Water Damaged phone - any successful repair stories?

[jaybee]

I've got a Nokia 8 smart phone that's been sat about my house since summer. It was kind of ahead of its time when it came to market and still to this day has good performance with 128gb storage, 6gb ram, decent camera and performance running Android 9.

A water bottle spilt in a bag and some went in the phone back in summer. It soon switched totally off. I took it apart and replaced the screen since water had got behind the main front element. Otherwise internally it seemed fine with no noticeable corrosion. Both water damage indicators at each end of the phone had turned pink.

Upon replacing the screen I got it to boot a couple of times then soon after it stopped turning on. I took it fully apart and gave the PCB a gentle scrub in an isopropyl alcohol bath, I tried a new battery and new charging port but no joy. Internally it looks fine but obviously something somewhere is not right.

So is this fit for the bin only or would someone somewhere repair it? I don't need data off it. It's probably worth about £50-£100 when sold second hand and all working. Anyone here fancy having a play with it? Anything I can try? I have basic soldering tools and skills.

 

[Smeghead]

I don't know if you did much in the time between realising it was water damaged (checking the indicators etc.) and actually attempting to boot it up, but my initial thought is unless you did everything you could to get rid of as much water as possible before booting it up again, it may be borked.

People often leave it in rice or oatmeal or whatever for up to weeks at a time before even attempting to turn it on.