Get in touch with technology with text stuff from how stuff works dot com. Be there and welcome to tech stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren boc Obam. And it looks like we've got a little listener mail to take care of today. Yes, Henry wrote in by a Facebook and asked, can you please make a show explaining ingrish protection and water resistance for electronics? Specifically, what exactly does x feat up to x minutes resistance mean? That's an excellent question, Henry. Yes, thank you. Yeah, we're very thankful for you sending that in, and we wanted to talk about this because you know, that was one of the things I always wondered for a while too, like what what does water resistant versus water proof mean? What does it take to make something like that? Why don't we see more tech that's water proof? I mean, come on, iPhones, as soon as you drop it in the water. Everyone knows that if you drop your iPhone in the water, it could short out. You've got a broken iPhone, And those folks at Apple are just like, we don't cover water damage. Yeah, you shouldn't have dropped it in the water. Yeah, time, try not dropping it in the water, and whereas we say, look, I understood that I was holding it wrong, but could we at least make it so that it can withstand some water. Well, here's here's the whole deal about it. We're gonna talk all about waterproofing and why we want to do it in the first place. So what the heck is it about water that ruins tech in the first place. Well, here's the thing about water. Water, unless you're talking about distilled deionized water, is conductive. Yeah. Conductive means it allows electrical current to flow through it. That's what conductive is. Right. So, if you have a material that allows electric current to flow through it, and you put that in contact with an electrical circuit where electricity is supposed to run a very specific pathway, right, which all electrical circuits are based on. Mean, it's there. The electricity in your iPhone isn't just like bouncing around all Willie Nilli going through extremely specific path right. I kind of like the vision of a of a phone that if you were to open it up you just see electrons going all over the place. That would be a broken phone. Yeah, also possibly a terrible Hollywood movie. But if if you were to introduce this conductive material to a circuit and allow electrons to flow through a direct pathway from point A to point B instead of going through all these different gates like it would in a transistor, like a series of transistors, you get what's called a short circuit. Now, a short circuit is uh is not a good thing. I mean, this is where you have two different voltages, difference in voltage, and you create a pathway directly between the two and then the voltage essentially equalizes as soon as it possibly can. And if that is on two parts of an electronic device that wasn't intended to be connected, you can have some some problems, including actual circuitry damage a k a. Frying your electronics. Yeah, so if you've ever heard about something in electronics hitting water, and you've got a whole list of things you're supposed to do, and the first one is make sure it's powered off as long as you're safe about it. Because what we'll get into that specifically, the reason for that is because it otherwise the the this current, this the circuit can't work the way it was supposed to because you've got this conductive fluid messing everything up. Now we did say d distilled and de ionized water is different. Is different. That's because pure water, absolutely pure water that has no ions in it, has no other uh contaminants in it, no other particles of stuff. Right, it doesn't conduct electricity. So if you've ever heard that water just conducts electricity on its own, there's a little technically correct pure old H two O. Yeah, there's a little asterisk there, right, So uh yeah, if it turns out that there's not the stuff in it, then um, it may not cause a short circuit, which is good. You still don't want to have with electronics. I wouldn't do that on purpose, just to test it out. Don't don't go filling your swimming pool would distill deionized water and then carry your iPhone into the deep end. That's that's not really the best solution. Also, that would be really expensive, yeah, and also probably wouldn't last very long. I mean you'd soon get contaminants in that way. I'm pretty sure that by pouring it into a swimming pool you would negate the fact. Anyway, if you invited any of my friends over, it would definitely negate the effect. Um. Okay, But so some stuff to remember about how to deal with electronics once they get wet. Before we get into waterproofing technical bits. Um, if if a device is a plug in device and it is plugged into a wall outlet and it falls into some water, don't don't reach into the water. No, definitely do Yeah, that would be seriously uh, seriously hazardous, and you do not want to do because electricity is flown around all willy nilly, um. You want to disc anected from the power. But probably the best way to do that, if you, if you can, is to just break the circuit, just to turn off the entire power to that room, right, go to the circuit breaker and turn off that circuit before dealing with anything else, because you don't want the chance of any electricity arching from the source and hitting you. I mean that could even if it didn't kill you, it could severely injure you. And so the best thing to do would be to to trip the circuit breaker if it hadn't already tripped, um, but then unplug it from the wall and then remove it from the water. Once you don't have any active electricity moving through It's not like you're going to have like some sort of um residual electricity. Oh yeah, no, no no know, once once it's done zapping, it's done. Yeah, so then you would want to remove the device from the water once it once you're shirt's safe. If it's a battery operated electronic device, you're probably going to be safe just removing it because the voltages there are very low. It's not like it's going to be I'm talking about like a typical battery up like a mobile device like a phone or a watch or a tablet something like that. Yeah, you're not going to have enough voltage there for it to really do any harm. You really could just reach out and grab it and pull it out. Yeah. Yeah, if for any reason you do have any concern about whether there's still some residual electricity going through the outlet or anything like that. Heavy duty rubber gloves like like the kind like like kitchen gloves or Doctor Horrible cosplay gloves, you know. Um, anything that covers any skin that you might submerge will help keep you safe. See that's exactly why I have mine in my bathroom, but I don't tell people that's why I have them in the bathroom. I approve of this plan. Um. Also, like wooden or plastic salad tongs or chopsticks or anything like that. Would you know, a non conductive man, you want to use metal, right, Yeah, that would be bad. Yeah. Once again, conductivity not not your friend. So if it's a battery operated device and the battery is removable, take out the battery, you know, make sure the device is powered off, take out the battery and set it aside. Uh. The longer the battery