Accidentally dropped USB dongle in water!!! What to do to give best chance of not damaging it?
by linuxuser371038 from LinuxQuestions.org on (#6R2S9)
Stupid mistake.
I live in my van, and a very small one at that, so everything is on top of itself so I have to move one thing away before getting another out.
I keep my electrical components in the dumbest place really, right above a bowl of water I use for washing, but had not bothered to find a better place for them.
The bowl has a cover which I tell myself to put on before doing something else but I got lazy on that front.
So I was pulling out the drawer rearranging stuff at the back and pulled it too far which caused the whole shelf to crash to the floor and at the same time some of the electrical stuff bounced into the bowl of water; One of which was the 4g dongle!
This is especially troublesome because I had a hard time finding this one as they don't make them any more (yes they have the same model for sale still but not the older firmware before they changed functionality). I had to hunt around to find it and got one off gumtree 2nd hand so it would not be easy to replace.
here is an image to know what I am talking about.
It must have laid about 50% submerged for maybe 5-10 seconds before I noticed it was in there and whipped it out.
The lid was on it iirc, thankfully.
It seems pretty well sealed but I don't really know how much ingress there was without taking it apart. I did have a little go at undoing a screw to see but it was not that obvious how to get it to open up plus I was not sure if opening it would be more detrimental as explained below.
Now I am not sure what the best way is to prevent the water getting into the parts? Should I just leave it without taking it apart or should I try and open it up so the water can air out? I thought taking it apart might actually be worse if it meant water could ingress more into the internals. Conversely I thought that if water is already in there will it just stay in there forever since plastic does not let water out?
I live in my van, and a very small one at that, so everything is on top of itself so I have to move one thing away before getting another out.
I keep my electrical components in the dumbest place really, right above a bowl of water I use for washing, but had not bothered to find a better place for them.
The bowl has a cover which I tell myself to put on before doing something else but I got lazy on that front.
So I was pulling out the drawer rearranging stuff at the back and pulled it too far which caused the whole shelf to crash to the floor and at the same time some of the electrical stuff bounced into the bowl of water; One of which was the 4g dongle!
This is especially troublesome because I had a hard time finding this one as they don't make them any more (yes they have the same model for sale still but not the older firmware before they changed functionality). I had to hunt around to find it and got one off gumtree 2nd hand so it would not be easy to replace.
here is an image to know what I am talking about.
It must have laid about 50% submerged for maybe 5-10 seconds before I noticed it was in there and whipped it out.
The lid was on it iirc, thankfully.
It seems pretty well sealed but I don't really know how much ingress there was without taking it apart. I did have a little go at undoing a screw to see but it was not that obvious how to get it to open up plus I was not sure if opening it would be more detrimental as explained below.
Now I am not sure what the best way is to prevent the water getting into the parts? Should I just leave it without taking it apart or should I try and open it up so the water can air out? I thought taking it apart might actually be worse if it meant water could ingress more into the internals. Conversely I thought that if water is already in there will it just stay in there forever since plastic does not let water out?