Haunting Fog

A few ideas on fog chilling and distribution

Fog is cool and a must addition to any spooky effect. It adds ghostly movement and shadows your graveyard or party - and makes the ground come alive. But the first thing most of us learn when we buy our first fog machine is that the fog doesn't creep along the ground like we want it to. It typically just goes into the air making everything hazy. Not bad, but not the alive creepy, crawling fog that everyone really wants.

Why does it do this?

Hot air rises - like a balloon - the fog is created by heating the "fog juice" and pumping it out - it's pretty hot when it comes out of of the machine. So it just hits the cool halloween evening air, and floats up, dispersing along the way. But if you could cool down that fog before it hits the air, your fog will stay closer to the ground - for that creeping effect. Enter the fog chiller.....

A fog chiller is probably one of the first things that the average home haunter builds for himself. It's fairly simple to do, doesn't have to cost a lot and can have a major impact on your home haunt. There are several different design ideas but the theory is basically uniform: pump fog into cooling chamber, cool with ice and release. It's pretty much that easy. Below are a few different designs, with links to several more.

An ice chest is the perfect fog chiller - it's already designed to cool stuff down and has a nice large area to chill the fog.

The Ingredients: Get an ice chest, some 4" pvc fittings, a drill, some chicken wire or aluminum dryer ducting, caulking, Ice or Dry ice.

The Basics: Drill a hole in the sides of the ice chest and fit the pvc pipe through the sides.

Make a cooling path inside the chest with chicken wire or dryer duct

Fill box with ice (dry ice works best if you can get it), aim the fogger into the black tube, and turn it on.

Instead of using an ice box, use a 5 gallon bucket with a lid.

Drill a hole in the lid and the bottom, snake and coil the dryer ducting between the holes, the more that you can get in the bucket, the better. For the bucket you are better off using 3" PVC. Fill the bucket with Ice or Dry Ice, point the fog machine into the PVC and let the fog run through the chilling tube.

I stumbled upon this as a means to distribute my fog around the grave yard.

Ingredients: 4" black plastic corrugated drain pipe - 10' sections
(I use 3 you could probably use up to 5, but the amount of fog decreases over distance) 4" Standard computer fan, pipe reducer end, square pipe drain adaptor fitting end

Basics:

1. Fit the PC fan into the square drain pipe adaptor - blowing out (you'll need to power the fan somehow, I hacked together an old 12v charger I had in a drawer and it's worked for years, but you can play around with other 12v sources)
   
2. snap the pipes together, with the reducer on one end, and the square drain adaptor on the other.
   
3. Aim the nozzle of your fog machine into the reduced end - the reducer helps keep the fog in the pipe

I found that with 30' of pipe I don't need additional chilling, although it does fit nicely onto the end of my ice chest chiller. The fan draws the fog through the pipe AND I can direct it exactly where I want. I hide the pipe under ice plant so it's almost invisible at night. Also, I shoot multiple fog machines into the chiller.