The Site With the Lamp

July 23, 2008

On saturday, i was playing at being a plumber. Not because I wanted to save a few bucks but my regular plumber was not available because his own house had been flooded. No his pipelines didn't explode. There was a flash flood caused by heavy overnight rain.

I did achieve a measure of success with my plumbing efforts and just when I thought it was over, my Nokia e51 fell into the water tank. It was soaking in the tank for a couple of minutes before I managed to fish it out.

Soaking the phone in a water tank is not the same as getting caught in the rain or dropping it into a puddle. In a puddle the water will not penetrate deep inside the phone for a few minutes. The trapped air inside will see to that. In a water tank there is pressure. If the captive air does not escape, it will be compressed (remember PV = nRT ) and the water will penetrate easily.

After fishing it out, I didn't expect to be able to make any calls using that phone. The white LED was burning fiercely but the LCD was off. It didn't respond to the power button so I switched itoff by pulling out the battery. Didn't put the battery back in without using an electric blower on it for a few minutes to attempt to try it out.

Only the back cover cannot be opened. The front face plate on the E series phones cannot be removed without a special tool, which I don't have. Putting the battery back in resulted in the white LED lighting up even before the power button was pressed. The LED turned white but didn't get any further.

I put the phone in my camera dry cabinet and finished up the plumbing matter, and then took the phone to the nearest Nokia dealer. They don't have the tool for it either. YOu need to drive into their repair shop at Bambalapitia and the timing was such that the place would be closed by the time I got there. The next day is a sunday.

So what I did was to keep the phone in the camera cabinet through saturday night and the whole of Sunday. On monday morning when I tried to switch it back on the phone actually did boot up. But you can still clearly see water behind the LCD.

So I used the blower on it and put it back in the dry cabinet. By evening the phone was back to normal. My investment in the camera cabinet has been recovered.