.5 days.

Mijn oplossing

It's dead, Jim: I replaced battery, but all I did was to move from "unknown error 21" (battery) to "unknown error 9" during attempts to restore phone in DFU mode, so logic board is probably toast. Worth the $30 and couple of hours it took me to do the replacement, though--at least now I know that the phone was largely unrecoverable.

Mijn advies

Similar to another comment on the iFixit battery replacement guide, it would be nice to have a reverse guide with pics instead of just "perform steps in reverse".

I had problems with the tiny screws; the magnetized pentalobe and #0000 screwdrivers were great for taking the screws out but a pain for putting them back in, since I would repeatedly end up with the screwdriver head sticking to the wrong part of the screw--this was very frustrating. If I had to do it again, I'd buy a higher quality precision screwdriver repair kit that included both magnetized and un-magnetized screwdrivers.

My battery adhesion tape things broke almost immediately when I tried to pull them up, and the dental floss was a total loss--even "premium" dental floss was no match against the super grippy power of the adhesive. I ended up prying the old battery up with the blue plastic thing in the fixit kit--yes, it did bend, but fortunately it did not break, so no nasty chemical leakage.

I used a rimmed cookie sheet to contain my repair activities; this worked great overall and helped contain the screws when I dropped them.

I used the sticky side of a post-it note (held to the cookie sheet with tape or with another post-it note) to hold the different screws. This allowed me to just write the size down on the post-it note and then stick the tiny screws to the sticky part for retrieval later.

Thanks, iFixit, for being a great resource for those who want to DIY! (or who don't really want to DIY, but don't want to spend the $$ to have someone else do it...)