Moisture: the safe deposit box's worst enemy.

[itjclarke]

Originally Posted by Jobu

A safe way to use the silica gel beads is to buy a plastic tupperware container, poke a lot of holes in the lid, and put the silica beads in there with the lid closed. It will still be open to the air but ought to contain all of the gel in case of what seems like a fairly rare meltdown.

According to Wikipedia (proceed with some caution), there appear to be a few things that react with silica gel: "Silica gel is non-toxic, non-flammable, and non-reactive and stable with ordinary usage. It will react with hydrogen fluoride, fluorine, oxygen difluoride, chlorine trifluoride, strong acids, strong bases, and oxidizers."

My guess is that the inital meltdown was due to one non-silica product accidentally being mixed with the silica, causing the problem.

Interesting, thanks for posting Jobu (and awesome username!). My wife had kept this stuff in a ziplock under our kitchen sink where there's plenty of weird stuff, including strong bases and/or acids in all of our cleaning stuff. It's also pretty moist down there, so suspect some things may possibly ooze or precipitate into others.