sits in there, and the longer there there's water in this device, the worst off it's gonna be. Because Uh, one of those short circuits that you could talk about is like just imagine a battery where you connect the to the two sides of the battery with a direct path that burns out a battery. Fact, So you want to get that battery out of there, and you want to allow the electronic device to dry thoroughly, and that can take up to a week or longer. Um. And if you're talking about a device that actually plugs into the wall, I wouldn't feel comfortable ever telling anyone to try it out again. Uh No, I would take that to a to a professional. Yeah, because tion or even if you are absolutely certain that's dry, here's the thing. Sometimes those contaminants and water can actually adhere to parts of the circuitry, which means that if it could permanently change the electrical flow inside the device, which could get really sparky, really exactly, so you don't want to mess around with that. But if it's battery operated, you know, you probably have heard that it's good to put it in some sort of material sand or something, some some sort of desiccate that will pull out water. Rice is probably the most commonly suggested one, But at any rate, you want to give it several days, if not a week, to let it dry. Once it's dry, then you can reconnect the battery to the device and test it out. And if the anything in the water has dried on the circuit try that's wind the device might be permanently yeah, whether you know, it could be perfectly dry that point it's just never gonna work again, or it might work fine. It kind of depends upon what the purity of the water was and how much how long it was submerged, um whether or not there were other things in there. And once you once you get it to that point, you have the actual moment of truth. It'll either work or it won't work. And if it doesn't work, you probably are gonna have to buy a new one because most warranties do not cover water damage specifically because it's such a common problem and it's hard to fix. Yeah, well, I you know, I think it's usually considered, um, what what's the is negligent? Yes? I think of it as an act of claude c l O d's the clumsy fool. Most of most problems that relate to me can be described like that. So Henry specifically asked about ingress protection. Yes, and this is a rating system. Yes, that tells us exactly how safe it is to use various electronics around water sources. Right, and also physical things like like physical like hands or tools. So yeah, ingress. If you're wondering what the heck does ingress mean, especially if you play the Google game Ingress, it's not the Google game. We did a full episode about Ingress the Google game way way back. But ingress is an entrance into something. It's a way of getting into some sort of enclosure. Ingress Protection is created the International Electro Technical Commission, which lots of countries belong to, including the United States, and as a rating system. And if you look at the rating system, you will know how well that particular component is rated against intrusion, either by physical stuff or or fluid fluid we should say, but yes, water, physical particles versus liquid particles exactly, So it's an actual standard. It's not that water isn't physical. That's yeah, well, yeah, I know what you mean. You mean like like mad like solid matter as opposed to liquid. Yeah, you know, we're we're casual with the states of matter here at tech stuff stuff to blow your mind. Probably a little more of a stickler for it, uh I e C. The the International Electrotechnical Commission designates this standard as six zero five to nine, so you can look it up if you want to. They have the charts and stuff that explain it, but we'll go through it, and defines the standard as a part providing protection of equipment against certain external influences and in any direction, protection against direct contact. So the reason why this would be important is multiple reasons. It's one to tell you about how robust that particular component is to any given type of intrusion, and partly to warn you a potential user as to the kind of operating conditions this device works under and whether or not. It's a good idea for you to reach your big old grubby myths in there. Sure. It however, does not cover other issues that you could encounter with various devices, such as corrosion resistance or the effects of ice exactly. So there are other things that can muck up a device that don't get covered by this. There are other standards that that involves. But English protection really just has two digits. The basic i P code has two digits in the first digit indicates the protection level against solids like dust. That would be the finest of the solids, the least frocks. Yeah, they actually do. If you're talking about zero, there's no protection against a solid substance. A one is I think, I think you have to get up to a two before you're getting to the point of human fingers. Like a one is bigger than essentially the back of the hand. If it has an i P of one, it means that the back of an average person's hand could come into contact with whatever component that is well, possibly with getting harmed. Actually, yeah, anything larger than that would not be able to come into contact. So yeah, it's all about it's all about the covering. If you think of it as like a cover. So yeah, the solid numbers range from zero, which is no protection at all, so you just got a big old open fan. Essentially, the Death Star had a lot of I P zero tech. You know, they had like all these these walkways with no railings. You could fall right into the core. Uh. Then if you want to go to the opposite side, that would be a six, which is totally protected against also known as dust tight, just as water would be water tight or air tight. You know that kind of thing. Duct tight is a thing. Yeah. Yeah. The second digit is um liquid protection, and that ranges from zero, which is no protection at all, to an eight, which means that that object would be protected against continuous immersion. Yes, and in fact, there are older versions of ingress protections that go up to a nine for water. But in that case it means that it is perfectly safe from water jets at high power from multiple directions simultaneously. So essentially a dishwasher, if you were to put it in the dishwasher, water would not get into this thing. Um. But really, the all those sources I was looking at was specifically talking about zero to eight for liquids. So if you had something that was rated i P five seven. It would mean that that particular device would be dust protected but not dust tight, meaning that if you were really determined, you could get some dust in there, and that it would be protected against temporary immersion and fluid, so you could drop it into like like let's say that it's a watch and you're washing dishes. You wouldn't have to worry about the watch getting too much water in it because it's protected against that, but you wouldn't at the same time want to go skin diving with the watch. So with these i P ratings, we're not just talking about how well a particular component is protected, but also how well the device protects us against being