Transcription
What's going on guys? Uh, so we're nearly reaching the end of October, and I'm sure you know what that means. It is fog machine time! Also, Halloween. Yeah, Halloween's pretty cool.
So, if you watch my channel, you might remember that about three years ago, I made this super powerful 4.5 kilowatt fog machine completely from scratch. And a lot of you guys were interested in making one yourselves but didn't necessarily have a foundry or couldn't get your hands on some of the parts needed. So, for Halloween, I thought instead of showing you how to remake a fog machine completely from scratch, I would show you a few tricks to essentially pimp the heck out of an already existing machine and how to turn a crappy 400-watt fogger like this into something a bit more exciting, like this. Let's get started.
I started by purchasing the absolutely cheapest and crappiest fog machine I could find. This model has a 400-watt heating block, which is pretty much as weak as they get. If you buy this thing from China, you're looking at, you know, only 30 bucks or something. And if we take a look inside, we can see that we have a small reservoir which contains the fog liquid. Down there is a small pump that forces the liquid from the container through this heating block, which evaporates the liquid into thick white steam. This thing is a small controller board used to regulate the heat and act as the receiver for the remote.
In my quest to achieve the biggest clouds, the first thing I turned my attention towards is the actual fog liquid itself. And after doing a little bit of research, I realized that these mysterious magical liquids are actually not that magical after all. They all seem to be made up of a solution of glycerin, propylene glycol, or a mixture of both. However, something confused me right away. Um, distilled water doesn't actually produce a visible cloud when vaporized. It just turns into steam, which is invisible. Yet, all of these fog liquids seem to contain 70 to 80% distilled water. So why not just use pure glycerin or pure propylene glycol?
So, to find out, I purchased one liter of pure vegetable glycerin and one liter of pure propylene glycol, making sure, of course, that they are food grade or pharmaceutical grade. These cost me about 15 euros each. You can get much cheaper bottles, but these will also contain a bunch of impurities, which you definitely don't want to evaporate and force into people's lungs for fairly obvious reasons.
Okay, so as a starting point, I wanted to test the machine operating under more normal conditions. So, I filled up the machine with actually the same fog juice I used with my homemade machine. And if I power it on, you can see, well, I mean, it, it performs like a 400-watt fog machine. Uh, definitely not that impressive. Um, for a small nightclub or an indoor haunted attraction, it could work all right, but of course, outdoors, it's, it's just not gonna work.
So, to try and improve things, I started by replacing the fog juice with some pure glycerin. I immediately noticed how thick and viscous it was. After powering on the machine, I could tell the pump was really struggling to force the glycerin through the tubing. Although it created this insanely thick cloud, um, it still wasn't very impressive because not that much smoke was actually coming out. And it's also probably overloading the pump, which will cause it to overheat. Also, at one point, the machine even got jammed, and I had to give it a good, a good shake to get it going again. So, pure glycerin is definitely not a good idea.
If I speed up this footage, you can see that the fog produced by the glycerin tends to, you know, stay in the room for a really long time before it dissipates, which is absolutely awesome for nightclubs or theaters where you want to produce a subtle haze to, uh, to really show off the light beams. In this particular test, it took over 30 minutes for the glycerin to completely dissipate, which is really, really good.
Next, I wanted to test it out with the propylene glycol, which is a lot less viscous but still thicker than water. And after powering on the machine, I was very pleasantly surprised. The cloud produced was absolutely huge, and the pump didn't even seem to be struggling at all. So, what's the catch? Well, it turns out propylene glycol vapor dissipates very quickly. So, this would be absolutely useless for a nightclub, but could be great for a magic show, for instance, if you don't want the smoke to stay in the room for ages. In this test, it only took about two minutes for the fog to dissipate completely.
So, after some more experimenting and messing around, I found that a 50/50 mix of both these liquids gave a really nice compromise between thick clouds and long-lasting fog. But hang on a second. A 50/50 mix of glycerin and propylene glycol? This sounds very familiar, and I'm sure some of you know exactly what I'm talking about. 50VG/50PG is exactly the base liquid used for e-cigarettes. Of course, e-liquid also contains an artificial flavoring and, more importantly, nicotine, which is the psychoactive and addictive substance you get from smoking regular cigarettes.
I got my hands on a nicotine-free bottle, and it seems to run just as smoothly as the 50/50 mix I made earlier. Also, it smells nice and fruity and delicious. So, it looks like you can use vape liquid as a super concentrated fog juice. It'll just be way more expensive than making it yourself, and obviously, get a nicotine-free version because I don't know if drugging a bunch of people against their will is very legal.
Okay, so I decided to make a two-liter batch. So, I went ahead and mixed one liter of glycerin with, of course, one liter of propylene glycol. I decided to get fancy and added in 10 milliliters of strawberry perfume. This stuff is very concentrated and should be used for fog juice only. I thought about using flavoring for, again, e-liquids, but the actual perfume in these things is heavily diluted, and you need 15% of it per bottle. And for the two-liter batch, I would need 300 milliliters of flavoring, which I'm sure you can figure out the problem. Then I gave it a good stir, and we're done with the super concentrated fog liquid.
