Episode: 2991
Title: HPR2991: Fix yer fog machine
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr2991/hpr2991.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-24 14:23:26

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 2991 for Monday 20 January 2020.
Today's show is entitled Fix Year Fog Machine. It is hosted by operator
and is about 11 minutes long
and carries an explicit flag. The summer is
save your fog machine today. Quote Dash.
This episode of HPR is brought to you by An Honesthost.com.
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting
with the offer code HPR15. That's HPR15.
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I got another quick tip here for you.
For the Halloween season, this is about fog machines.
For the Halloween season, I've yet had another issue with my fog machine.
I'll go over that.
If you have a fog machine or plan on getting one,
there's a merry out of things you need to know.
The first thing is those little crappy ones you buy in the store,
or Walmart, whatever, they're all garbage.
The one I have is garbage too.
I got a free one from an old coworker that was moving
by the bunch of other Halloween stuff.
I said, oh, this is cool.
I said it, I had to remote an RF or an IR remote.
The kids would bring the doorbell.
I would hit the little button and fly the machine and go off and it was cute.
The next year, I go to use it and it's a big mess.
We start leaking and spewing stuff all over the place.
I'm trying to take it apart.
The hose is all either dried up or messed up or broken or bent or whatever
for the intake to the thing.
The best of my knowledge I'm making all this up is there's a high-powered pump,
high-voltage pump, which usually on these cheap ones is 120 volt pump.
It pumps the oil or whatever it's called mineral oil, basically,
into a little tube and that little tiny tube is a metal tube.
I guess it's pressurized to the point where it takes the mineral oil stuff
and then feeds it to a heater with a thermostat sitting on top of it.
The reason why you can't hit the button and have spewing oil come out
is that there's a thermostat on the top that regulates when you can press the button.
If it gets too cold, then it turns off and if it gets too hot or whatever
when it gets hot enough, it'll turn green.
There's a number of things you have to keep in mind there
is that if the temperature regulator thing is broken, it's either going to fail one way or the other.
Also, the pressurization is also an issue as far as getting too much pressure over time
and the poses blowing out or whatever.
The one I bought was that I don't think it was in the thousands.
It was under a thousand.
It was probably a hundred maybe if that, even if that I can't remember.
But it was a cheap one.
It was the same piece of garbage that I had the first time around.
What I didn't know is that you had to clean them.
I don't know the best method to clean them.
I've seen the vinegar thing. That's what I did last year.
And then this year, nothing.
It didn't work at all.
The pump would just barely go.
So I took the thing apart, looked at some videos online and found out that that's how some of this goes.
There's the vinegar method where you clean it out with vinegar and whatever.
From what it feels like, I'm going to use just water and a can of air.
So clean it out with water and then when I'm done, I'm going to flush it.
I use the pressurization from the intake to clean out the, to flush out the whole pump.
And hopefully this year, it'll work.
So set yourself and alarm, you know, a few weeks before Halloween to check here.
Fine machine because chances are it's not going to freaking work.
So took it apart, messed with it, and you know, we're talking about high voltage stuff.
It's not like it steps down from off of the, at least with these little crappy ones.
It stays 120 volt pump.
I guess because it needs that to have enough power to pressurize it.
I don't know why the pump has to be so high voltage.
So that's some of it.
So took it apart, and started flapping with it, tried to clean it out, tried to put water through it, tried to run it again.
And then the pump would run, it would just kind of sound very faint.
Like it wasn't getting enough power.
It didn't appear to be, you know, damaged or anything or anything stuck in there.
So I just said, well, you know what, I'm pretty sure the issue is the pump.
Let me just get under pump.
So order the new pump, swapped it out, started it all up, nice.
Actually, it twisted wires first, and it came with two black wires, which I don't know which one was which.
But I tried to make a guess, and of course, I plugged it in backwards to where the pump was always on, instead of being able to switch on and off.
So I quickly swapped that out, and then made it all nice and pretty neat.
And it all did back together.
You know, you had to realize this is all, like, again, garbage.
So these little tubes, the little two, pressurized tube, has a little rubber grommet that has a plastic caster on it, and you screw that nut onto the plastic screw or the plastic thing to attach it to the pump.
So I'm not explaining this right, of course.
