Vintage astro water change

[Gary]

Hi to all i am a total newbie to this site 
I have a question regarding my vintage astro 
I need to do a water change but when i open it it smells like some sort of fuel can i still use distilled water and epsom salts  or will this react with the lava
Many thanks

[Scucci Tedescucci]

This is a little late, but I cleaned out a vintage lamp here and it had the same smell. What you're smelling is actually the stuff in the lava (smell leaches through the water a little).

I poured my old water out and refilled it with water and balanced it with epsom salts and it worked fine. ... I still ended up dumping the lava too because it was also dirty (someone had opened the lamp up and left the cap off for a while), so I ended up just replacing everything in there. ... BUT, it did work fine after I replaced just the water.

[Erin]

I've replaced the liquid in an old Lava Lite lamp. And yes, old fluid smells awful. However, I believe Scucci is right - the smell leaches into the liquid from the wax. I've tried to fix my liquid 3X in the old lamp and each time I removed the fluid, it had that smell again, even thought I started with distilled water and epsom salts.