Okay, so let's take this outside and see what kind of improvement this is. First up, for comparison, here's the regular fog juice, and like we saw before, it's quite underwhelming. And now for the 50/50 mix. Uh, to make sure the pump has no issues circulating the fluid, I added just a tad of distilled water, you know, just to liquefy the mixer a little bit. And as you can see, we have a much thicker and more impressive cloud.
All right, now hang on a second. Um, this seems a bit too good to be true. Um, if this is such a major improvement, why don't, uh, you know, commercially available fog liquids just contain less water? And honestly, I'm, I'm not so sure. I've looked around online and even asked a few professionals, but I couldn't really get a clear answer. You might say it's more cost-effective, but that doesn't really make sense either. Of course, glycerin and propylene glycol are way more expensive than water, but, you know, whether you have a bottle containing, let's say, 100 milliliters of glycerin or a bottle containing 100 milliliters of glycerin plus 900 milliliters of water, both bottles will end up producing the same amount of smoke. In fact, the one containing water will even use up more energy to evaporate, so it will technically end up costing more.
I think I read in a forum somewhere that the distilled water was to prevent the glycerin from emitting toxic fumes, but I don't think that's correct either. Glycerin will definitely emit really nasty gases if heated past a certain temperature or if it combusts. The heating block doesn't go anywhere near those temperatures, and the lack of oxygen inside the tube prevents the glycerin from combusting. So, whether it's diluted in water or not, it shouldn't really be an issue. I actually think the main purpose of the water is to clean the tubing while the machine is operating. Glycerin does leave nasty residue behind and with time can really clog up the machine, and without water, it will definitely leave a whole lot more residue behind, and I'm probably going to have to manually clean it a whole lot more often. Oh, and by the way, you can easily clean your machine with a solution of clear vinegar. Just mix one part vinegar to one part distilled water and pump it through the machine for a few minutes.
Another concern is that this 50/50 mix is also way more viscous than regular fog juice, so it could potentially reduce the pump's lifespan. Speaking of pumps, the amount of smoke being produced basically boils down to this: it's all about how much glycerin and propylene glycol you can evaporate per second, and this depends on the pump's flow rate. And these small machines use puny 15-watt pumps, so they're not really able to force that much liquid through the heating block. So, wouldn't it be nice if we could replace that tiny little pump with a much beefier one? Hmm, I don't know. Let's find out.
I salvaged this 48-watt vibration pump from an old espresso machine, but you can buy them brand new for fairly cheap. These are perfect for fog machines, as they are able to reach pressures of up to 20 bar. So, I've removed the old pump and unsoldered the connections from the controller board. Now, the issue with the new pump is that it's quite chunky, and it doesn't fit inside the machine. So, I decided to remove the container and have the pump sit in its place. By the way, I also replaced the pump inside my old 700-watt machine, you might remember from my other video, and because the casing is a lot bigger, the pump fits inside of it without any issues.
Now, the tricky part is figuring out how to hook up the two-millimeter copper tubing to the pump. I drilled a small hole in this 1/8 brass fitting, then after applying solder flux, I carefully brace the fitting onto the tube. Now, if you don't have a brazing torch, you could maybe try binding the fitting to the tube with epoxy resin, but I wouldn't really recommend it, as epoxy goes soft when heated, and when operating, the entire machine does get pretty hot, so probably not the best idea. Then I could screw in the pump using Teflon tape to prevent any leaks. Then, being careful not to damage the tubing, I positioned the pump vertically where the container used to be. Finally, I could hook up the pump to the controller board. I soldered the connections to the same pads the old pump used. Of course, we don't care about polarity, as this is AC. Using a Dremel, I cut out the shape of the pump so that it would stick out of the casing without any issues, and we're done. Let's take it outside and see what we get.
So, again, as a reminder, this is the machine out of the box with regular fog juice. And now for the pimped-up version.
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So.
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And there it is. Um, so what's the catch this time? Why don't all fog machine manufacturers just use bigger pumps? Well, of course, they're more expensive, but more importantly, after about five seconds, the machine will start spitting out an evaporated fog liquid, and after about 10 seconds, the machine will shut down in order to heat up again. And this is because the heating block can only store a certain amount of thermal energy. When the liquid passes through the heating block, which, by the way, is a tube wrapped in a coil cast inside of a block of aluminum, the aluminum block will immediately lose its heat, and by the time the sensor detects that the block is too cold, the copper tube is already way too cold to evaporate the liquid, which is why it'll just start spilling out this misty, half-evaporated liquid thing. And to fix this problem, all we need is a bigger heating element with more thermal mass. But we've basically just reinvented the more powerful fog machine. So, I think we'll just leave it there.
And just for fun, I decided to blast all three fog machines at the same time. They all contain the 50/50 mix, and the one on the left is the only one that hasn't had its pump replaced.
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And there you have it. So, again, this is all very experimental, and I'm by no means a professional chemist or an expert on, you know, evaporating glycerin and things like that. So, uh, this can potentially damage your fog machine. This can potentially be toxic. It's probably not a very good idea. So, obviously, if you want to try this, do this at your own risk. But from what I've tested, it seems to work really well. So, yeah, I don't know. Either way, happy Halloween, and I shall see you guys next time.