Halloween Memories

I’ve had some fun times in the technology industry.  I’ve worked with some fun people.   I’ve worked on projects that had fun times.  And some of our products have definitely had fun elements – who else remembers the Hearts card game that was included with Windows for Workgroups?  Life should have some fun in it, and so should our work.

The most fun I’ve had with technology has been at Halloween.  For about 15 years, I spent a mad amount of time decorating our house for Halloween annually, and technology was absolutely a big part of that.  At the peak, we would have 400-500 visitors on a Halloween night, and it is just great to see kids and families out on that evening.  It is Summerween now, Spirit Halloween is open nearby, and this has all brought back some of these great memories.

Halloween provides the opportunity to marry digital technology with physical effects, and the physical effects can really draw people in.  Lighting, sound, and fog have a dramatic impact, more than any scary prop.  I’ve played around a lot with different elements of all these, and today I’d like to talk about fog.

Outdoor fog is fantastic; with lighting, it can be so atmospheric.  We had a large front yard, and we could fill it with fog and even slop out into the streets and fill the backyard, too.   

In years 1 and 2, we tried the Spirit Halloween class foggers.  These had a variety of issues. 

• They leave a residue; fog juice is typically a mix of water and some glycol product.   Glycol products are supposed to be safe for humans, but I didn’t love pumping this stuff into the air and leaving a residue. 
• These machines gum up and don’t have long lives. 
• The emitted fog is warm and tends to rise in the air; these create more smoke than fog.  You can attempt to chill the fog to get it to lie low, but that requires more gear and I found it to be somewhat ineffective.  
• They are not programmably controllable – they have a manual on/off toggle, and they can't be controlled by powerline switching as they default to off when they lose power.
• They have poor response time. When you turn them on (if you could do so programmably), you need to wait minutes for fog.
• The tanks have modest capacities, you would have to run around all night refilling tanks.

Ultimately, I found these machines unsatisfying for large amounts of fog, though they were great for doing point effects at places — for instance, if you want a burst of fog coming out of a coffin as someone approaches it.

So after 1-2 years of trying and failing with these devices, and spending $100-200 a year at least on these devices and their supplies, I went a very different route. I switched to a mister system.  The particular one I used is long out of business; it was essentially the same as this one at BigFogg.  I would run the cabling throughout the front yard and then put the system on a controller where I could control the duty cycle.   It created a MASSIVE amount of low-lying cool fog, and it was just water.   It did leave some dampness outside, but we are talking about late October in Seattle; dampness is our middle name.  There are also systems like MistAmerica that are packaged nicely and might work well.  

None of these are cheap systems, but I got 15 years of use out of it, and it was still working fine when I retired my setup.  They just use a hose connection as a supply, which is cheap and requires no refilling at night. They are controllable via powerline switching, and they respond nearly instantaneously.

I did need to control the duty cycle because if I let it run full time, it would have created acres of thick fog spilling into the road and the neighbors’ yards, which I thought was kind of cool, but no one else was impressed.   You just need some way to control the power to the system.  You could certainly use smart plugs, something like Homekit, and a little script. However, I did something very different which I will talk about someday.

I looked for a nanosecond at using liquid nitrogen fog machines such as this fog cannon system.   That would have been rad, but at $85K, it wasn't really economic. And I wanted to place the fog generation equipment in my garage, and I was worried about nitrogen off-gassing in an enclosed space, that would have been a tragic way to go.

Memories

We had a blast with this for 15 years. We lived in great neighborhoods that were level and reasonably dense, so we had a ton of visitors. When I look back at pictures from those days, I can still feel the chill of the fog, I can hear the voices of the kids, and I remember what a great time we had as a family.

And it is so easy to look back at those photos now. The ability to have all my photos online and searchable has been a great development in technology in the last 10 years. I can just search for "Halloween" now and Apple Photos is smart enough to dredge up photos from every October (and I am sure Google Photos and other large-scale photo products can do the same). 10-15 years ago it would have been much harder to browse all my old photos, and 30 years ago browsing through prints would have been WAY harder, though there is a certain enjoyment in browsing through prints.

But I am taking a moment to be thankful for the digitization of photography, for effectively unlimited cloud storage, and for easy searching.