clods. Getting back into that, so if you have an i P component that has low numbers, then you know there are components here that you could easily come into contact with if you yourself were not careful. So using that death Star example, we would see that the rating is very low, and we would know this is not a safe place for me to be, uh, you know, unobservant. I would need to watch my toes wear a hard hat and a jet pack. Yeah, and uh, and also don't do anything wrong because management on the Death Star as a no tolerance policy for mistakes. However, you're of chances of rapidly ascending the ranks. They're really high. I never thought about it that way. Yeah, if you've ever wanted to be an admiral, just wait around a week in the Imperial Navy and you'll get there. You might not last very long, but you know, advancement is certainly an opportunity. So anyway, if your big old machine of awesomeness has a huge fan moving at high velocity inside it, you probably want to protect against something accidentally being able to touch the van. So you would want to make sure that that i P rating would be such that only specific tools would be able to move through there. Right, You wouldn't want anything too large to be able to pass through and make contact with the fan. That would be dangerous. At the same time, you wouldn't want to be dust tight because it would be air tight. Uh, And having a huge rotating fan and airtight chamber probably wouldn't really help you out. No. Imagine having a computer where you have a computer fan that's supposed to help spurs heat, but you have no vent. Well, that heat is just gonna continue to sec it's just gonna be right there in your laptop or a computer. It's not going to move. And then eventually got a fried machine, as anyone who has worked with me would realize, as I somehow managed to get my machine clogged every time within a couple of years. It's really just my way of getting a new laptop every couple of years. So now we go on to the next part of Henry's question. I think we've covered ingress protection pretty thoroughly. So what does x feet up to x minutes resistance mean? Well, I P ratings indicate there's a spectrum of resistance to intrusion, right that you you can have uh devices that have different levels of resistance. So some devices have no protection at all, and some have an incredible design that keeps everything clear of any kind of particle or fluid. But most fall somewhere in between exactly. So if you're looking at x feet up to x minutes, that's kind of describing that in between phase. The depth or feet part of this is all about water pressure, right, because water water has weight, So the deeper you go in a body of water, the more weight or a really pressure you're going to be subjected to yep, and so your device is going to be under that same amount of pressure. So if I have a device that's you know, not totally water tight, it's very resistant to it, but I start adding more and more pressure to it, that might mean that it puts puts enough pressure on the device to allow water to start to get in, to start to seep in. Right. That's why watches, for example, we'll have those those depth ratings exactly exactly. They'll say that, well, you know, we've tested this to this amount of pressure and it is able to be resistant to water at that pressure, but beyond that, we cannot promise that you won't have a failure of this device. So I gadget with a design that resists water intrusion. It may only work at surface pressures, meaning that you could be able to operate in the rainstorm but not necessarily submerge it in water um or you might be able to do some snorkeling but not scuba diving with it, or something might be splash proof, you know, like like you could wash your hands, but you wouldn't want to take a shower exactly. Yeah, I always want to take a shower. Just went nip that rumor in the bud. Um. So, yeah, you want to make sure that you follow those those uh those warnings on there. It's only good at X number of feet. As for the minutes, again, that kind of tells you that a gadget may be able to withstand a temporary immersion, like we said in the ingress protection uh that you know, if you if it's underwater for maybe a minute or two, there's no big deal that there's there's probably no uh no opening that water could get into easily. But the longer that it's down there, the more likely you're going to have a failure of one of the protective surfaces. Yeah. So it could just be the company really just kind of covering its bases saying, well, we know this thing is technically supposed to be water tight, but uh, we don't really want to make a claim that customer could come back and say, hey, you said it was waterproof, I wore it when I went swimming and now it doesn't work. It's you could look at it a source of some wiggle room as well. Um, not necessarily stating that the companies that say this are trying to be uh you know, to edge around it. It's just that's another possible legally speaking, it's important to protect themselves. Absolutely understand that. So, um that those both of those elements obviously are really important to determine. Uh, whether or not a gadget is going to be capable of going into the water and then coming back out still working. So how can electronics manufacturers make a gadget waterproof? What do they have to look at in order to make sure that their device will continue working even if it has been exposed to water. Uh, First of all, you gotta make sure your materials are waterproof. So that's a big first step. Yeah, if you have a smart phone and made out of paper towels, probably not going to be very waterproof. I don't that would be a really I don't want that smartphone. I'm going to pass on the paper towel so strong and thoroughly absorbent, but not particularly useful for a communication. Yeah, you have to make sure that those materials will be able to repel water or at least not least not absorb it exactly. Yeah. Um, you also don't want materials that would dramatically expand or contract in heat or cold. Yes, because as we know, water is not always the same as room temperature, so it could be that the device is exposed to a fairly dramatic change in temperature. I mean, you know, if you were to jump into, say, a mountain lake, might be very brisk. Sure even just you know, like if if you are hanging out in a mountain lake region and it's chilly outside and your your device is contracted in ways that that open up a crack somewhere, bad time. So that's that's one thing you have to keep in mind. Um More more traditional hydrophobic coatings. Hydrophobic of course, just meaning water resistant, a repellent, water repellent, I suppose, right, um More traditional hydrophobic coatings like Teflon, which is the most popular brand name for the material poly tetra floro ethylene, Which makes me understand why people usually just say teflon. By the way, uh, in case you're curious, she got that on the first try. I would not have been able to do that. I did. I did have to cough before I said it, because I was aware that I wasn't gonna be able to take a breath for you know, seven or eight minutes, or at least what feels like it in the role of that word. Um, those can come in very much handy in terms of this