What exactly is the goop inside a lava lamp?

Hello and welcome to No Effort November, a series of videos for the month of November in which it becomes increasingly clear that the title is a misnomer. Today's video is about

lava

lamp

s! Yes, those things that hang out on set unceremoniously. Just doing his globular thing. Speaking of misnomers, unless the

lamp

has broken, the

lava

is inside the glass, shouldn't they be magma lamps? These are important questions. Lava lamps have been an object of personal fascination for many years. They are objectively useless objects, producing little to no usable light and taking literally hours to become operational, especially for larger ones, but once functional, they are downright paralyzing and hypnotic.

And how it works is stupidly simple but at the same time surprisingly complicated. And that's

what

we're going to talk about today. First, the anatomy of a lava lamp. You already have the base. You already have the balloon. And you have a little hat to hide the fact that the globe is actually just an oddly shaped bottle, complete with its lid. Inside the base is an incandescent light bulb, often some type of appliance light bulb, and then when you place the globe in the base, you end up with

what

amounts to a strange bottle on top of a light bulb.

And that bulb has to be incandescent because these things run on the heat they generate, so it's a good thing they use appliance bulbs since they're unlikely to be phased out. You can't

exactly

put an LED bulb in an oven, can you? But as with many things in life, it's what's inside that counts. It is evident that there are two substances inside this bottle: one transparent and one unclear. They clearly don't want to mix, and it's also clear that the one that's unclear is some kind of wax, clearly. When the lamp is cold, it forms a large mass at the bottom and gentle inversion and shaking reveals that it is clearly a solid.

That's clear. In fact, anyone who has had a lava lamp and watched it heat up knows how clear it is that we are dealing with wax. Except, of course, those who are too impatient and too careless to read the labels attached to things that say to be patient and then leave product reviews claiming it doesn't work: those people are very funny. Anyway, a fun and common phenomenon found in flavas when they are heated is the Pointed Wax Tower. You will often find that the clump of wax at the bottom is pushed up as the wax closest to the bulb melts and expands, and once it has melted enough, it makes a hole in the top of the bulb. dome and then splashes outward and upward where it solidifies again once it comes into contact with the still cold mysterious transparent liquid.

Then it will look like this for at least another half hour, so be patient, Greg. You don't always get the Spiky Tower of Wax, sometimes you just get the Bloaty Glob of Indigestion or the Fantastic Flippy Flip. No matter how the wax behaves at first, it takes until the entire globe has heated up to the point where all the wax has melted (and can stay melted), and then you will get jigglies of various colors. What a callback! Now this is where our friend physics creates magnificent magma magic. Wax, like most substances in existence, expands when it melts.

Water does the opposite because it's cheeky, but anyway once the wax melts its density is almost

exactly

that of the mysterious clear liquid. That means it won't exactly float or sink. It will just be suspended for a bit. But, fortunately for us, its density, and therefore its buoyancy in the mysterious transparent liquid, varies a little with its temperature. And also, fortunately for us, because the heat source is at the bottom, we get a temperature gradient across the globe with the hottest parts at the bottom and the coldest parts at the top (the furthest from the lamp).

So, we end up with this cyclical behavior where the wax starts at the bottom, is heated by the lamp, becomes slightly buoyant in the mysterious clear liquid thanks to thermal expansion, and then floats to the top. Once there, it cools a little as it is far from the bulb, causing it to contract slightly and therefore no longer floats but sinks, and then sinks again to the bottom. And this repeats itself over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. If you've seen a lava lamp for any period of time, you'll know that these wax globes don't really want to match each other.

Collisions are frequent, but most of the time they result in a bounce and not a smoosh. But there has to be something forcing them back together, otherwise at some point you'll end up with a bunch of little beads floating around as they continue to separate. Then, at the bottom of the balloon there is a coil of wire that serves to break the surface tension of these balloons and force them to form a large balloon again. In this way the lamp can work continuously. This also keeps the wax in contact with the hottest part of the glass at the bottom, making it heat up faster and keeping everything moving.

Now, you might be wondering what this hitherto mysterious clear liquid is. Or, at any rate, the wax. Regular candles are made from our old friend paraffin wax, which melts at fairly low temperatures and therefore seems to be a good candidate. But paraffin wax is much less dense than water and would never sink in it, so if it is paraffin wax, the mysterious clear liquid would have to be something else. There are now clear liquids in which paraffin sinks, but many of them are flammable and therefore pose a problem. A large amount of, say, acetone in a glass bottle on top of a light bulb probably wouldn't get UL approval.

Furthermore, many of these potentially acceptable liquids would be mixed with the paraffin and we cannot allow that. We need it to be separated like oil and water. It turns out that that mysterious transparent liquid is actually water. Which now turns the wax into a mysterious translucent substance. Why does wax behave like paraffin but also sink in water? The answer is: paraffin. Okay, now comes the part of this video where I make my own lava lamp fluids. I have done this once before and here is the beautiful result. Yes, the base is... a cube and the globe is... a wine bottle, but it actually works like a real lava lamp.

