Thread: Building a low lying fogger without electricity or fog machine... Need help!

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Hello!
This forum rocks ! We are putting on a haunted hayride and trail ride and will not have access to electricity, but will have a fire. I was watching diy network tonight on haunted house building and they built this fogger and it got me to thinking... They took a trash can w/lid (I am going to use 5 gallon bucket) and cut a hole in the lid and on the bottom. They ran a dryer vent thru the trash can holes and then put ice in the trash can around the vent to cool the fog and keep it low lying. They then hooked the dryer vent to a fog machine (fog machine was on top of the trash can) forcing the fog out and to remain low lying. Since I cannot use a fog machine, I was thinking of using boiled water to heat the fog. They were saying what makes a fog machine work is that it heats the fog, but to keep it low is to cool the fog. So if I can heat the fog with boiling water and get a battery operated fan to push the fog from the top out of the bottom. Any thoughts? Thanks!

Boiling water won't do what you want it to do. (or what I THINK you want it to do). I am not 100% sure exactly how a fogger works, but I am pretty sure it does a little bit more than just heat the fog juice. Do you have access to a generator to run the fogger? Otherwise you might want to try Dry Ice in water to get a fog effect without having electricity.

I hope this helps.

boiling water wont work. A fog machine is basicly a hot plate (real hot) Works much the same as dropping water on a red hot iron.

You'd be better off filling a garbage can with dry ice. Either use a small fan to push it out or a few holes to allow the wind to do it. whenever you need more fog, just pour some water into the garbage can.

btw DO NOT use a metal can. Dry ice and metals don't play well together. It will scream and thrash till there no longer touching one another.

I am with all of the above, dry ice. Unfortunately it won't be cheap.

Sounds like your idea will be making a still, like for moonshine . If you just boil the water then chill it, unfortunately, you will only get condensation. I think the dry ice thing will be the easiest method for you. I have seen links where people made their own fog machine out of a clothes iron and fog juice. Maybe if you were to have a metal plate in a fire while slowly dripping fog juice on the plate, it might work. I don't think that fog fluid / juice is flammable, but maybe... be careful!!!

The reason fog machines make thick visible fog is the glycerine and other ingredients that boils and vaporizes. Water vapor alone isn't very visible unless it is thick. The glycerine adds mass to the water vapor molecules to make it denser.

If you boil fog juice and somehow suck it into the chiller with some fans, it MIGHT work.

Boiling the juice won't work, you'll just have a sticky mess in the bottom of the pot. Foggers operate at much higher temps than boiling water (~200 °C), and part of vaporizing the superheated mixture involves forcing it through a very small channel under pressure.

Thank you everyone so much for all your responses. I wasn't thinking of actually boiling the fog juice, but putting a hot pan of water under a container filled with fog juice, similar to the potpourri dishes, where the t-light is in the bottom and it heats the solution on top making it smell good. then taking the fan and blowing the fog down the vent pipe and out the bottom... do you think this will work?

I still don't think it will get hot enough. Maybe expirement with the hot-plate thing as suggested above.

Or maybe you need to stoke the fire with something to make it hotter. That can get dangerous though.

Originally Posted by Screaming Demons

Or maybe you need to stoke the fire with something to make it hotter. That can get dangerous though.

It won't make any difference. Water boils at 100 °C in an open container. You have to pressurize it to raise the boiling point. Boiling the fog juice will only make steam.
Pouring fog juice on an uncontrolled heated plate may be dangerous. If the temp is high enough to actually burn the glycerin (> 400 °C), carcinogenic compounds may form.
The dry ice solution may be your best bet here, but can be costly. Maybe rent a small gas-powered generator to power a fogger?