Need someone to try an experiment for me. May have found a cure for bubbly wax

[Autumn]

So I was talking with da9l and he asked me about bubbly lamps. After some talking I did some googling and figured out stuff like dish detergent will increase surface tension. Since adding salt decreases surface tension and causes lamps to go bubbly, maybe detergent can remove the bubbles?

Anyone wanna give it a shot? I dont have the time or money to try it myself right now.

[Da9L]

This was what i did, and in my case i did help to replace a salt solution liquid with a PG solution or Glycerin solution. I do still believe that PG is the best solution though

Heres a picture showing the different solutions and how the wax behaves

Would be great if someone else would try this theory out!

[Astralav]

Very impressive picture Da9l!

Is it the same wax, just with a change of liquid?

Another reason for water bubbles is when some water is trapped under the wax, then it goes up with it.

[Da9L]

Same wax yes .. liquid is changed .. i even tried it a few times and it was only with the salt solutions i got bubbly wax, but this does seem to make sense if the salt lowers the surface tension as Autumn says ..

[Jus]

I can speak from my experiences on at least 3 lamps that adding detergent (dawn dish soap) beyond 2 or 3 drops has only resulted in degrading the wax, causing it to begin sticking to the sides of the glass or causing the blobs to have odd points on them when they pull apart. Less seems best where detergent is concerned...

Autumn-I should have said thank you before now, but your tip on using marine epoxy to seal the top permanently sure worked great for me...thanks!

[Justin]

i can say from experience that dish soap does the trick to fix some lamps.

ever had those few that just get too hot too fast and ball up at the bottom? i cannot say if it fixes bubbly lamps, i have yet to run into one. but for those that ball up at the bottom, a drop or two of plain old dish soap gets them flowing just like they should.

i have tried salt in different experiments and found that it tends to cloud the water up after its cooled down and run the next time. 

i think dish soap reduces surface tension and allows it to separate easier, versus increasing it. so dish soap may not be a good solution to bubbly lamps. if i run into one, i shall try it.

[Pierre Brazeau]

Hi, everyone. In answering to your salt situation Justin, iodized salt does that with no problem. Cloudes the water everytime,

but seasalt won't, God forbide all those salt water aquariums with the different colored sea anamenies,trigger fish,purple

damsles,yellow tangs,etc,etc would be a real waste of money. Bad enough the initial start up cost for the salt alone,but

having to keep topping up the aquarium's water because of the daily water changes, it becomes expensive to say the least,

but ohhh the color variety. Nothing like salt water aquariums when it comes to color, can't be beat. And if your raising live

coral, well you better have deep pocket, because there extremely finicky on water quality, never mind the lighting, that runs into the hundreds and hundreds of dollars. Sorry, I forgot to mention iodized salt is good old table salt. hope this helps.

[Pierre Brazeau]

I was wondering about surface tension. They say adding soap to water makes the water, believe or not wetter.Instead of allair bubbles sticking to whatever gets put in the water,or excuse cling to the surface of objects in the water, the clinging bubbles detach and rise to the water's surface and make those soap bubbles we all see when doing the dishes. Some pondbugs, like the water stryder that's able to miraculously moves around on the water's surface on those tiny legs that seem to compress the water surface without sinking through, try adding several drops of soap in his water and see if he stay afloat.Iguess the reverse is true, swimming in the Dead Sea is suppose to be surprisingly easier,because of all that salty water.The reason I'm mentioning this is I've built and tested many aquariums of all sizes and noticed that bubbles had an easiertime attaching themselves to whatever fell in the water and the reverse was true when soap was in the mix. There was always many tiny bubbles that took forever to float to the surface when attached to sunken objects when soap was missing.

[Dr. WHAT?!]

I would love to try this fog juice method on a grande lamp that I have. How do I know how much fog juice to put in? and do I use it with distilled water?

[Jim]

Don't you need the good fog juice though?  The stuff they don't offer in stores anymore?  All I ever see is water soluble fog juice and I don't think that's the stuff you want.

Dr. WHAT?! said:

I would love to try this fog juice method on a grande lamp that I have. How do I know how much fog juice to put in? and do I use it with distilled water?

[Tim Gill]

Fog juce is manly glycerine and distilled water - I don't know what you mean by good fog fluid which isn't water solubable.
I haven't heard of fog fluid being water soluabable - if water is added to it then it will just be diluted.

If you want to use good quality fog fluid try find a pro lighting shop / hire place and ask for fog fluid by Martin or Rosco this stuff is good quality.

[Jim]

I had thought when the idea of fog juice first surface on the site, there was talk that the stuff you can get these days is a new "safer" formula that doesn't have the goods to be a suitable master fluid replacement.  If it is what is needed, I'm all for it, but I had been looking for bottles with skulls and crossbones and warning on them due to toxicity.

I blew up the label on the juice from the local party shop around here and it reads...

Contains:  De-ionized water and non-hazardous glycols and glycerine.  Does not contain any ethylene derivatives.

 

http://www.partycity.com/product/fog+juice+gallon.do

Tim Gill said:

Fog juce is manly glycerine and distilled water - I don't know what you mean by good fog fluid which isn't water solubable.
I haven't heard of fog fluid being water soluabable - if water is added to it then it will just be diluted.

If you want to use good quality fog fluid try find a pro lighting shop / hire place and ask for fog fluid by Martin or Rosco this stuff is good quality.

[Tim Gill]

Contains:  De-ionized water and non-hazardous glycols and glycerine.  Does not contain any ethylene derivatives.

This is what all fog fluid contains - it has to be non toxic as it gets vaporised in a fog machine and will be used in places with people.

The fluid that wont have this will be fluid such as haze fluid which is designed to be very fine and cant be seen but can show up the light beams - haze fluid contains water and oil that gets super heated (cracked) to produce a fine mist.

The other effect that you may see and wonder about what fluid makes it is low lying fog - this is often created by using dense fog fluid and produced in a machine that cools and compresses the fog to be dense so sticks to the ground. Before this dry ice was used but as this is dangerous (very low temperchers, frozen co2 etc) it isn't used much.

Back to the original point - I think that fog fliud isn't a good replacement  for master fluid for lamps as its too diluted - adding some PG as you would salts to the lamp is the best idea.

However fog fluid is a good masterfluid for Mathmos glitterbabies but they have a different formula from the other lamps.