You can search online for homemade lava lamp recipes, but most of them are, well, terrible. I mean, sure, they're kid-friendly and most are designed for fun little science projects, but vegetable oil in water is nothing like the real thing. I finally found a recipe that is probably exactly what is found in commercial lava lamps. Or at least, what it once was: This recipe uses nothing more than what can be found at a craft store and a Walmart, but one of the ingredients is no longer available for sale in all fifty states. Yes. And I'll explain that recipe shortly, but first we have to change this cheap IKEA table that I take at least a little care of for a folding table that I hardly take care of at all.

Because you know, messy. Did that cut work? I hope so. It doesn't matter because this part didn't go exactly as planned. I'm one in three here and I'm pretty sure I've figured out why. But first, for those of you looking at this lamp with its clear liquid and yellow wax and wondering where you can find such a rare color combination, you can't! This is because the goo on this lamp has been replaced with mine and as you can see it is working quite well. There are a few things I would like to improve, but now let me explain how it was done.

The wax is actually just regular paraffin wax. I used raw paraffin from a craft store instead of just melting some unscented white candles, which I did because a previous lava lamp attempt with simple candles clouded the water. However, I discovered that maybe the wax wasn't the problem there; We'll talk about that later. The water is regular distilled water (tap water would probably be fine too, for what it's worth), and a pinch of dish soap and kosher salt. Let's start by coloring the wax. What has proven to be the most difficult aspect of commercial lava lamps to recreate is the color.

Paraffin, when melted, is transparent, but that would be a little difficult to see in a lava lamp. It may look great dyed with candle dye, but what I'm looking for is to recreate the translucent look of a real lamp. With this successful wine bottle lamp I found that adding a little raw titanium dioxide powder seemed to work wonders for clouding it, but I added too much and the consistency is a bit...not great. This time I tried simple oil paints. I really just want the pigments inside the paint, but hopefully the linseed oil base will dissolve well enough in the paraffin.

I experimented with blue, yellow and brown (of course) and was quite pleased with the result. In the end it still wasn't perfect, after a while the paint settles to the bottom of the wax, but with enough movement it mixes at least a little. I'd like to get my hands on some raw pigments like the titanium dioxide powder here, and I may give powder paint a try in the future. As long as it can dissolve or remain suspended in the wax and not leach into the water, it will work. Well, mostly, we'll get to that. But anyway...

Now that I have a reasonable method for coloring the wax, it's time to discuss how to make the wax sink. This part is where I think some hiccups occurred this time. We need to increase the density of the paraffin so that when it melts it has a specific gravity of about 1, that of water. So we need some kind of oil-soluble chemical that is very dense. And it turns out that a commonly available automotive chemical fits the bill. What is it? ♫ dramatic sting ♫ Ah, this is where I get a little disclaimer. This chemical is, to put it mildly, questionable.

It's probably not particularly dangerous to be around, after all the auto technicians for decades have sprayed this stuff randomly on all the brake parts and all that, but it is recognized as a probable carcinogen with long-term exposure, and there are plenty of others too. anecdotes related to health. effects associated with the use of this chemical, so you know... I wouldn't consider this completely harmless. Also, I'm not going to use it for its intended purpose, with that in mind; This video is intended for entertainment purposes only and does not endorse the use of this or any other chemical product in a manner inconsistent with its label.

Do not try this at home. And, in addition to potential health and safety risks, this chemical also has certain environmental risks! Again, this is no big deal. What is it? Wow, it's tetrachloroethylene. Fun fact, this was used widely in dry cleaning and I think it's still pretty common in the industry today. Dry cleaning doesn't mean things don't get wet, it just means they don't get wet with water. In the dry cleaning industry it is often called perc, short for perchloroethylene. And the reason it's problematic for the environment is precisely the reason it's useful in lava lamps: it's very dense.

The specific gravity of this chemical (I'm not going to keep saying tetrachlorethylene, okay?) is 1.62, which means it is 1.62 times denser than water. Great for my needs, but a problem for soil and groundwater contamination because this material just sinks. And it sucks, by the way. This is probably why it has been banned in some states. The newer formulations are various mixtures of other fun things. Now, to be clear, this environmental hazard is generally only problematic in the case of large industrial spills. This stuff evaporates pretty quickly, which is why in some states we still sell it in aerosol cans like this one anyway, but I'm just giving you another reason to consider this something not to be messed with.

