Fog machine and chiller

I used a small fog machine this last year, I found that it worked ok except that the machine would take some time to warm back up after a couple of good blast. So what you have to considered is how much you want the unit to put out and how much cash you what to put out.

What I did was to buy a 2nd small unit (on sale at 50% off) that I can use in concert with the one I already had. I did a little looking around the net for some ideas on how to use a fog machine. The best thing that I came across was for a chiller, most of them showed a large tube that connected to a cooler with a large tube coming out the another side.

This looked like a really cool way to chill the fog. But I don't have that much room for something like this and the cost was to high. Besides you had to hide all your hard work

I made my chiller part of the halloween display. What I did was to take an old 5 gallon plastic water jug and cut the bottom out of it. That way I could fill it with whatever I wanted to, and what I wanted, was a rubber brain, a pair of hands and allot of ice some water and red food coloring. I built a stand as part of the display. I sought after the mad scientist look and in doing so the jug drew all of the attention away from the chiller.

To set up the jug all you need is a rubber stopper or cork for the top. Drill a hole through the stopper and insert a adaptor so you can connect a section of tubing to transfer the water to the chiller. The adaptor that I used is called a Christmas tree adaptor. It looks like two trees joined at the base of the tree

All of the chilling effect takes place in a 4" section of ABS pipe that is about 3' in length. Inside the ABS tube is a coil of copper tubing. I went to Home Depot and purchased 5 sections of 1/2" copper tubing 24" long. and around 10 elbows and valve. I then constructed my coil.

The out flow will dump into a bucket and then be pumped back up to the 5 gallon jug on the stand.

At first I tried to use 1/4" copper tubing for the coil but soon realized that it the small diameter created to much back pressure, this meant that the flow was not going to be enough to fill the needs of the chiller.

So I went to the 1/2" tubing. This was not a big deal for me I had work with 3/4" before. What is really good about using 1/2" pipe is the heat transfer rate. To make this work you have to take as much heat out of the fog as you can in a very short time. Because the flow was so high and the contact service area was fairly large with this tubing it worked out very nicely.

The last thing was to find a way to illuminate the jug. Very simple, all I did was to cut a hole in the top of the stand and placed a flash light so the head of it was touching the jug. when it was turned on the whole jug glowed a nice blood stained red.

After all of this you ask what does the chiller do? And why would I want one? The fog comes out of the machine hot, in a cool room or on a cold night the fog will just rise up into the air. With the chiller it stays close to the ground so you get a blanket effect that looks very eerie.