My phone went through the washing machine. What can be saved?

It happens more than you’d think. A phone in a coat pocket, a full cycle at forty degrees, and a very bad moment at the other end.

What you do in the first few minutes makes a real difference, so let’s start there.

Right now, before anything else

1. Don’t turn it on. This is the important one. Water plus power is what destroys the electronics. If it’s off, leave it off. If it’s on, turn it off.
2. Don’t plug it in to charge. Same reason, and worse.
3. Don’t press buttons or shake it — you’re just moving water around inside.
4. Take the SIM out if you can. Dry it on a cloth; SIMs usually survive.
5. Dry the outside and stand it upright somewhere warm but not hot. Not a radiator, not a hairdryer — heat warps components and melts adhesive.

And the famous one: rice does not work. It absorbs a little surface moisture and does nothing for water already inside, while getting starch and dust into the ports. It has persisted because phones sometimes recover anyway and the rice takes the credit.

What’s actually likely

Honestly? A full wash cycle is about the worst case. It’s not just water — it’s hot water with detergent, spun for an hour. Modern phones have some water resistance, but that’s designed for a splash or a drop in the sink, and the seals degrade with age.

Phones that have been through a wash sometimes power on and work. More often they work briefly and then fail over the following days as corrosion spreads. That second pattern is the cruel one, because people assume they’ve got away with it and don’t back anything up.

If it does turn on, back it up immediately. Don’t wait to see whether it settles down.

What your SIM actually holds

Worth clearing up, because people pin a lot of hope on the SIM.

A modern SIM holds your phone number and network details. That’s essentially it. Your photos, messages, apps and most contacts are not on the SIM — they’re in the phone’s storage and, usually, in your cloud account.

So the good news isn’t the SIM. It’s that if you were signed into iCloud or a Google account, most of what you care about is already safe and will come back automatically on a new phone.

Very old SIMs sometimes hold contacts saved directly to them, and those we can usually read.

What we can do

Assess it properly. Opening it up tells us how far the water got and whether corrosion has started. Free, as always.

Clean it. Where it’s caught early enough, cleaning the corrosion off can save a phone. No promises — it depends what the water reached.

Recover what’s on it. If the phone won’t run but the storage survived, there is sometimes a route to the data. This is specialist work and isn’t always possible, particularly on newer phones where storage is bonded to the board.

Set up the replacement. This is the part we do most often, and it’s the part that actually gets people back to normal — restoring from your cloud backup, moving the number across, getting mail and apps working, making sure nothing is left behind.

The honest summary

A washing machine is a hard thing for a phone to survive, and we’d rather tell you that than take your money on a maybe. But bring it in anyway — assessing it costs nothing, some do come back, and even when they don’t there’s usually far more recoverable than people fear.

Bring the phone, the SIM if you have it, and any cloud account details you know. Workshop on Station Road, or ring 01753 884700.