waterproofing material outer casing kind of stuff. Um, But the inner materials do matter too. For example, a weather proof speaker might use my lar diaphragms in place of the paper ones that are commonly used in indoor speakers, right, and those are the part the membrane. Yeah, And of course sound is a physical phenomenon. It involves stuff vibrating, which then makes air molecules vibrates. So obviously you need something that's going to be able to withstand lots of vibration and also not absorb a lot of water. If it were the paper ones, one that would affect the sound and two would weaken the membrane right. Right. So as a side note here, because I mentioned the word weather proof, a weather proof is another industry term that usually it's a little bit separate from the technology sector, but it usually indicates a combination of dust and water overall. Yeah. Now, you would also want to eliminate any openings in the outer surface, very important for chargeable devices. This is a tricky because, yeah, because usually you have a port that you plug your charging cable into port is an opening, yeah, and you could get water inside of a device that way. If you had some waterproof port where it had a very specific contact point for your your charging cable, then maybe you could you could minimize water intrusion that way, but you would also run the risk of anything drying inside of it that could interfere. But there are some devices that use contact charging points, like my Pebble smart watch, not not not just mine, actually all of them. The Pebble smart watch has a has a contact charging point. It's got a magnetic point and the USB cable that comes with it. Uh, it the the part that plugs onto the watch also has magnets on it, so it connects magnetically and that makes the contact points line up properly, and it charges that way, so you can just pull them apart and it disconnects. There's nothing plugged into anything. But that means that they didn't have to make a port, so you can actually wear your your Pebble watch in the shower or in the pool or the ocean. I've done all of those things, so it works just fine. But that it does it's an engineering challenge. You have to figure out how to do that and of course, it also means that you're charging cable ends up becoming proprietary. So let's say you are a claude like me, and you and you realize, hey, my pebble smart watches run out of juice. I need to uh, I need to recharge it. Where the heck is that one USB cable that's different from every other USB cable I own? And uh? Yeah, you'd think I would have put aside a specific place for it because that would save me sanity, but I have not at any rate. It is an engineering challenge. And another is to create those hydrophobic coatings like teflon or or nanocoadings even um. And again this means that water molecules themselves are upheld by the substance. So you probably heard hydrophobic or oleophobic. Oleophobic would be oil repellent. So lots of smartphone screens have oleophobic coating so that you don't get smudges all over them since they're touch screens. Well, hydrophobic just me that the water will kind of beat up and roll off. If you've ever treated a windshield with something like rainnecks, yeah, that's just a hydrophobic cutting. Yeah, it looks like the T one thousand is split up into a million little pieces and is rolling all over your windshield. It is awesome. Uh. Companies like liquid Pel have developed procedures to coat electronic components in a fine layer of hydrophobic film to protect them from short circuits. I mean I'm talking about even the inside of their devices, not just the outside. So with this approach, you don't have to worry so much about liquid getting into the device because the device itself is repelling the water. Uh, it's pretty cool. Yeah. The process involves putting your electronic device. It's a mail in kind of thing. At this point, I think you put they put your electronic device in a vacuum chamber and then employ plasma like like ionized yas um to spread this vapor of their proprietary chemical in a nanometer thick film over and inside the device. Yeah and there. I think they only have specific devices they cover right now because they Yeah, yeah, because I think the vacuum chamber they use is very you know, attuned to particular devices. Yes, if they are not built correctly, then that would break the thing. Yeah. I think I think they cover the Nexus five and I use the Nexus four all I have to do is drop that nexus four in a puddle of water and next thing you know, I get the nexus five. Yeah, don't tell my wife I said that. Um, um, you can. You can also, well, I mean you can't, but scientifically, we as humans can texture the surface of an object to repel water, thus kind of in a long, long about sort of way, eliminating the need for having a separate coating in there. Um. All kinds of research out of like the Department of Energy and a whole bunch of different facilities across the world have created nanoscale surfaces that replicate the self cleaning properties of some plants, specifically lotus leaves, and also like insect exoskeleton stuff like that. And and by self cleaning, we just mean that they've got these we little um nanoscopic cones or bristles that will trap air molecules and use that as sort of a nanoscopic air hockey table to repel water and and any other bits of stuff that you don't want in a thing away from a thing that's really cool. Yeah. Well, and of course there are lots and lots of companies out there that all they do is they make waterproof cases for your electronics that basically just snapped together really good, right, and they are designed to just be watertight, to just keep the water out. So you know that those are pretty simple in a way. They're they're simple technology and that they're not a lot of components to it. But it does mean that you have to engineer it just right because water is a tricky thing. It finds a way into some of the craziest places. Yes, like like life, water finds a way. It's incredibly persistent and anyone who's ever had to deal with any kind of water damage to anything will agree with that. So, Henry, I hope we answered your questions. We thought that this was a fun one to tackle. Uh. You know, it's it's cool to have a very specific kind of approach to something because a lot of the stuff we cover is so general, it's so wide open. That turns into just nesting layers of all kinds of windows open until my I T guy yells at me for breaking my computer. Right. Yeah, we we have broken the Internet more than once. Here at how stuff works. So we are glad that we were able to have a very focused discussion on this. If any of you have suggestions for future topics. Maybe you have another just component of technology that you've always wanted to know about, or perhaps there's that company you've always been curious about, or that that person in tech that you think deserves a full episode. You should let us know. Send us a message. You can tell us on email our addresses tech stuff, how stuff works dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumbler or handle at all. Three is text stuff h s W and we will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it has stuff works dot com

