Awesomely lucky 17 inch/32 oz blue "Designer" lamp refurbishment weirdness. Is this normal, anyone else had similar situation?

[James K.]

I got a 17 inch/32 oz "Designer" lamp, the blue base with blue wax variety.  When I picked it up(used) it was totally clear but had obvious very fine white powder collected at the bottom...the usual china wax cloud powder. It had not been run in quite awhile.  As expected it quickly became moderately cloudy after being run looking like the pictures I've seen here of all the other lamps of this type, so I decided to try and refurbish it by replacing the fluid with distilled water, epson salt, and some surfactant left over from a goo kit(I don't have a fine enough filter at the moment). After pouring out the original fluid and rinsing a few times with distilled water I added a little less than 10 ml of surfactant and set the lamp on its base to heat up so I could start the process of getting the fluid density balanced correctly for proper operation. After a few minutes though I noticed the lamp simply started to flow correctly, better than before in fact.  This has really surprised me since I assumed I absolutely would have had to alter density of plain distilled water to get it to work at all, but no its flowing amazingly with nothing but pure water and a little surfactant.  Has anyone else had this happen? Its not just that it flows great now, it even seems to have better endurance than before. I'm running it without a dimmer at the moment and its been about 4 hours. I'm just curious if this is a lucky quirk of the variability of the china wax in this particular lamp that has it working so well on distilled H2O and goo kit surfactant only or are others of this type like this? 

[Keith]

I've heard of grande's flowing with surf and distilled water only so it stands to reason that smaller lamps would do the same.  Luck of the draw with these china lamps.  I guess it shows that continuity from batch to batch is lacking.

Also,

SHOW US PICTURES!!! :D

[Dave Cook]

I know this is an old post I'm reviving.

But in case anyone else finds this and wonders...

In my experimenting, I made one lamp where I didn't add as much PERC to the wax as is typically recommended in the recipes you find around here.  (I probably started around 20-25% rather than 33%.)

I then heated the lamp with just distilled water and a little soap until the wax melted and floated to the top.  Then, I simply added a little bit more and more PERC until the wax was flowing as I liked.  

So it stands to reason that the manufacturers may have done the same type of thing, thereby saving money on not having to add as much to the water (and also using less PERC in the wax).

[Claude J]

Newer wax formulas use chlorinated paraffin to the extent that they will float with only distilled water

PERC has been out of production lamps for decades due to it's environmental and carcinogenic properties