But it's exactly the type of chemical we need to make paraffin denser. So this is what I did. First, I consumed the contents and then cleaned a couple of wine bottles to hopefully turn them into modern cube lamps. Now, I found that the part of the bottle, which is the upward protrusion on the body next to the glass, needs to be minimal or non-existent for best results, and we need to add some type of coil to help the wax reform. and stick to the bottom, as in a commercial lamp. It doesn't seem like it has to be rust resistant, since once it'scovered in wax, it will almost always be covered in wax, so I used a couple of random springs.

From this previous wine bottle lamp I learned that you need the coil to be a little smaller than the diameter of the bottle, otherwise the wax can form a giant ball that never touches it long enough. Once I was happy with the coil, I added distilled water to the bottle and placed it on the base. I wanted it to be close to operating temperature when I added the wax. While it was heating, I prepared the color of wax I wanted in a glass jar in a double boiler. After emptying the contents of a can of brakleen into a glass jar outside, I added it to the wax; something like a third of the wax volume seemed to work well, but I was guessing everything here.

Once mixed, and assuming the water in the bottle was hot, I poured it into the bottle. Here the wax did not sink, so it did not have enough brake. I experimented with using syringes to inject brakleen into the wax, and it worked pretty well, but it was pretty slow and ended up with what I was hoping to avoid: little balls of overly dense wax that quickly sank to the bottom. In the end I used a larger syringe without a needle to simply inject into the top of the bottle. Once most of the wax had sunk, the refinement proceeded.

If the wax is too dense, this is not a problem: we can easily make the water denser by adding salt and in this case it is better to use kosher salt which does not cloud the water. I found it was best to make a very saline solution and use a syringe to add it to the water. Then I simply added the brine to the bottle until the wax started to float. Of course, some adjustments were necessary and fortunately, if you add too much brine, all you need to do is remove some of the liquid and replace it with plain water.

This process is a bit tricky, though, since you can't start with a full bottle unless you want to deal with overflow, and I had to remove some liquid anyway, which means you're messing up the salt-to-salt ratio. water once you add brine or plain water...then... But in the end it wasn't that much of a hassle and I found the process worked wonders. The idea of ​​making the brine solution actually made this a pretty simple affair, but this is where I ran into trouble. The water was starting to cloud up and I couldn't understand why. It didn't look like it was the paint - the previous test didn't have any cloudiness issues.

And simply adding salt shouldn't have clouded the water. What's more, the wax seemed to separate somehow, as if it had impurities. I didn't know what to make of this behavior until I realized that the can of brakleen I had used for this was not purely tetrachloroethylene. It also contained petroleum distillate and trichloroethylene. Now, I've had these cans for years; I bought them about a decade ago when I first tried this, and I never realized this one was different. I suspect that the other components were reacting with the paraffin wax, causing the water to become cloudy and creating strange impurities.

And perhaps this was to blame for the failure of my previous cheap candle wax wine bottle lamp; maybe the wax was never the problem. Anyway, I'm considering the blue and brown bottles lost causes. It seemed that the impurities in the wax could be removed with a little manipulation: a sort of crust appeared on the surface of the molten wax and could be removed with a small object, but a couple of attempts were unsuccessful for the brown bottle. . However, the yellow lava lamp, despite initially having the same problems of turbidity and impurities, was somehow saved. After removing the crunchy wax, it came back together with a bit of cloudiness.

I simply repeated that again, removing as much contaminated wax as I could, changed the water and now it was almost perfectly clear. That's great. Of course, the yellow lava lamp was a little different. It started life as a new pink wax with purple liquid lamp, a color combination I've never liked despite being on sale forever, and after warming up just once, I unceremoniously opened the bottle cap and poured its content. . A quick sniff test revealed that commercial lava lamps most certainly no longer use tetrachlorethylene in their wax. It smells almost like sticky flour, or something like plasticine, nothing like the sweet chemical smell of this stuff.

I'm really curious what this wax is and it's definitely safer than this concoction I'm making. I cleaned its coil by simply running some boiling water over it and washed the bottle as best I could. From there the process was the same, but this time I added too much brakleen and the wax sank immediately. I would actually prefer this to having to add it to the floating wax, but you have to be careful because if you go too far with the brakleen, no amount of salt will make the wax float. Fortunately, it didn't take much for the lava to flow.

The last thing you need to make a decent lava lamp is a couple drops of dish soap. This helps prevent the wax from sticking to the glass, but more importantly, it makes the lamp more visually appealing. Without it, the surface tension of the water tends to keep the wax as a couple of large droplets. The soap reduces this surface tension and thus results in a more active lamp. In retrospect, it seems better to add the soap to the water before even adding the wax; However, I began to suspect that the soap might have been causing the cloudiness issues.

More or less it was, but only because of wax impurities caused by non-pure brakleen. It seems like the soap was helping to get them out of the wax, which I guess is a good thing, but it caused them to become cloudy. Now, this recipe is far from perfect. For one thing, it requires an absolutely perfectly sealed bottle. You can still smell the brakleen when it is added to the wax, which means it slowly leaches and evaporates. With wax underwater this doesn't matter: it's not soluble in water, so it would probably just stay in the wax, but even if it leaked into the water, it would immediately sink to the bottom where the wax would recombine with it again.

