Chosen Solution
10:00 pm. My Google Pixel 2 XL was hosed under a tap for about five seconds. Water drops can be seen on front and rear camera. 10:10 pm. Boot loop. 11:00 pm. Boots normally. Touch screen no response. 11:30 pm. Everything except camera (blurry image) works fine. The next day. 8:00 am. Bright, discrete horizontal lines appeared on the left side of the screen. Dark colours (like black) can still be seen but anything brighter than grey will be saturated to white. 8:00 pm. The phone was blew under hair dryer with warm air. Cameras became clear again. The next day. 11:00 am. The screen was taken off from the rest of the phone. Warm air blew to both touch input and display socket. Bright lines persist. The lines look like this. If you turn on the screen after staying off for longer than about 30 seconds, the display looks fine.
In about two seconds, a few bright lines appear.
Two more seconds, the first wave of lines suddenly become a gradient white area on the left side of the screen.
And the bright lines come back gradually. I filmed this with another phone so please ignore the grids.
What is the possible cause of this kind of damage? Can it be fixed and how? Thank you.
I purchased the tool kit from ifixit, watched many many videos on opening the phone. The task was to replace the power switch and battery. Both the power switch and battery work well now, however I too have the bight lines on the left. One of the videos talked about using alcohol to clean off the glue from the edge of the screen, and I believe this is what caused the damage to the tft monitor. I used 99% thinking if I use 70% or lower it may have absorbed some water from the air which could leave residue or worse. I’ve heated the front and back of the screen (glass side and the copper backing on the tft screen) to help dry out the inside of the monitor but likely the damage is permanent. I’m sure these are not built to be repaired, and using any kind of liquid on the edge of the glass will likely result with this effect, perhaps altering the chemistry of the tft screen glued to the glass. Sad because the phone still works, and using the heat gun on the glass reduced the effect from covering 1/3 of the left side to about 1/4”. I will leave it for a month or so to see if anything changes. The touch screen is unaffected. For what its worth, the tools and parts provided by ifixit were pretty top notch. The one video they had on my phone resulted in the same damage, which leads me to suspect the phones are built to be delicate inside. I would also say just don’t use any liquids on the inside of the glass, period. In fact, don’t touch the inside of the glass, period, the flexible tft monitor pane that is glued to the glass is more fragile than you imagine.
You should try a LCD Screen replacement. At the same time a good cleaning with alcool isopropylique to remove the deoxidation caused by water.
hey dude what happened after replacing the screen? i have the same prob with my 2 xl after exposing it to water, it had the same lines and now it just flashes strong white light when i turn it on , was thinking of a screen replacement, is it worth a shot??
