The hot exhaust airflow from your undoubtedly glorious gaming PC is just about perfect for dehumidifying small stuff rapidly. It doesn't dehumidify the room because the room is a mostly closed system and the moisture eventually ends up back in the room anyway, but for small amounts of residual water it will evaporate that stuff so fast it's like it's the sahara desert back there.
How it works:
To evaporate water requires a few things to happen.
- You need air that can accept the moisture. Air can only hold so much water, and the more full it gets, the slower it gets at accepting evaporation. Indoor air is usually about 50-70% relative humidity to keep humans comfortable, so it has some room for more, but it won't be too eager to accept a lot more moisture.
- You need energy usually in the form of temperature. Room temperature is enough for evaporation, but more is definitely better and will speed up the process.
- You don't need moving air, but moving air is important because once the nearby air has accepted some evaporation it's cooler and more humid and it kind of forms a shell around the wet object until it dissipates by natural air movement, so the process slows down quickly.
Dessicants (like rice, or silica gel) only provide the first of those three things, and that's good! It definitely helps. They are good at drying the air out, and that gives the air lots of room to accept new moisture from the device. But for even better drying power you would ideally have all three, and what do you know, PCs are an excellent source for all three!
- The air coming out of a PC has been dry-heated without any moisture added to it during the heating process. As air gets hotter, its moisture carrying capacity increases a lot, and even though it hasn't lost any of the moisture it was originally carrying before it was heated, it means the percentage of moisture it is carrying compared to the maximum it can now hold is much lower, so overall the air is considered to be more dry. This is called relative humidity.
- Since the air coming from a PC is reasonably hot, it also has lots of energy that can be tapped to allow for evaporation. Evaporation as a process takes energy out of the air. This is how hot air, liquids, or surfaces are cooled down by evaporative coolers aka swamp coolers, and also by the large cooling towers used at coal and nuclear power stations. Also importantly, the air from a PC is not too hot, you don't want it damaging delicate parts like screens or batteries or especially getting so hot as to damage plastic or weaken solder joints!
- And perhaps most importantly, there's lots of air flow and lots of air movement. Lots of fresh dry hot air being forced into all the little nooks and crannies of the device. That's really important, it's arguably the most important step to drying something out, and lots of other people back me up on this assertion. You'll notice that when a house is flooded they don't bother with the heating and drying at all, they just set up lots of really big fans. There's a reason for that. Fans are without a doubt the best way to get your device dried out.
I've used this technique to dry out several devices and some of my friends and family members and it has worked wonders. I have yet to have a device that was not at least partially rescued by this process, although I'm sure it's still totally possible to ruin a device completely with water especially in this day and age of glued in batteries and other nonsense, but, assuming you do everything you everything you can to get the device powered off as quickly as you can after it's exposed to water, I think you'll have a good chance of rescuing it.
And now for the probably sappy part... I do hope this helps some people down the road, and I think it's a good technique in general, but I've known about it for awhile, and what really made me decide to post this now is the flooding going on around Houston. I know there are probably a lot more important things right now than some waterlogged cellphones but even if it helps a few people I'll feel happy. If you've been evacuated you probably do not have access to a PC, but anything that puts out warm dry airflow like a refrigerator or vending machine or even just some sort of airflow at all like a ceiling fan or air return vent may help bring that phone back to life more quickly, and phones can be a vital lifeline in situations like this. Not to mention they may contain the only photos and memories some people have left. I've been in a flood situation like that before myself, and I know people often assume it's over once you've made it to the evacuation center, and it's all just a formality from there, but far from it! In some ways, for a lot of people, the hardest parts are still ahead. Good luck to everyone.
Submitted August 30, 2017 at 09:37AM by cecilkorik http://ift.tt/2xwoqHz pcmasterrace
No comments:
Post a Comment