However, if left out in the open, enough wax will come out over time that it will ruin the density. Ask me how I know. Also, well, the oil painting seemed promising, but in the end... it wasn't great. It seems that the linseed oil base doesn't actually dissolve in the paraffin. It seemed like it was, and maybe it's the bad brake that's messing this up, but over time the paint sinks into the wax and doesn't stay suspended. To make matters worse, the coil of this commercial lamp seems to act like a strainer, so over time the wax becomes increasingly clear.

I can get the paint to recombine by spinning the balloon while it's hot and the wax settles to the bottom, but this is annoying plus the paint doesn't blend well anymore and is all snotty and gross. I may try oil paints with the right shade again, but I'm willing to accept that it just doesn't work. Now, the most notable thing about this process is how finely balanced it is. The difference between no movement and good movement was about 10 cc of my brine solution, which itself contained perhaps a gram of salt, if anything. The overall change in the specific gravity of the bottle was minuscule, but that's just the world of lava lamps.

They are finely tuned bottles. Speaking of which, some tips and tricks! Some lava lamps misbehave. This one here loves to have bubbles in the wax. One thing you can try to help mitigate this is to reduce the wattage of the bulb - Tech Tangents had success with this for an annoying lamp. He also noted that the airflow around the lamp can affect its performance, which actually makes a lot of sense given how fragile this buoyancy balance is. Small changes in temperature can cause the wax to sink or rise, and speeding up the rate at which the energy leaves the bottle will greatly affect its behavior.

If you want even more precise control, you can put your lava lamp on an in-line dimmer switch. Personally, I only found them necessary for the giant Lava Grande lamps, and eventually they added dimmers to the lamp bases. I'm not even sure if they still sell them, although they really need something like 85 watts of power, which isn't exactly the size of a normal light bulb. But it's pretty easy to do it with a dimmer! And before I go, I'd like to talk about how I'm going to deal with this environmentally problematic substance that I've created. It's probably not the best idea to send this to the landfill, so I'll keep it.

I'm going to melt all of this failed wax into a lump and keep it open in the garage because I suspect that if it's exposed to air, eventually all of the brakleen will evaporate from the wax. The old glass jars I used a long time ago for this no longer have any smell, and the remaining wax has become harder over time (the combination of wax and brakleen is quite soft as a solid, and what is left now is feels like regular paraffin). ). So it seems that eventually it just evaporates, despite being dissolved in solid wax. I'll be curious to see how long it takes for the wax to release, if ever.

But if that fails, there is also option B. The boiling point of tetrachlorethylene is 250 degrees Fahrenheit or 121 Celsius. That's much lower than the flash point of paraffin, so you might as well put this in a toaster oven at 300 degrees and... wait a while. It's probably best to put the toaster oven outside if I'm going to do that. But this should cause it to vaporize and enter the atmosphere, where it will break down into less harmful substances. Its lifetime in the atmosphere is estimated to be only 2-5 months, so I'm not too worried about the impact of this, although I do want to be careful.

Anyway, thanks for watching. I hope you enjoyed this video about lava lamps and a way to make them. I actually have no idea if this recipe was ever used in commercial production, and there's no way I can remember where I found it exactly, but if memory serves, it looked like it was, "ahem," borrowed from someone in the past. The day. If there are any chemically inclined people out there who know of a more inert way to do this, or perhaps have an idea of ​​what's in lamps today, please leave a comment. I would also love suggestions on how to best color the wax.

What I'm leaning towards is actual candle dye for color, and just a little bit of the titanium dioxide powder here for translucency. Although, like I said, I also want to try powder painting and find some raw pigments. I think the biggest problem with oil paint is that linseed oil doesn't really dissolve in paraffin and appears much denser than wax. Since the power of titanium dioxide seemed to work so well in this case, I imagine any fine powder that can remain suspended in the wax will work. I will report if there are any important findings. Toodles! ♫ Volcanically smooth jazz ♫ Literal hours for it to be operational, especially for Lawl -- ...appliance light bulb, and then when you turned on the...

I did it too soon! This is very exciting! Okay, now it comes... uh, no, I need it... Because it's gobedy, I know what I'm doing! I know what I'm doing. I should probably mention that there is an alternative method to this that I want to try, that's one of the reasons I'm making three lamps in total, or hoping to anyway. Oh! Tone it down a bit... This recipe uses nothing but what eh bith be. That's because the goo on this lamp has been replaced with mine and as you can see, it works, God, that's hot. Don't touch the bottom, fool!

Man, this video was weird. And the hair! Ugh, why! It looked much better in the experiment shots. I have to try to replicate it next time.