Help water between digitizer and lcd?

[Tridox]

So I fell in a river over the weekend and my phone had the pleasure to come with me. Because it's an Lg G2 ripping out the battery wasnt an option, so I did what I could for it. I pulled off the back, got what water I could out of it and dried it with a dryer the best I could.

Eventually I got it working again. I dried the phone out and turned it on and it works perfect except one issue. Found that the screen had a white middle and gray around edges. (Like its dimmer around edges). It appears water is either in LCD or between digitizer and LCD. The gray area is uniform in brightness and looks normal (except its dimmer than usual but not by much) I figured that was water so I put it in a handy electronics dryer at work set to 115F during day and rice at night. Well all it's done is make the gray spread more and more and now 90% of screen is gray with a little white left right in the middle. Touch screen works perfectly.

So does anyone know what the issue is? Is the gray area water? Should I take apart the phone and remove battery and soak in iso alcohol? Any suggestions would be a big help!

 

[acejavelin]

Honestly, in the G2 the LCD and digitizer are are a single unit, I would replace them... Soaking in alcohol, even 90+% pure, is probably not the best idea. I have heard of people doing this but it can damage the LCD screen, then again if its that bad I guess it couldn't hurt anything much more.

 

[Rukbat]

Alcohol (70% isopropyl - I have no idea who came up with using 90% alcohol on phones) doesn't damage LCD screens. Or, at least, it hasn't damaged any of the hundreds (at least) of screens I've dried with it.

The problem here, though, is that river water, even from the cleanest river, is full of fish waste, rotting plants, etc., and that gets into the phone. Just drying the phone leave all that stuff in the phone. Since we don't live in dry nitrogen, all that stuff is corroding the metal parts, shorting the circuit boards, etc. Eventually (which can be a week, or it can be 5 years, but eventually) the phone will be damaged beyond repair.

The main purpose of the alcohol bath is to wash out all these impurities. (In a shop we scrub each individual part with gauze while the part is immersed in alcohol, then swish it in clean alcohol to get all the junk off it.) Just drying the phone (or putting it in rice) removes the water but leaves the junk.

Tridox, I hope your phone keeps working until it's so old that it's not worth even scrapping, but I don't think it will.

 

[stef7]

Rukbat. What do you think about the OP putting in an "OEM Digitizer / LCD" from say eBAY? Tridox seems savvy enough to be able to get the back off.

My thinking is even if you can "dry" the device sufficiently, perhaps wash out the majority of impurities in the process, there's going to be a mechanical discontinuity at the interface between the surfaces involved which will be visible and annoying. Hence, if it were me, I'd probably be putting in another display/digitizer combo per acejavelin's recommendation.

 

[Tridox]

So as it would turn out, the gray area of the screen is actually the dried water while the white area is the water getting inbetween the backlight and the foil. So as of today pretty much all the water is gone. Due to damage somewhere the backlight was damaged and it wont go as "bright" but is otherwise perfectly fine.

I took it to a friend (cell mechanic) and he told me all this. So you guys think I still need to clean it out? At work I have access to gallons of 99% iso alcohol so the question is, if I took phone apart and cleaned it would there be a good chance it will fix the issues with the backlight and prolong the life of the phone?

What Id really like to do is completely strip the phone and scrub parts then take out the screen and get under that foil and rinse it with alcohol. Since I've never opened one up I don't know if
the foil is glued on or anything. Is it easy to get under there?

Edit: Also, I'm very savvy with electronics because I work with them all day. I have never taken apart a phone before and Im worried about taking the screens out. Purchased 3M 2mm dpuble sided tape for it but seriously I'd rather use the phone as is for a year than break it trying to save it for a year and a day... and quite frankly if I ever used tape and glue to secure parts in the stuff I work on I'd be fired. No wonder phones are broken so easily. They're glued together!

 

[stef7]

Here are some Youtube videos on the topic.

People are not going to know you or your competence, comfort, availability of tools, your eyesight, lighting / work area, hand-eye coordination doing this sort of repair, so... it would be disengenuine probably for anyone to tell you that you can do it.

Only you can make that assessment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hPFBA24dR1w

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7IiqWDlefaI

There are probably YouTube videos on fixing LCD/Digitizer assemblies (i.e. replacing only a part which is I guess what you'd be following, if you wanted to try to clean the surfaced), but just based on stuff I've read before, I think that's a slippery slope.

HTH