But you have the pump, and the pump has two plastic ends.
One plastic end is the smaller end is the part you put the tube on to suck in the oil.
The other end is a bigger plastic end with just screw on, you screw on the nut, which has the little rubber grommet that attaches to the pressurized thing.
So that's where you get your pressure.
It's essentially one of those things, you screw it down, you screw it down, you screw it down, and eventually it pushes that grommet down tight enough to where it'll be when it gets pressurized, it's not spewing out all over the place.
So if you try to hand tighten it, it's going to spew out all over the place to make a big mess.
But you have to realize it's a plastic thread on a nut that goes with the thing.
So you have to realize that you can't over tighten it, you can't under tighten it.
So I was very careful in turning it on, I tightened it a little bit, and it would kind of spew a little bit more, and I'd tighten it more of its spew less.
And eventually I got it tight enough on there where it wasn't leaking, and I let it at that.
I left like two screws in the thing, because I think it's the total pain of the butt to take apart for all of them.
And the purpose is it's got way too many screws for me, because if I'm going to be going in and out of there every year, I don't want to have to unscrew like 15 screws to get this stupid thing apart.
You know, it is high voltage obviously, you don't want to screw around with it because you're parked and we're talking about liquids, water, and high voltage, you know, 120 volt electricity.
So take a lot of caution when it's plugged in, don't work on it while it's plugged in, if it's absolutely unless it's absolutely necessary type of thing.
And so what I found out is when I got the new one, it also had the same little weird, you know, I call it shrink tubing, had the shrink tubing around the wires.
And what I noticed is that there's some kind of resistor or something on there to either step down the voltage or emperage, or I don't know what it does.
But what I'm thinking is that my pump is probably still good, but whatever this resistor is that crap down or whatever it is in between the wire and the pump and the motor is like some kind of resistor that may have crap down.
And that's why I wasn't getting the pump wasn't working the way it's supposed to.
Now that might have been a result of me hitting, pulling the button down and going and then burning out the motor and then causing that resistor to use the blows or whatever it is.
So I'm assuming probably the pump is still good because I just got the thing. I've only had it for like two years and it lasted two years and then crap down.
So anyways, you know, I don't know what the solution is, you know, I think it's just, it's, it's kind of like these in-car power inverters, they're all garbage, there's not such a thing as a good in-car power inverter.
It's like a good multi-function printer, they just don't exist. So, you know, what you do is you get to two of these little crap fog machines, you fire both of them up and if one of them works fine, then work on the other one clean it out and figure out what's wrong with it.
Or you can buy yourself a, you know, $2,000 smoke machine and fog machine and still do the same thing.
I was looking at the ones that do like the graveyard effect with the heavier mist or heavier fog, but it's just not worth the cost.
And then when the thing wraps out, I'm going to be very upset because, you know, I did my due diligence to clean it and whatever and then I had to like swap parts out on it and you know, it's got more relays and more complicated.
So for me, I feel like the best bet is going to be by two or three of these little crappy, crappy ones, pull them out every year and whichever one works, use it and make sure the other one that's not working is fixed or has parts ordered for it or whatever.
I think it's all pretty standard stuff.
But anyways, I think I just hope that should help you guys out.
I've got some lasers and stuff that I'll put up that go to the garage sensors that had the little garage so you pull up into the garage, I'll put those out sometimes.
Some other stuff I'll do is the Mr. Foggers with the water that you use, like little misting machines. I'll use those.
Other than that, as far as gear goes.
They have those little, you've probably seen them, they've got the projectors and get a projector and protect it on a special mat that allows you to do those little videos of like scary things going on.
You put them in a window or put them in your garage or whatever.
I didn't splurge for a nice projector. I knew I was going to have to spend, you know, $600 or more on a good projector.
So I just took our TV in our bedroom and shoved it in the window and did it that way.
It was good for one year, but I don't plan on doing it again because it honestly scared a lot of the kids and even filtering out some of the ones that weren't as scary.
Some of the kids didn't appreciate this cariness of the TV that was sitting in the window.
Anyways, hope that helps you out. If you have a fine machine, take care of it.
If you don't, then it's going to be a piece of crap and then you're going to have to fix it or throw it away.
But try to fix things and learn how to fix things.
And, cool. Take it easy.
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