Get in touch with technology with text stuff from how stuff works dot com. Be there and welcome to tech stuff. I'm Jonathan Strickland and I'm Lauren boc Obam. And it looks like we've got a little listener mail to take care of today. Yes, Henry wrote in by a Facebook and asked, can you please make a show explaining ingrish protection and water resistance for electronics? Specifically, what exactly does x feat up to x minutes resistance mean? That's an excellent question, Henry. Yes, thank you. Yeah, we're very thankful for you sending that in, and we wanted to talk about this because you know, that was one of the things I always wondered for a while too, like what what does water resistant versus water proof mean? What does it take to make something like that? Why don't we see more tech that's water proof? I mean, come on, iPhones, as soon as you drop it in the water. Everyone knows that if you drop your iPhone in the water, it could short out. You've got a broken iPhone, And those folks at Apple are just like, we don't cover water damage. Yeah, you shouldn't have dropped it in the water. Yeah, time, try not dropping it in the water, and whereas we say, look, I understood that I was holding it wrong, but could we at least make it so that it can withstand some water. Well, here's here's the whole deal about it. We're gonna talk all about waterproofing and why we want to do it in the first place. So what the heck is it about water that ruins tech in the first place. Well, here's the thing about water. Water, unless you're talking about distilled deionized water, is conductive. Yeah. Conductive means it allows electrical current to flow through it. That's what conductive is. Right. So, if you have a material that allows electric current to flow through it, and you put that in contact with an electrical circuit where electricity is supposed to run a very specific pathway, right, which all electrical circuits are based on. Mean, it's there. The electricity in your iPhone isn't just like bouncing around all Willie Nilli going through extremely specific path right. I kind of like the vision of a of a phone that if you were to open it up you just see electrons going all over the place. That would be a broken phone. Yeah, also possibly a terrible Hollywood movie. But if if you were to introduce this conductive material to a circuit and allow electrons to flow through a direct pathway from point A to point B instead of going through all these different gates like it would in a transistor, like a series of transistors, you get what's called a short circuit. Now, a short circuit is uh is not a good thing. I mean, this is where you have two different voltages, difference in voltage, and you create a pathway directly between the two and then the voltage essentially equalizes as soon as it possibly can. And if that is on two parts of an electronic device that wasn't intended to be connected, you can have some some problems, including actual circuitry damage a k a. Frying your electronics. Yeah, so if you've ever heard about something in electronics hitting water, and you've got a whole list of things you're supposed to do, and the first one is make sure it's powered off as long as you're safe about it. Because what we'll get into that specifically, the reason for that is because it otherwise the the this current, this the circuit can't work the way it was supposed to because you've got this conductive fluid messing everything up. Now we did say d distilled and de ionized water is different. Is different. That's because pure water, absolutely pure water that has no ions in it, has no other uh contaminants in it, no other particles of stuff. Right, it doesn't conduct electricity. So if you've ever heard that water just conducts electricity on its own, there's a little technically correct pure old H two O. Yeah, there's a little asterisk there, right, So uh yeah, if it turns out that there's not the stuff in it, then um, it may not cause a short circuit, which is good. You still don't want to have with electronics. I wouldn't do that on purpose, just to test it out. Don't don't go filling your swimming pool would distill deionized water and then carry your iPhone into the deep end. That's that's not really the best solution. Also, that would be really expensive, yeah, and also probably wouldn't last very long. I mean you'd soon get contaminants in that way. I'm pretty sure that by pouring it into a swimming pool you would negate the fact. Anyway, if you invited any of my friends over, it would definitely negate the effect. Um. Okay, But so some stuff to remember about how to deal with electronics once they get wet. Before we get into waterproofing technical bits. Um, if if a device is a plug in device and it is plugged into a wall outlet and it falls into some water, don't don't reach into the water. No, definitely do Yeah, that would be seriously uh, seriously hazardous, and you do not want to do because electricity is flown around all willy nilly, um. You want to disc anected from the power. But probably the best way to do that, if you, if you can, is to just break the circuit, just to turn off the entire power to that room, right, go to the circuit breaker and turn off that circuit before dealing with anything else, because you don't want the chance of any electricity arching from the source and hitting you. I mean that could even if it didn't kill you, it could severely injure you. And so the best thing to do would be to to trip the circuit breaker if it hadn't already tripped, um, but then unplug it from the wall and then remove it from the water. Once you don't have any active electricity moving through It's not like you're going to have like some sort of um residual electricity. Oh yeah, no, no no know, once once it's done zapping, it's done. Yeah, so then you would want to remove the device from the water once it once you're shirt's safe. If it's a battery operated electronic device, you're probably going to be safe just removing it because the voltages there are very low. It's not like it's going to be I'm talking about like a typical battery up like a mobile device like a phone or a watch or a tablet something like that. Yeah, you're not going to have enough voltage there for it to really do any harm. You really could just reach out and grab it and pull it out. Yeah. Yeah, if for any reason you do have any concern about whether there's still some residual electricity going through the outlet or anything like that. Heavy duty rubber gloves like like the kind like like kitchen gloves or Doctor Horrible cosplay gloves, you know. Um, anything that covers any skin that you might submerge will help keep you safe. See that's exactly why I have mine in my bathroom, but I don't tell people that's why I have them in the bathroom. I approve of this plan. Um. Also, like wooden or plastic salad tongs or chopsticks or anything like that. Would you know, a non conductive man, you want to use metal, right, Yeah, that would be bad. Yeah. Once again, conductivity not not your friend. So if it's a battery operated device and the battery is removable, take out the battery, you know, make sure the device is powered off, take out the battery and set it aside. Uh. The longer the battery sits in there, and