Total newbie, inherited a 45+ year old lamp with floating..."snow"?

[newtogoo]

Boy, am I glad to have found a site full of people who are passionate and knowledgeable on this subject. Thanks so much to the mods for approving my join request!

My mother passed away unexpectedly, leaving me the new caretaker of her vintage lamp. She was a fascinating, eclectic woman, and I'm realizing now just how little I understood about things that I'd seen in her homes for decades - like this lamp. It was around for my entire life, but I didn't pay much attention, and can't remember seeing it run in the last 30+ years. Kicking myself for that now, when I really wish I had a clue and can't ask her.

From its appearance in old photo albums, I know she already had the lamp in the late 60s. I couldn't see any manufacturer's marks on it, but hours of googling seems to suggest it's a Century (please correct me if I'm wrong!). It has a 40w bulb installed. I haven't tried to run the lamp at all - given its extremely odd appearance, it seemed wise to get expert advice first. I'm quite nervous about the idea of potentially harming something that Mom obviously cared for, let alone heating a sealed vessel where chemicals I don't know are behaving in ways I didn't expect.

At the top of the liquid, there's a floating debris layer about 2" thick. The particles look like the artificial snow they make by shredding synthetic sheeting. The floaters are quite densely packed up there, but they're not a solid fused mass. If you picture the tiny chunks of ice at the top of a slush drink, but replace the ice chunks with the shredded synthetic snow, you're in the right place.

I apparently forgot to photograph the bottom of the bottle, where there's something slightly less weird happening. It will be a week before I'm back where the lamp is (3 hour trip), so I hope this is one of those things everybody's seen, and photos aren't needed.

Where the floor of the bottle meets the sides, there are a few (2?) areas where the wax appears lighter than the rest of the wax block. If you've ever made chocolate cake from a mix, and done a bad job of scraping the bowl while you add the liquids, you'd have found some bubbles of light-colored dry mix hiding in the corners of the bowl. That's what this reminded me of. I don't remember seeing texture differences or gaps, just color differences with defined edges. These areas might run 1-2" along the crease between floor and wall, and extend 3/8-1/2" up/out from the crease.

I don't have much other information on the lamp. I assume that she bought it in Canada, because she spent very little time in the States. It lived in at least 4 houses, all in Ontario. The last 3 houses were within a 10 mile radius, and it had been in the last house for 25 years. I don't think it was ever stored in an unheated environment, but it did spend years on the 2nd floor of a house without air conditioning (summer temps to 32C/90F). I'm the only child it would've really been exposed to, and our family are cautious types - repeated shaking (especially while hot) would have been highly unlikely.

At this point, I'm not concerned with making it "perfect" or correcting its faded color - I'd just like to see it run. Maybe in the future, I'd consider upgrading or renewing the contents, but right now it's just a silly sentimental thing to see Mom's beloved goo move again. Hope that makes sense.

The base is now with the family electrician for a quick check-up and blessing, but I don't want to reunite it with the bottle and start heating things up without input/reassurance from goo experts.

So, the questions for you wonderfully knowledgeable lava people:

1) Has anyone seen this snow formation before? Is this just a normal variant of the "someone shook it when it was hot" damage, and I'm just too new to understand what I've read on the subject?

2) Does the "unmixed cake batter in the corners" sound familiar? Are photos needed? Is this an area of concern, or am I being overcautious?

3) Are there any danger signs I should look for when turning the lamp on for the first time? If so, what should I do when I observe ______? Is it totally silly to worry about the bottle exploding?

4) Is there any reason why I shouldn't try cycling the lamp to see if it can eventually right itself to some degree?

5) Is there something glaring I should've thought to ask, but didn't?

Thanks so much for bearing with it through a long post from yet another clueless noob!

[Brad]

glad to hear your lamp is flowing!  great story too.  if the lamp flowed for a while but "domed" at the bottom as time went on, that indicates it's overheating.  i would put the lamp on a dimmer once it starts moving for a while.  good luck!

