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 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 50vg50pg 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 5050 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 2-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 5050 mix is also way more viscous than regular fog juice so it could potentially reduce the pumps 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 watts 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 [Music] so [Music] [Music] 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 aluminium the aluminium 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 [Music] [Music] 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