the longer there there's water in this device, the worst off it's gonna be. Because Uh, one of those short circuits that you could talk about is like just imagine a battery where you connect the to the two sides of the battery with a direct path that burns out a battery. Fact, So you want to get that battery out of there, and you want to allow the electronic device to dry thoroughly, and that can take up to a week or longer. Um. And if you're talking about a device that actually plugs into the wall, I wouldn't feel comfortable ever telling anyone to try it out again. Uh No, I would take that to a to a professional. Yeah, because tion or even if you are absolutely certain that's dry, here's the thing. Sometimes those contaminants and water can actually adhere to parts of the circuitry, which means that if it could permanently change the electrical flow inside the device, which could get really sparky, really exactly, so you don't want to mess around with that. But if it's battery operated, you know, you probably have heard that it's good to put it in some sort of material sand or something, some some sort of desiccate that will pull out water. Rice is probably the most commonly suggested one, But at any rate, you want to give it several days, if not a week, to let it dry. Once it's dry, then you can reconnect the battery to the device and test it out. And if the anything in the water has dried on the circuit try that's wind the device might be permanently yeah, whether you know, it could be perfectly dry that point it's just never gonna work again, or it might work fine. It kind of depends upon what the purity of the water was and how much how long it was submerged, um whether or not there were other things in there. And once you once you get it to that point, you have the actual moment of truth. It'll either work or it won't work. And if it doesn't work, you probably are gonna have to buy a new one because most warranties do not cover water damage specifically because it's such a common problem and it's hard to fix. Yeah, well, I you know, I think it's usually considered, um, what what's the is negligent? Yes? I think of it as an act of claude c l O d's the clumsy fool. Most of most problems that relate to me can be described like that. So Henry specifically asked about ingress protection. Yes, and this is a rating system. Yes, that tells us exactly how safe it is to use various electronics around water sources. Right, and also physical things like like physical like hands or tools. So yeah, ingress. If you're wondering what the heck does ingress mean, especially if you play the Google game Ingress, it's not the Google game. We did a full episode about Ingress the Google game way way back. But ingress is an entrance into something. It's a way of getting into some sort of enclosure. Ingress Protection is created the International Electro Technical Commission, which lots of countries belong to, including the United States, and as a rating system. And if you look at the rating system, you will know how well that particular component is rated against intrusion, either by physical stuff or or fluid fluid we should say, but yes, water, physical particles versus liquid particles exactly, So it's an actual standard. It's not that water isn't physical. That's yeah, well, yeah, I know what you mean. You mean like like mad like solid matter as opposed to liquid. Yeah, you know, we're we're casual with the states of matter here at tech stuff stuff to blow your mind. Probably a little more of a stickler for it, uh I e C. The the International Electrotechnical Commission designates this standard as six zero five to nine, so you can look it up if you want to. They have the charts and stuff that explain it, but we'll go through it, and defines the standard as a part providing protection of equipment against certain external influences and in any direction, protection against direct contact. So the reason why this would be important is multiple reasons. It's one to tell you about how robust that particular component is to any given type of intrusion, and partly to warn you a potential user as to the kind of operating conditions this device works under and whether or not. It's a good idea for you to reach your big old grubby myths in there. Sure. It however, does not cover other issues that you could encounter with various devices, such as corrosion resistance or the effects of ice exactly. So there are other things that can muck up a device that don't get covered by this. There are other standards that that involves. But English protection really just has two digits. The basic i P code has two digits in the first digit indicates the protection level against solids like dust. That would be the finest of the solids, the least frocks. Yeah, they actually do. If you're talking about zero, there's no protection against a solid substance. A one is I think, I think you have to get up to a two before you're getting to the point of human fingers. Like a one is bigger than essentially the back of the hand. If it has an i P of one, it means that the back of an average person's hand could come into contact with whatever component that is well, possibly with getting harmed. Actually, yeah, anything larger than that would not be able to come into contact. So yeah, it's all about it's all about the covering. If you think of it as like a cover. So yeah, the solid numbers range from zero, which is no protection at all, so you just got a big old open fan. Essentially, the Death Star had a lot of I P zero tech. You know, they had like all these these walkways with no railings. You could fall right into the core. Uh. Then if you want to go to the opposite side, that would be a six, which is totally protected against also known as dust tight, just as water would be water tight or air tight. You know that kind of thing. Duct tight is a thing. Yeah. Yeah. The second digit is um liquid protection, and that ranges from zero, which is no protection at all, to an eight, which means that that object would be protected against continuous immersion. Yes, and in fact, there are older versions of ingress protections that go up to a nine for water. But in that case it means that it is perfectly safe from water jets at high power from multiple directions simultaneously. So essentially a dishwasher, if you were to put it in the dishwasher, water would not get into this thing. Um. But really, the all those sources I was looking at was specifically talking about zero to eight for liquids. So if you had something that was rated i P five seven. It would mean that that particular device would be dust protected but not dust tight, meaning that if you were really determined, you could get some dust in there, and that it would be protected against temporary immersion and fluid, so you could drop it into like like let's say that it's a watch and you're washing dishes. You wouldn't have to worry about the watch getting too much water in it because it's protected against that, but you wouldn't at the same time want to go skin diving with the watch. So with these i P ratings, we're not just talking about how well a particular component is protected, but also how well the device protects us against being clods. Getting back into