[Critter]

Glad it flowed again. Not surprised though I have found that if you are willing to try and are patient many lamps with "bad wax" will correct themselves or the owner can remove the fluid and heat the wax to recombine and then put the liquid back in.

Lamp looks good. Was I right earlier? Is this a two piece base?

Criter

[Erin]

What a great comeback story! Reading your story was pretty cool! 

One of my late-60s models had a 50W bulb in it, too. And I even have some old Lava Lite literature that recommend a 50W bulb and that 50 (or was it 40?) was hand-written in there, almost like they had recommended another wattage, but then changed their minds. 

Some of those old lamps can be really gross! I've found old, long-dead bugs in some of mine. :)

Sounds like you have a decent lamp on your hands! I'm glad that it's working out. Keeping running it. And don't be disappointed if it gunks up again after sitting - mine always do. 

I can only run these late 60s lamps for about 3-4 hours tops before they get overheated and end up acting weird, so that's normal. It's also likely that some of the wax became disconnected from the coil. That can be normal, too. 

[newtogoo]

I was prepared for it to gunk up again - but now it's turned completely opaque! I feel like I shouldn't be trusted with grown-up scissors anymore. LOL

Looping back a few days...

At the end of its successful 1st run (pic in last post), it showed me that it doesn't like being overheated any more than I do. Message received, I made a mental note to buy it a dimmer, and to be cautious if I ran it before getting the dimmer incorporated.

The next day, I had a few hours where I knew I could keep an eye on it, so I fired it up. Take-off was different - the wax puck tilted up on the right hand side. When it hit about a 30 degree incline, a giant hollow tube shot up from under the highest part, doubling over on itself at the surface. Half flower from Salvador Dali, half face-hugger from Alien. I was impressed...and a little scared. :) It took about 10 minutes for things to warm up enough to melt the alien structure, and then things started flowing normally. I figured this meant successful rehab complete, and patted myself on the back...totally invoking Murphy's Law on the poor lamp.

Yes, I'm an idiot.

After 3 hours or so, the lamp went back in hovering blob mode, so I shut it down and reminded myself about the need to stop off at Home Depot. No problem, no doubt the lamp was functioning, no rush to run it again until schedule allowed grabbing a dimmer. My schedule was crazy for a few days, so it took a while to get back to the lamp at all.

I eventually picked up this Lutron Credenza TTCL-100 dimmer and inserted it between the lamp and the outlet. It seemed to work normally enough (the light did go brighter/dimmer/off suitably when tested), but the lamp seemed to have trouble getting up to speed with the dimmer on "full" power. Eventually I took the dimmer out of the loop, to see if it had been inhibiting the lamp. After that, lava started moving. When it started acting like it was getting warm, I added the dimmer back in and throttled the lamp to what seemed like happy operation for an hour or so, until I needed to go to bed. I noticed the water had been getting slightly cloudier over time, but I could still see the wax all the way through the bottle.

During its next cycle, I eventually noticed that I was having trouble seeing wax moving at the back of the bottle, and shut it down. The next day, I glanced at the lamp from a different angle, putting it in front of other furniture instead of a blank white wall. There was a substantial, dark metal floor lamp post 18" behind the bottle, but I couldn't see a trace of it through the lava's fluid. Uh-oh.

I gave the lamp a day to see if it would settle, and didn't see any improvement, so I let it try one more cycle under close scrutiny to gather information. I left the dimmer out of the loop. Before turning the lamp on, I slowly lifted the bottle to see what the state of affairs was with the white "unmoistened cake mix" at the bottom.

When the lamp came to live with me, it had 2 well-isolated clumps of white material at the floor/wall junction. This material seems to have shifted or grown (I'm lousy at estimating quantity/size). It didn't seem to be as tall as it used to be, but it extended much further around the bottle. The cooled wax puck seemed normal enough otherwise.

So on with the test run. The initial tilted wax puck followed by a single alien worm to the surface of the liquid seems to be the set takeoff pattern now, but the worms have been smaller with each successive run. The water has been cloudier for each run, so I'm guessing this is related?

