Home made fog machine

[Wallyman]

I own a couple of room smoke machines. Which is fine for smoking out your guests. If you want the smoke to lay on the ground like fog which is really a great atmosphere for halloween parties, try this.
I took a full size cooler which i found at the local Habitat for humanity thrift shop.
I made holes in either end big enough for 3 inch PVC. one was an inlet for the smoke machine, the other was an output. really simple.
I tweeked it with a piece of sheet metal bent downwards to keep the smoke from going straight to the other end.
Load it up with ice and attach whatever you want on the output to disperse the "fog" to fit the situation. Makes a halloween party 100% more eerie.

As you can see i used metal flexable dryer vent hose for the output. IT worked great. On the input i have two 90 degree elbows arranged in a way as to set the machine on the top of the cooler. This saves space and also keeps the remaining fog inside the cooler between blasts. I did not come up with the design, there are videos on the interweb of others doing it also. I had it set up behind a chicken wire fence on the garden in the backyard. The dryer hose connected to some 3 inch pvc that i buried up to the level of the dirt. A layer of garden cloth (the kind that you put under your soil in a planter box to keep weeds from growing through) over the pipe to hide it and the fog looked as though it was coming out of the ground. I also drilled 3/4 inch holes all along the pipe BTW.Much like french drain pipe.

Heres a picture of it in action.

 

[rockclimber]

dry ice.

 

[Wallyman]

what about dry ice.

 

[ChiXJeff]

Dry ice should give you a much denser fog, it'll chill down the incoming air both faster and colder than water ice, condensing water vapor into fog droplets.

This machine should work pretty well as long as the ambient temperature is close to the dew point.

 

[rockclimber]

what about dry ice.

Dry Ice will give you a much better low-lying fog.

these are the setups most commonly used

what you made is a pretty common way of turning a traditional fogger into a low lying fog unit.

the problem is that the way those machines create that fog is with a large amount of heat, and then as the fog cools it dissipates. so as you cool your fog down to make it lie low, you are loosing quite a bit of it. but it generally works OK

another way of doing it is using a LCQ fog machine, that works similar to a dry ice setup.
http://www.rosco.com/uk/fog/coldflow.cfm

or you could go balls to the wall and run a heavy fogger like a Glaciator
http://www.martin.com/product/product.asp?product=glaciatorx-stream

I wonder if it would be possible to adapt one of the smaller fog machines like what you have to run a heavy fluid like what the Glaciator runs.

 

[Wallyman]

I was planning on running out to buy some dry ice but given the outside temps were in the upper 40s the ice / ice packs worked great.
You are right. Buying dry ice the day of the party, trying to store it and handle it all in a certain time-frame on top of all the other party planning i had i chose the other option. Plus like i said it was pretty cold outside so it was good.

 

[Wallyman]

That thing looks nice and productive. I really ought to change the title to "fogger on a beer budget" I did it for under 40 bucks including the fogger.
Just wanted to share for those of us who already spent all our money on our Jeeps.

 

[djinn]

The big problem with using the 'juice' type smoke machines is the smell - the juice they use is either oil based or glycol based, which can smell bad and leave a residue.

I just built a dry ice fog machine, which looks an awful lot like the picture rockclimber posted. I started with a new 20 gallon drum from McMaster-Carr. There is a 1kW bucket heater from Farm & Fleet to keep the water hot. A basket to hold the dry ice can be lowered into the hot water by a rod through the lid. A 30cfm fan pushes the fog out through a 4" dryer hose mounted on the side of the drum. The first test showed that about 5 pounds of dry ice would yield about 20 to 30 minutes of heavy, low-lying fog. Pictures at

http://www.ifversen.org/gallery/main.php?g2_itemId=488

for anyone interested in seeing it.

 

[rockclimber]

you can run water based fog through any of those "juice" machines.... it doesn't hang around very long though. and it wont be very heavy.