that, so if you have an i P component that has low numbers, then you know there are components here that you could easily come into contact with if you yourself were not careful. So using that death Star example, we would see that the rating is very low, and we would know this is not a safe place for me to be, uh, you know, unobservant. I would need to watch my toes wear a hard hat and a jet pack. Yeah, and uh, and also don't do anything wrong because management on the Death Star as a no tolerance policy for mistakes. However, you're of chances of rapidly ascending the ranks. They're really high. I never thought about it that way. Yeah, if you've ever wanted to be an admiral, just wait around a week in the Imperial Navy and you'll get there. You might not last very long, but you know, advancement is certainly an opportunity. So anyway, if your big old machine of awesomeness has a huge fan moving at high velocity inside it, you probably want to protect against something accidentally being able to touch the van. So you would want to make sure that that i P rating would be such that only specific tools would be able to move through there. Right, You wouldn't want anything too large to be able to pass through and make contact with the fan. That would be dangerous. At the same time, you wouldn't want to be dust tight because it would be air tight. Uh, And having a huge rotating fan and airtight chamber probably wouldn't really help you out. No. Imagine having a computer where you have a computer fan that's supposed to help spurs heat, but you have no vent. Well, that heat is just gonna continue to sec it's just gonna be right there in your laptop or a computer. It's not going to move. And then eventually got a fried machine, as anyone who has worked with me would realize, as I somehow managed to get my machine clogged every time within a couple of years. It's really just my way of getting a new laptop every couple of years. So now we go on to the next part of Henry's question. I think we've covered ingress protection pretty thoroughly. So what does x feet up to x minutes resistance mean? Well, I P ratings indicate there's a spectrum of resistance to intrusion, right that you you can have uh devices that have different levels of resistance. So some devices have no protection at all, and some have an incredible design that keeps everything clear of any kind of particle or fluid. But most fall somewhere in between exactly. So if you're looking at x feet up to x minutes, that's kind of describing that in between phase. The depth or feet part of this is all about water pressure, right, because water water has weight, So the deeper you go in a body of water, the more weight or a really pressure you're going to be subjected to yep, and so your device is going to be under that same amount of pressure. So if I have a device that's you know, not totally water tight, it's very resistant to it, but I start adding more and more pressure to it, that might mean that it puts puts enough pressure on the device to allow water to start to get in, to start to seep in. Right. That's why watches, for example, we'll have those those depth ratings exactly exactly. They'll say that, well, you know, we've tested this to this amount of pressure and it is able to be resistant to water at that pressure, but beyond that, we cannot promise that you won't have a failure of this device. So I gadget with a design that resists water intrusion. It may only work at surface pressures, meaning that you could be able to operate in the rainstorm but not necessarily submerge it in water um or you might be able to do some snorkeling but not scuba diving with it, or something might be splash proof, you know, like like you could wash your hands, but you wouldn't want to take a shower exactly. Yeah, I always want to take a shower. Just went nip that rumor in the bud. Um. So, yeah, you want to make sure that you follow those those uh those warnings on there. It's only good at X number of feet. As for the minutes, again, that kind of tells you that a gadget may be able to withstand a temporary immersion, like we said in the ingress protection uh that you know, if you if it's underwater for maybe a minute or two, there's no big deal that there's there's probably no uh no opening that water could get into easily. But the longer that it's down there, the more likely you're going to have a failure of one of the protective surfaces. Yeah. So it could just be the company really just kind of covering its bases saying, well, we know this thing is technically supposed to be water tight, but uh, we don't really want to make a claim that customer could come back and say, hey, you said it was waterproof, I wore it when I went swimming and now it doesn't work. It's you could look at it a source of some wiggle room as well. Um, not necessarily stating that the companies that say this are trying to be uh you know, to edge around it. It's just that's another possible legally speaking, it's important to protect themselves. Absolutely understand that. So, um that those both of those elements obviously are really important to determine. Uh, whether or not a gadget is going to be capable of going into the water and then coming back out still working. So how can electronics manufacturers make a gadget waterproof? What do they have to look at in order to make sure that their device will continue working even if it has been exposed to water. Uh, First of all, you gotta make sure your materials are waterproof. So that's a big first step. Yeah, if you have a smart phone and made out of paper towels, probably not going to be very waterproof. I don't that would be a really I don't want that smartphone. I'm going to pass on the paper towel so strong and thoroughly absorbent, but not particularly useful for a communication. Yeah, you have to make sure that those materials will be able to repel water or at least not least not absorb it exactly. Yeah. Um, you also don't want materials that would dramatically expand or contract in heat or cold. Yes, because as we know, water is not always the same as room temperature, so it could be that the device is exposed to a fairly dramatic change in temperature. I mean, you know, if you were to jump into, say, a mountain lake, might be very brisk. Sure even just you know, like if if you are hanging out in a mountain lake region and it's chilly outside and your your device is contracted in ways that that open up a crack somewhere, bad time. So that's that's one thing you have to keep in mind. Um More more traditional hydrophobic coatings. Hydrophobic of course, just meaning water resistant, a repellent, water repellent, I suppose, right, um More traditional hydrophobic coatings like Teflon, which is the most popular brand name for the material poly tetra floro ethylene, Which makes me understand why people usually just say teflon. By the way, uh, in case you're curious, she got that on the first try. I would not have been able to do that. I did. I did have to cough before I said it, because I was aware that I wasn't gonna be able to take a breath for you know, seven or eight minutes, or at least what feels like it in the role of that word. Um, those can come in very much handy in terms of this waterproofing