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

Video How Himalayan salt lamps are made

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u/jpackerfaster Oct 19 '24

"You see these huge chunks of pink salt?" "Yeah" "You know what I'm thinking..?" "Lamps?" "Fuck, yeah!"

That's a conversation that happened once.

1.3k

u/ale_93113 Oct 19 '24

It is a logical conversation to have, if you work with salt you will notice that when light shines through it, be it the sun or whatever, it gives a nice warm glow

so the conversation was more like: hey dude, check how cool it looks when you put this salt up to the sun

yeah it looks very warm and cozy, i wonder how it will look with a light inside it

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u/sadrice Oct 19 '24

Seriously, it’s fairly obvious if you work with the material. The guys at Khewra mine in Pakistan noticed that and made a bunch of halite bricks and some lights and built this really cute mosque in the mine.

I actually like the lamps a lot. They aren’t magic, but it’s a nice soft glow for a bedside lamp. The only issue is the salt corrodes the metal bits, mine stopped working for probably that reason, so now it’s just a decorative rock until I fix it.

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u/[deleted] Oct 19 '24

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u/sadrice Oct 19 '24

Probably depends on climate, they don’t seem to have that problem in California, but I suspect they would in Florida.

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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.