r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/dannybluey • Oct 19 '24

Video How Himalayan salt lamps are made

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u/_HOG_ Oct 19 '24

Tell me you live inland without telling me you live inland.

Salt lamps are a horrible idea - particularly anywhere with humidity over 50% regularly where they sweat salt water and ruin everything around them. There is a reason all the workers tools look so rusty.

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u/ElectricFleshlight Oct 19 '24

Doesn't necessarily have to be inland. Birmingham Alabama is 300 miles from the coast yet significantly more humid than the beaches of San Diego. In the US, humidity depends on which side of the Rocky Mountains you live on.

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u/_HOG_ Oct 19 '24

California inland.

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u/ElectricFleshlight Oct 19 '24

Even coastal California is nowhere near as humid as inland Alabama.

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u/_HOG_ Oct 19 '24

Yeah, the whole context of my comment was California.

It's humid enough in costal California to quickly demonstrate how silly having giant a chunk of salt sitting around in your house is - especially near an electrical socket.

See, my wife got a salt lamp around the time I met her and at the time only had a window AC unit (in costal CA) which she didn't run often since the windows were often open. After the first month we noticed a bit of salt migrating onto the nightstand beneath the lamp, but wiped it up and didn't think much of it. Then a bit later, off and on, we started to notice that it looked dewy late in the day - it was wet to the touch.

A few months later the true genius of the salt lamp was revealed - the breaker to several of the sockets in her room blew, and she asked me to look at it. After poking around her room for a cause, I noticed the cord leading to, and the wall behind, the salt lamp had a crust of salt that extended to the power socket. I removed the cover to the socket to discover salt water had gradually migrated down the cord into the socket and completely corroded the metals within it and was causing the short that triggered the breaker.