Thread: How Hard Can It Be?

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I was reading one of the threads in the Tutorial section about low lying fog. As we all know, dry ice makes the best fog but is expensive to produce and can be messy (not to mention dangerous!). The last entry in the thread showed a utube video of something called an "Ultratec fogger." Low ground fog for your Cemetary Googling that little device uncovers a (sound of me choking here) MEGA $ asking price.

So while looking at the utube video, I was making mental note of it's construction and mechanics and I thought; How hard could it be to make one of these? You would need:

A suitable container, probably plastic - No problem there: They are cheap, plentiful and easy to modify.

An electric water heater heating element - hmm never messed with that, unknown cost. Need to do some research there.

A toilet bowl water inlet/shutoff device - again cheap and plentiful. Probably not needed as this device seems to be used as a safeguard to shut off the heater in case the tank runs out of water. I could do the same thing by just sticking my nose in there and taking a look-see.

A basket to hold the dry ice - easy enough to make/modify. Probably not necessary to adjust the basket height relative to the water level in an outdoor graveyard environment. More necessary for a dance floor, etc. where you don't want to overload the area with fog. An "adjuster" could still be done cheaply though.

A small PC cooling fan or two to blow the fog out of the box, or maybe not even needed as the dry-ice conversion process may be enough to generate "flow."

And dry ice - Cost dependent on accessibility and quantity needed. I think I could buy a lot of dry ice for the cost of the Ultratec machine.

How hard could it be? I'm thinking about trying this. Thoughts? Previous experience out there?

Here is a heating element for a 2000 watt, 120v electric water heater - $8 bucks https://keithspecialty.com/water.heaters_parts.htm Affordable enough to buy one for testing purposes.



By the looks of it, there is a ceramic insulated base. There may be additional insulation required if this were to be mounted in a plastic enclosure. For additional safety, I might need to look at some kind of timing mechanism (once the element heats up) to keep it in a mangeable state.

Doesnt look that hard, need to make sure the heating element doesnt melt the plastic, so you would need some pretty durable plastic. Maybe something like those blue 55 gallon drums. Those are pretty thick. How long does Dry Ice fog last compared to Fog Juice?

Will be watching intently for updates.