Water Damage & Flooded Basement Restoration Services

Repairing a Water Damaged MP3 Player

By the RestorationSOS Educational Staff

When CDs were introduced in the early 1980s, it improved the music quality to new levels. The only future improvements that might be made would be to make the medium for it physically smaller. One of the latest incarnations of listening technology arrived within the last decade in the form of the MP3 player, a tiny unit that is capable of holding hundreds of songs, depending of course on the amount of memory available.

Unfortunately, MP3 players are easily ruined if they become wet. They are small and even when used with extreme care they may become wet or dropped outright into water. The good news is that these players and your playlist can be saved if swift action is taken.

Don't assume the worst if you drop your MP3 player into water. Instead, act quickly by taking out the battery. This will shut off the supply of power and help prevent irreversible damage to the electronic section of the player. By keeping the player turned off, you may be able to avoid short circuits.

Use distilled water to rinse the unit and the battery, since distilled water is less of an electrical conductor than regular tap water. Isopropyl alcohol may also work as a cleaning agent, especially of the material it was dropped in is sugary or greasy. The goal is to make the unit clean enough to hold without causing more water damage to occur.

Make sure the unit and the battery are completely dry. Air drying is the best option as using appliances like a blow dryer may cause water to be pushed further into the unit. Placing the player and the battery near an air conditioning vent may help to dry the unit and remove moisture from the various nooks and crannies.

Once the unit is dry, it should be reassembled to see if the drying and cleaning process was successful. Insert the battery and turn the unit on. At this point it either will work or it won’t, but don’t get discouraged too quickly if it does not work. Instead try a new battery. If that fails to generate results, then you can assume the damage is beyond repair. Water damaged MP3 players can be saved in many cases, but not all. This doesn’t mean that you did anything wrong, simply that the damage involved was just too severe.

Of course, the best advice is to keep MP3 players away from any standing water and not operating the units in wet conditions such as rain. But with the portability of these units, water damage is almost inevitable, so be prepared to act quickly when the unit does slip from your grasp and become submerged.

Recommended Reading
Clean, Dry, Repair and Disinfect Electronic Media
How to Fix Water Damage on an iPod