Have fixed cloudy lamps in the past but this time I put too much washing up liquid in I think
The guide said to put a small amount of washing up liquid in
It's dead now and doesn't work
Can I try flushing it somehow?
tomorrow evening when the wax has cooled
to dense. need to lower the water's density more. soap will do that.
it's a bit more complex than you might think. you want a fluid that's density at temperature is around or slightly higher than the density of the wax at the same temperature.
no idea what wax is in there, but I'd suspect paraffin wax as it has the lowest melting point (45c ish), so if we assume that, with a density of around 900kg/m3 (will need to be calculated at that temp but isn't that different).
density of water at 45c is 990kg/m3 (
https://www.vip-ltd.co.uk/Expansion/Density_Of_Water_Tables.pdf) so it will float, cool and stay at the top. this doesn't work though, as when the lamp cools the wax sinks, so it must be lower than 900kg/m3 at room temperature.
trying to do this calculation with soap is awkward because we don't know what's in the soap.
so lets do it with ethanol first.
ethanol density is around the 800kg/m3 mark.
ethanol, which is miscible in water will reduce it's density similar to soap. however, you are going to need around 50%abv to get it to work assuming the numbers above. Ethanol is highly flammable and will start to turn to vapour at 45c, so..... yer lets not do that. (
https://www.handymath.com/cgi-bin/e...nc=&concv=&submit=Reset&volwght=&calcvolwght=)
a quick google suggests dish soap is around 932kg/m3 at room temp, so it's not going to get lower enough. this means the wax must be denser than parrafin wax. beeswax is around 60c, much to hot for lava lamp fluid.
I think you are in to a world of experiments now. flush it and use distilled water and soap mix, go for 10% soap in water and then increase my 5% increments till it works or doesn't and then you are in to figuring out what the wax is, what it's density is (eureka).... actually, you could do that first. hmmmmm.
