On Mon, 09 Mar 2015 16:32:30 -0400, "(PeteCresswell)"
wrote:

I mean the stuff that our state uses on highways: big, irregular
yellowish crystals. They always seem to be slightly wet.

I come away from Googling with the impression that as long as the
humidity is over 75%, road salt will be absorbing water.

I've got a couple of 5-gallon buckets of it that I am saving for next
winter and wonder if it is worth leaving the buckets uncovered for a few
weeks of lower-humidity weather in hopes of drying it out.

Does the stuff dry out? Or is the water adsorption a one-way street?

They used to sell bags of CaCl, I think it was, to hang in the closet
with one's clothes to keep the closet dry. Try to find the instructions
for using that. I had a bag, and iirc the instructions said that to
dry it out to put it in the oven at a particular temp (not so hight the
cloth bag fell apart or burned up) for a length of time, in the hours
iirc, and that woudl dry it out.

They still have little bags of "that stuff????" that come shipped with
electronics and cameras.

I had a flooded basement that started to smell of mold, so I bought a 50
pound bag of salt of some sort, at a janitorial supply store. I took a
plastic bucket and some of that brown masonite-like stfuff with the
filligree holes in it, that was hot stuff in the '50's, and I cut a
piece to divide the bucket vertically. I put the salt in one side of
the bucket and I put the bucket where I smelled mold. The next day
there was an inch of water in the bottom, probably on both sides, but I
could see it and when it was fuller, puur it out from the side that was
otherwise empty.

Strangely, the smell disappeared only where hte bucket was. I actually
noticed the smell more when I was walking up the basment steps, so I put
the bucket on a step. In a day or two, the smell was gone from that
step, but I could still smell it on the others. I had to put the bucket
on each step in turn. What's stranger is that my nose was about 5
feet higher than the bucket, but it still worked this way. I poured
out a lot of water, maybe put in salt a second time. Eventually I got
rid of all the smell and I gave most of the bag to a gas station I
thought might need it. A 50 pound bag was still a lot cheaper than a
whole bunch of 4 oz. bags.