Silica Gel Desiccant

Hello, Jim, and welcome to the CCF forum.

Those gel packs use a porous paper or paper-like material as a container for whatever drying agent is inside. That alone should prevent any problems with contacting your silver. Silver does react with chlorine and with many chlorides to produce a white colored powder, which is silver chloride. Many of these desicants contain calcium chloride, which is an effective drying agent. I would not want any drying agent to come into direct contact with my silver collection but the package containing the drying agent should be sufficient to prevent that as long as the package is intact. If you live in a high humidity environment, those dessicant packages will become saturated with absorbed water at some point and will need to be replaced. Only time and your usage will tell you when that is appropriate. In some cases, those drying packets can be recycled via heating them in an oven or with a heat lamp for an hour or two every so often. Putting these into an oven used for cooking food is probably not a good idea. I'd go with a heat lamp and see how well that works.