Glycerin for density?

So I was filtering my grande and lost a container with 6oz or so.... so i ended up topping it off with water. Now, of course, it lost a lot of density and is just making a colum that goes half way up but never break (at it's best anyway), and someone a few days ago said to use glycerin at 1ml steps if this happens (the sitting at the bottom in original formula).

So here's my question- do I need to worry about glycerin's surfactant properties in this small amout? I'd hate to ruin it and going with a gookit after dishing out the money for the filter.

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Permalink Reply by Autumn on June 17, 2011 at 11:31am

Glycerin will change the properties of the lamp if you add 6 oz. If you can measure the density of your grande I would bet its just lightly more dense than water, mine is anyways. What I use is propylene glycol, since its what lava lite used in their 90's lamps as well as some other chemicals. Waters density is 1,000 kg/m3 and propylene glycols is 1,036 kg/m3. A lava lamp made in the 90's has a density pretty close to propylene glycol, but it has at least 50% water in it so they use another chemical to add more density I think. Luckily for you a grandes density is close to water so adding propylene glycol should work.

In this discussion someone used fog machine liquid(50% water 50% propylene glycol) as well as some salt and perc to further change the densities to make a working lamp. http://oozinggoo.ning.com/forum/topics/china-redclear-redo

You should use pure propylene glycol though because you need the density.