We love to hear about what our customers are putting in their freeze dryers. We hear a lot of great stories, some are brand new things they’ve tried, some we’ve heard before. Although typically we hear food stories, we occasionally hear about other things, too. We told you about the Clark’s drowned iPhone and how it was saved by a freeze dryer here. That story helped another customer with his son’s phone.

Max P., in Idaho sent us this story:

“A couple days ago my son came home from work and told me his “smart phone” was soaked and not working. In all fairness, someone else had put a leaky cooler on top of his shirt that had his phone in it. It was only working about 25%, (it would sort-of power up, but most of the functions wouldn’t work). I remembered reading of the Clark’s fix on your website and thought I’d give it a try.

I know time is a priority with a wet phone so I had him immediately remove the battery and card and leave the back off. He was reluctant to let me try this new method of restoration but the way it was working, there wasn’t much to lose. Unfortunately, I already had a batch of food in the freeze dryer and it was already cold but not in the dry cycle yet.

I kept the back of the phone off and placed it on a small piece of paper towel about the size of the phone, face down, on top of the food already [freezing] in the trays (in this case it was a batch of shredded cheese.) I immediately closed up the dryer and waited.

In all, the phone spent about 14 hours in the dryer and came out at about 120 F. With fingers crossed we installed the battery and with a little holding of our breath as it fired up, it was back to 100%!

Another success story for Harvest Right to chalk up … it saved us about $175 phone replacement.”

Now, we can’t guarantee freeze drying will save your soaked cell phone, but, in this case, we are so glad it worked! The shredded cheese survived, too, if you were wondering. And it will last a lot longer than the cell phone – up to 25 years! :)