MattN

Ok, so I got the short straw...

A few of us our throwing a party and each has a job to sort out, I have to organise the lights and effects.

Lights no problem, smoke... a problem.

It's a halloween bash so i think dry ice would be a better effect, smoke may be ok but in the past smoke seems to get to thick a bit quickly. Anyway anyone got experience of them, good or bad. Did you hire or buy, if so wher and how much!!?!?!??

I would prefer to buy one but am guessing they are on the expensive side.

Nikko2

A friend of mine made a smoke machine for his a levels.

You dont neccesarily need a machine just the fluid. All you need to do is heat up the fluid and hey presto.

We tested the theory on my mums iron before he built the machine.

Didnt realise but we must have had some residual fluid left in the iron afterwards. Caused quite a stir next time the ironing was done.

dhorwich

or just add dry ice to some water..

Dan

grottbags2

Be careful with dry ice. In fact, if there's kids going to be there I'd say think very carefully about the safety aspect. You only need one muppet of a kid to decide to play with the "ice" for them and maybe other to get badly burnt. Same counts when using the actual machine, they can get very cold and very hot in places and risk people being burnt.

My tuppence worth as someone into Amdram who's been near a few of these machines before. Oh, and we did the "throw the dry ice into a bucket of water" thing and decided against it on the basis of how slippery the floor got directly around the bucket.

Edited to add that you can get them at reasonable rates (or at least they seem so to us) from lighting and stage effect hirers.

[Edited by grottbags2 - 9/19/2003 9:12:14 PM]

fast bloke

Got a smoke machine for last years halloween party for £6.00 per night. I have had one before that was on or off, so on led to complete blackout in about 3 minutes. This one had some sort of sensor which would measure visibility relating to visibility when you turned it on. You could turn it up to blackout, but we ran it all night an a low setting and it would give a blast every time you noticed the rest of the smoke was disappearing.

It didn't seem to agree with asthmatics though, so watch out.

(BTW - Blacklights are a must, and can generally be hired from the same place as the smoke machine)

MattN

must admit I didn't think about just adding the dry ice to some water, there won't be any kids about and thinking about it there are a couple of places we could stick a bucket that would be out of peoples way but still close enough to have an effect.

I've had some great idea's... hmmm budget... window...

Mice_Elf

Dark_Elf does event hire with all sorts of paraphernalia to do with sound and light and he has a smoke machine. Throw him a mail at alan@dark-elf.co.uk, mention you're from ScoobyNet and he'll sort you out with a decent price.

Just as a point of interest, he did the March ScoobyBall.