Studies suggest that nearly 1 in 5 Americans will drop their phone into the toilet at some point, but common tips for “fixing” a water damaged phone could do more harm than good, cellphone repairman Adrian Reddix told Port City Kiwanis this week. 

“I see a phone dropped in the toilet two or three times a week,” said Reddix, owner of ARTech cellphone repair.

Most people assume that putting a phone in a bag of rice will help dry out the components, but in actuality it does more harm, he said. Online postings often called “life hacks” that suggest such methods have only made things worse.

“Rice is the worst thing you can do to a phone actually. If you think water is bad on a phone, starch is so much worse. It gets in there and does a lot of damage to the solder and the components get very corroded,” Reddix said. “Sometimes you can get lucky and the rice will work, sometimes. But most of the time it does more damage than it does good.”

For a phone to function properly after water damage, it usually needs a new battery and the circuitry needs to be scrubbed with alcohol, he said.

One woman who recently brought her phone to Reddix’s shop had placed it in the oven for two hours on a low setting after her daughter dropped it in a bucket of dirty mop water. Afterward the woman sealed the phone in a bag of rice for two weeks, making the cellphone unfixable

“It’s a recipe for a very rusty, bad phone,” Reddix said.

About 10 percent of phones that come into the shop suffer from liquid damage — including being dropped in the toilet. One of the worst cases of liquid damage Reddix has seen was a woman whose 3-year-old daughter had put the mother’s cellphone in a jar of applesauce. The mother didn’t discover the phone for about a week.

“It was beyond repair. It smelled nice, but that was about it,” Reddix said.

While liquid damage is common, people find all sorts of ways to damage their phones. Reddix has had customers who inadvertently ran, stepped on or otherwise crushed their phones.  One man had duct taped his iPhone to a dirt bike before it fell off and was run over.

“Seventy percent of the repairs I see are broken glass, broken digitizers or broken LCDs from people dropping phones or sitting down on them,” Reddix said.