Tinkering with a Grande - surprising discovery

[Erin]

Well, surprising for me anyway. ;)

 

Got a shitty Grande off eBay a week or so ago. Cloudy, of course. I dumped it immediately, and just to see what would happen, I just filled it with tap water. Oddly enough, it flows. Poorly, but it flows. 

 

I do notice that it seems to be the wax that clouds up the water (a little) - when I first ran it after the tap water refill, there were a few times where I would see a wax bubble pop and a little plume of what looked like smoke would poof out. Interesting.

 

My next test is to refill again and see if it clouds up at all. If not, then I'll refill with distilled water and try out some GooKit surfactant to see how it affects flow. My thought is that the wax will still have poor, heavy, China-like flow, but we'll see. 

 

 

[Autumn]

Its snowing! Your grande must already be in the christmas spirit.

 

[Erin]

Oh, I didn't even think of that! LOL

[Dr. WHAT?!]

I bet thats just dead wax floating around in there. It may settle all back into the wax eventually.

[Erin]

There's tons of it. What's weird is that it wasn't there the first few times I ran it. I can always dump the liquid and refill since it's just tap water. It's been running on tap water which is so weird!

[Dr. WHAT?!]

when the lamp cools, do those floaties remain? or do they go back into the wax?

[Erin]

They remain. I can see them sitting on top of the cold wax. Looks like dandruff. 

Dr. WHAT?! said:

when the lamp cools, do those floaties remain? or do they go back into the wax?

[Dr. WHAT?!]

well that's good at least.  Just dump again and refill until they are all gone, once you get it all out, I would refill one last time with distilled water.