Speaker Cleaner

A speaker is a membrane, and a loud low tone drives it through a wide swing. A drop of water in the grille gets pushed out by that swing. This is the same trick the water ejection on the Apple Watch uses: there the speaker plays a 165 Hz tone, and so does this tool.

How to use it

1. Lay the phone speaker down, on a flat surface or on a towel.
2. Set the phone volume to maximum. The swing of the membrane pushes the water out, and the louder the signal, the wider the swing.
3. On an iPhone, turn off silent mode: with it on, sound from a web page does not play at all.
4. Press "Start cleaning" and keep the phone away from your ear.
5. After the cycle, check the sound with some music. If it is still muffled, run it again.

Three cycles

• Water — the 165 Hz tone. This is the basic method, and it is usually enough for water.
• Water and dust — water ejection first, then pulses and a frequency sweep: fine particles hold on tighter than a drop.
• Deep cleaning — the same sequence in several passes, with pauses in between.

The individual modes at the bottom of the page play a single segment on its own. If the phone got badly soaked, it makes sense to repeat the water ejection several times in a row instead of running one long cycle.

What the tool does not do

It pushes water out of the speaker grille, nothing more. A phone that fell entirely into water cannot be dried with sound: these vibrations do not reach inside the case. If something else stopped working after a drop in water, take the phone to a repair shop; sound will not fix that.

One more thing about the speaker itself. A long loud low tone heats the voice coil, and the coil is what fails, not the membrane. That is why the long cycle here runs in segments with silence in between, and blasting the cleaner many times in a row at full volume is not a good idea.