Yet another car boot sale gem (Lava Lamps)

Member Name: sue26

Product:	Lava Lamps
Date:	04/01/02 (1648 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great mood lighting

Disadvantages: The bulb has just this second blown in mine

I`ve always wanted a lava lamp but new they are not that cheap to buy. Most lamps these days start at around £30, and spending that kind of money on one product just frightens me, so I`d resigned myself to never owning one.

Then one day as sue26 and clan were browsing around our favourite shopping place, you know, that great big store known to all thrifty people called the local car boot sale, I did a quick u-turn as out of the corner of my eye I spotted a lava lamp.

Now here`s the best bit of this tale, all I paid for this little gem was, wait for it, drum roll please, £5, yes you read that correctly, just £5 for something I thought I`d never own.

Now for those of you that don`t know what one of these little beauties is then I`ll tell you. A lava lamp is a glass jar filled with clear fluid with a guey like glob of oily waxy stuff dropped inside. This jar then sits snuggly on a base unit with a 40w light bulb inside. A cap is then placed on top of the jar so it doesn`t look like, well, a jar simply.

Now from that description it doesn`t sound that spectactular, well it isn`t, not until you turn the light on that is. Even once you`ve turned the light on it`s still a pretty boring lamp until it`s been left a few hours to heat up.

Now as I said, I`ve never owned a lava lamp, so I didn`t know how they worked, so you can imagine how disappointed I was after turning it on and then sitting staring at it for five minutes only to find nothing happening. Oh bugger, I thought, I`ve only gone and bought myself a dud.

It wasn`t until I did a search on the internet to find out how they worked that I learned it can take four or five hours to start working when a lava lamp has been turned off for a few months.

So there I sat in front of my monitor just idling away the time, while my new little lamp slowly warmed up in front of me taking pride of place on the window ledge. After a few hours I looked up, and low and beho
ld the guey stuff had started to soften and rise up from the bottom of the jar. Not long now I thought and carried on surfing and doing other stuff round the house. Seconds ticked by, then minutes, then hours, then all of a sudden a little blob of red goo rose slow and dreamily to the top of the jar. This was soon followed by another blob, and then another until slowly but surely it started to get a rythm going.

Now once a lava lamp gets going they are pretty cool, and they are so relaxing to watch as the little blobs swim up to the surface and then drop back down again, now and again colliding with one another to make them take a different route round the jar, they`re a bit like watching fish swimming around a tank.

Mine is on a simple silver base with a flip switch and the lead is quite long so it doesn`t have to sit next to the plug socket. The lava globe (jar), is just a simple tall shape which angles slightly inwards towards the top which is then topped with a silver pointy cap.

These lamps don`t give out a lot of light into a room as they only use a small 40w bulb, but then again I suppose their main function is ornamental or just pure amusement. They are however good as mood lighting for romantic meals and such or as an aid to relaxation.

Most lava lamps don`t vary a great deal in design, although you can buy some wacky ones such as ones shaped as skulls, but mostly they are just like the one I have. Where they do differ though are the colours and designs of the bases, and the colour of the goo inside the globe, and now you can also buy ones that have glitter inside as well. The good thing about these lamps though is that you can buy the bases and the globes separately, so there no need to panic if you accidentally smash your glass part, or just become a bit bored with the base unit, and because most globes are the same width and shape at the bottom you can mix and match most variations. The base units and the globes start
at around £20 each, but once you look at the fancier end of the market they can become quite pricey. Apart from just the simple base, the next most commonly bought bases are the ones that are shaped like the bottom of a rocket.

There are several names for these brilliant lights such as motion lamps, lava lamps or lava lites, but the man who invented them, a Mr Edward Craven Walker, called them astro lamps. He first came upon the idea after seeing a weird egg timer in a cafe, this timer was a cocktail shaker with a glob of wax inside.

He first began making them in a factory in the south of England in 1963, then put them on display at a novelty convention in Hamburg, West Germany in 1965. After this two Americans bought the rights to the lamps and renamed them lava lites, once they were put out for sale they went down a storm in the psychedelic 60`s. Once into the 70`s sales started to drop off, but although lava lamps have gone out of fashion they will never die out.

The way a lava lamp works is by combining two liquids similar in density and insoluble in one another into a tightly sealed container.Once the bulb underneath is switched on, the heavier of the two liquids will absorb the heat first, expand and become less dense, then float to the top. Once it reaches the top it starts to cool down, becomes heavier again, then sinks back to the bottom.

Even though the oil used in the globe is not a living organism as such, it can still die and refuse to function properly. If the lamp is used on a regular basis for a quite a few years, or if the lamp is dropped or shaken up, then the chemicals inside the oil can lose their potency and fail to the job they are meant to do. The special chemicals used in the goo are what causes the oil or wax to separate relatively easily into little blobs when it is stretched, so of course if these chemicals don`t work anymore and the oil can`t be broken up, then it will be too heavy to float around the j
ar. It`s for this reason I suspect that the older lava lamps have now become collectors items.

Although the original recipe for manufactured lava lamps is a closely guarded secret, there are recipes about which enable you to make your own, but these are not only time consuming, they are complicated, messy, and will in the end cost you more than simply buying one off the shelf.

For those of you with kids out there, or those of you that just like playing anyway, here`s a couple of really simple recipes that I`ve found on the internet, bear in mind though, these are not lava lamps, and they are messy, but they are also great fun for kids.

Recipe 1. This is just a simple experiment to start you off.

You will need. A glass jar or clean drinking glass, vegetable oil or baby oil, salt, water, and food colouring(optional).

Firsly put 3 inches of water into your glass, then add 1/3 cup of oil and let it settle. here`s where you then add the food colouring if you want. Then all you do is shake the salt onto the liquid and watch the bubbles sink to the bottom. Once the salt has dissolved, watch the oil bubbles rise back up to the top again.

Recipe 2. This one is better.

For this one you will need a jar with a screw on lid, a coffee jar will do, vegetable or baby oil, water, food colouring, and also some glitter and other glittery stuff, sequins or even coloured bits of foil look good(put that shiny wrapping paper to good use).

Firstly, put about 2 inches of oil into the jar, then add your glitter and other pieces. Top up with water until it`s almost full then add the food colouring. Don`t add too much colouring though as it spoils the effect, one tiny drop is enough. Then fill it right up to the top with water and screw on the lid really tightly. Here`s where`s it`s a good idea to work over a sink just in case your jar leaks. Now just turn the jar upside down and then back again and watch what happens. I
thought this one was really good and my kids loved it, so I`ve now got two jars taking pride of place on my kitchen window ledge.

Whatever you do, please don`t let your kids do any of this unsupervised because it will ruin your kitchen if you do, lol.

If you don`t fancy doing any diy lava lamps then you can always download one to your pc, although these aren`t as good as the real thing, just go to http://www.cs.buffalo.edu/~llabbott/lava/ and it should take about 20 seconds to download your very own pc lava lamp.

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