material outer casing kind of stuff. Um, But the inner materials do matter too. For example, a weather proof speaker might use my lar diaphragms in place of the paper ones that are commonly used in indoor speakers, right, and those are the part the membrane. Yeah, And of course sound is a physical phenomenon. It involves stuff vibrating, which then makes air molecules vibrates. So obviously you need something that's going to be able to withstand lots of vibration and also not absorb a lot of water. If it were the paper ones, one that would affect the sound and two would weaken the membrane right. Right. So as a side note here, because I mentioned the word weather proof, a weather proof is another industry term that usually it's a little bit separate from the technology sector, but it usually indicates a combination of dust and water overall. Yeah. Now, you would also want to eliminate any openings in the outer surface, very important for chargeable devices. This is a tricky because, yeah, because usually you have a port that you plug your charging cable into port is an opening, yeah, and you could get water inside of a device that way. If you had some waterproof port where it had a very specific contact point for your your charging cable, then maybe you could you could minimize water intrusion that way, but you would also run the risk of anything drying inside of it that could interfere. But there are some devices that use contact charging points, like my Pebble smart watch, not not not just mine, actually all of them. The Pebble smart watch has a has a contact charging point. It's got a magnetic point and the USB cable that comes with it. Uh, it the the part that plugs onto the watch also has magnets on it, so it connects magnetically and that makes the contact points line up properly, and it charges that way, so you can just pull them apart and it disconnects. There's nothing plugged into anything. But that means that they didn't have to make a port, so you can actually wear your your Pebble watch in the shower or in the pool or the ocean. I've done all of those things, so it works just fine. But that it does it's an engineering challenge. You have to figure out how to do that and of course, it also means that you're charging cable ends up becoming proprietary. So let's say you are a claude like me, and you and you realize, hey, my pebble smart watches run out of juice. I need to uh, I need to recharge it. Where the heck is that one USB cable that's different from every other USB cable I own? And uh? Yeah, you'd think I would have put aside a specific place for it because that would save me sanity, but I have not at any rate. It is an engineering challenge. And another is to create those hydrophobic coatings like teflon or or nanocoadings even um. And again this means that water molecules themselves are upheld by the substance. So you probably heard hydrophobic or oleophobic. Oleophobic would be oil repellent. So lots of smartphone screens have oleophobic coating so that you don't get smudges all over them since they're touch screens. Well, hydrophobic just me that the water will kind of beat up and roll off. If you've ever treated a windshield with something like rainnecks, yeah, that's just a hydrophobic cutting. Yeah, it looks like the T one thousand is split up into a million little pieces and is rolling all over your windshield. It is awesome. Uh. Companies like liquid Pel have developed procedures to coat electronic components in a fine layer of hydrophobic film to protect them from short circuits. I mean I'm talking about even the inside of their devices, not just the outside. So with this approach, you don't have to worry so much about liquid getting into the device because the device itself is repelling the water. Uh, it's pretty cool. Yeah. The process involves putting your electronic device. It's a mail in kind of thing. At this point, I think you put they put your electronic device in a vacuum chamber and then employ plasma like like ionized yas um to spread this vapor of their proprietary chemical in a nanometer thick film over and inside the device. Yeah and there. I think they only have specific devices they cover right now because they Yeah, yeah, because I think the vacuum chamber they use is very you know, attuned to particular devices. Yes, if they are not built correctly, then that would break the thing. Yeah. I think I think they cover the Nexus five and I use the Nexus four all I have to do is drop that nexus four in a puddle of water and next thing you know, I get the nexus five. Yeah, don't tell my wife I said that. Um, um, you can. You can also, well, I mean you can't, but scientifically, we as humans can texture the surface of an object to repel water, thus kind of in a long, long about sort of way, eliminating the need for having a separate coating in there. Um. All kinds of research out of like the Department of Energy and a whole bunch of different facilities across the world have created nanoscale surfaces that replicate the self cleaning properties of some plants, specifically lotus leaves, and also like insect exoskeleton stuff like that. And and by self cleaning, we just mean that they've got these we little um nanoscopic cones or bristles that will trap air molecules and use that as sort of a nanoscopic air hockey table to repel water and and any other bits of stuff that you don't want in a thing away from a thing that's really cool. Yeah. Well, and of course there are lots and lots of companies out there that all they do is they make waterproof cases for your electronics that basically just snapped together really good, right, and they are designed to just be watertight, to just keep the water out. So you know that those are pretty simple in a way. They're they're simple technology and that they're not a lot of components to it. But it does mean that you have to engineer it just right because water is a tricky thing. It finds a way into some of the craziest places. Yes, like like life, water finds a way. It's incredibly persistent and anyone who's ever had to deal with any kind of water damage to anything will agree with that. So, Henry, I hope we answered your questions. We thought that this was a fun one to tackle. Uh. You know, it's it's cool to have a very specific kind of approach to something because a lot of the stuff we cover is so general, it's so wide open. That turns into just nesting layers of all kinds of windows open until my I T guy yells at me for breaking my computer. Right. Yeah, we we have broken the Internet more than once. Here at how stuff works. So we are glad that we were able to have a very focused discussion on this. If any of you have suggestions for future topics. Maybe you have another just component of technology that you've always wanted to know about, or perhaps there's that company you've always been curious about, or that that person in tech that you think deserves a full episode. You should let us know. Send us a message. You can tell us on email our addresses tech stuff, how stuff works dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook, Twitter, or Tumbler or handle at all. Three is text stuff h s W and we will talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it has stuff works dot com