By the time the lamp was running on this session, I could only tell that it was running by looking at the top and bottom half inch or so of liquid. Blobs were visible as they got to the top, and as they landed on and recombined with the edge of the main wax mass at the bottom. Granted, my field of vision was very restricted, but I didn't see nearly as much activity in those small windows as I expected to. I did notice that the wax seemed to be having trouble getting a grip on the spring, but it didn't seem to be levitating as a mass (well, what I could see). It seemed to be staying at the bottom in the center, and just not having the oomph to ooze sideways through the coil.

I know you're not supposed to harass a hot lamp, but it seemed prudent to see what the white crud was up to while the wax was liquid. Was it still gumming up the spring? Had it dissolved, and become the problem clouding the entire bottle?

When I looked at the bottom of the operating-temp bottle, the wax wasn't a single mass tight to the glass all the way across, but it also wasn't mounded up on one side as I'd seen before. It looked like there was a sticky bun sitting on the bottom of the bottle. There were circular pieces of wax (dough) touching the bottom (and touching each other), but they had shallow liquid (cinnamon sugar) voids between them just at glass floor level. Around the outside of the jar was one body of wax, almost a complete ring, but not quite - like a big C. The center of the jar showed another mass of wax, a circle about an inch across. It might have been part of a larger mass, causing the void in the C. The wax was down at the bottom, not floating up far away from the floor. It just had some "grooves" full of liquid underneath parts of it.

The white gunk was arranged in nearly a full ring around the outer edge of the bottle's floor. If the wax needs to be able to maintain surface tension underneath the spring in order to function properly....well, that wasn't going to happen. The white crud seems to have taken over most of the spring-bottom real estate. I rotated the bottle very slightly to see if/how the white stuff would move. It didn't react like a liquid, like melted wax. It behaved like powder. I could see some of it "rub off" the top of the pile, and drift up the surface of the wax along the glass.

Visibility is about half an inch in this soup, and I can't see any particulate in the liquid. It's just uniformly cloudy, like you dumped milk into a glass of water, and resembling these plastic "jade" horses everybody had in the early 80s. It doesn't seem to settle (at least not visibly, given a day or two), and it doesn't seem to get absorbed into circulating wax (at least not noticeably, in these few brief cycles). It does seem to be on a trajectory of getting worse, but I'm running out of visibility to measure degree with.

Soooooo....now what?

Do I just let it run cycles "blind" for a few days? (Bearing in mind: I can't really see what's going on to any decent degree, we've established that this lamp exceeds its temp limits if left unattended, and the dimmer isn't proven solid or dialed in.)

Is there an oddball secret clarifying ritual, like chilling to 42F while singing Elvis songs in Swedish during a blue moon?

Should I just get over it and prepare for some sort of surgical filtering procedure? (I'm not ready to go straight to kitting the lamp yet. It's a ridiculous sentimental thing, but if possible I'd rather rehab Mom's wax to 80% function than install new goo at 100%.)

Many thanks for the continued wisdom, patience and encouragement!

Oh, and Critter - yep, two piece base. And thank you for posting about your gigantic lamp kaboom during the week from hell. I'm in IT too, and a lava lamp hobbling an alarm system is the most interesting troubleshooting story I've heard in ages. :)

[Erin]

These old lamps can be really tough. I'm not sure what you can do. I'd run it for several more days for 2-3 hours and see what you have after a week or so. The white stuff at the bottom will never go away and luckily, usually stays at the bottom, not really harming anything. 

I should fire up one of mine like yours and see what mine does. 

[IvyTripper]

I'll buy this lamp in it's current state if it has still never been opened.  Let me know if you're interested.

[Claude J]

Do you know this post is from 2015 ?
IvyTripper said:

I'll buy this lamp in it's current state if it has still never been opened.  Let me know if you're interested.

[IvyTripper]

Yep.  My eyes work.
Claude J said:

Do you know this post is from 2015 ?
IvyTripper said:

I'll buy this lamp in it's current state if it has still never been opened.  Let me know if you're interested.