Water damaged iPhone 6s plus from jetskii.

Hey look at you! This is the first reasonable DIY water damage post that I’ve seen in a long time—opening it up and drying it out with a cloth, well done! Hopefully you disconnected the battery while it was drying, but still—-nice work. The rice thing, eh, let’s just pretend that never happened. Rice does nothing for phones—that whole thing is an old wive’s tale perpetuated by folks with wet phones where water never hit the logic board that are magically “saved” by rice.

So what to do now?

If you really did get the phone opened up fairly quickly and the battery disconnected AND you resisted the temptation to let a wet phone sit on a charger, then you have a reasonable chance that this phone just has focal damage.

Step one is to clean off any visible corrosion with toothbrush and alcohol. If you know a microsolderer, desolder the shields and give it an ultrasonic cleaning, if not—-carry on.

Next—you’ll need a known good housing—-another phone. Take out your logic board following an iFixit guide and install it into the known good housing—-if the phone boots, troubleshoot parts to figure out what you need to replace on your phone. If not—-then time to really make friends with your local microsolderer.