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Cleaning a smoke machine
On YouTube this video is called How to Clean Your Smoke Machine
What this lesson teaches
Four minutes of maintenance on a machine most people run until it dies.
How a smoke machine works
Four parts, and knowing them tells you what goes wrong.
A container of smoke fluid. A pipe from it. A pump. A heating element.
The pump pushes fluid up the pipe and through the heater under pressure; the heater flashes it into vapour. That is the whole machine.
What goes wrong
Fluid residue builds up in the pipe and the element over time and clogs it. Output drops, then stutters, then stops - and the pump works harder the whole way down.
His interval: once every six months.
The safety warning, which is not a formality
He says it twice, and it is the most important content in the lesson.
Do not do this around anybody. Ideally outside, in an environment where you will not upset anyone.
And specifically: what comes out of the nozzle is water vapour - steam. His comparison is exact: putting your hand over the spout of a boiling kettle. You would not do it. Do not do it here either, and keep your face well away from the output.
Hot vapour under pressure from a nozzle you are standing behind is a genuine scalding risk, and the fact that it looks like stage smoke does not make it cooler.
The procedure
1. Lift the pipe out of the fluid container and run the machine until the pipe is clear of fluid.
The pump will make a different noise - and his reassurance is worth having, because it sounds like a fault: that noise means the pump has nothing to pump, which is exactly what you want. The pipe is now clear and ready for water.
2. Prepare the water. He uses deionised water, and his home method is to boil a kettle and let it go cold.
That is not strictly deionised - boiling removes dissolved gases and kills organisms rather than removing minerals - but it is a great deal better than tap water straight in, and genuine deionised or distilled water from a shop is better still and costs almost nothing. The thing you are avoiding is limescale in the heating element, which is the same enemy as in a kettle.
3. Pipe into the water, and run it. It takes a moment for the water to travel through the system, then it comes out as vapour. Stand clear.
4. Pipe out, let it reheat, and run it again to clear the water out.
Then put it away
The lesson stops there but the habit that follows is worth adding: flush it at the end of a season or before a long gap, not just on a schedule. Fluid left sitting in a pipe for three months is what causes the clog in the first place.
Do this twice a year and the machine stands a much better chance of lasting.
Contents of the video
0:00 Clean your smoke machine
Alright folks, in this video I'm going to show you how to clean your smoke machine. Now I'm not on about cleaning it on the top so it looks nice and shiny, we're on about cleaning it on the inside, very important. Now a smoke machine is very simple and straightforward. You've got a container that will actually house the smoke fluid, you've got a pipe, you've got a pump or a motor and you've got a heating element. Now basically what happens is the smoke fluid will be transferred from the container through the pipe It'll go through a pump that will push it through a heating element and it pushes it with force. The heating element heats the actual fluid and turns that into the smoke. Now over a period of time what happens, it can get clogged up so you need to clean it. Maybe once every six months will do. Now first of all what you need to do is take your pipe out of the container and then just make sure that you've got rid of all of the leftover smoke fluid that's in the pipe.
0:59 I'll say this a couple of times
Now, very, very important. I'll say this a couple of times. Do not do this around anybody and make sure maybe ideally you're outside and you're in an environment where you're not going to piss anyone off basically. So here we go. Now that noise you can hear isn't telling me that there's something wrong with it. That's basically telling me that the pump hasn't got anything to actually pump through the pipes which is what you want because you want the pipes to be clear ready for This stuff here. Now, I'm using deionized water. You can get that by just pouring normal water into a kettle and boiling the kettle. Then what you need to do is let that cool down or get cold. Put it in a cup. That's all you need. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to put the pipe into the deionized water like that. Now, it'll take a little bit of time for the water to eventually come through. Very important. Stay well clear.
Because the stuff coming out of there now, if it's smoke fluid, it's going to be hot anyway. But it's water and basically it's water vapor or steam, exactly the same as what you would expect to come out of a kettle. Now if you put your hand over a kettle, that's exceedingly hot. Do not do it. Well clear. So what I'm going to do now, I've got the pipe in the deionised water and I'm going to press play. There you go. It took a bit of time because the actual water has got to go through the system. There you go. Alright, what I'm going to do now, I'm going to take the pipe out of the water. I may have to wait, I don't know, a couple of seconds for this unit to sort of slightly reheat again and then once it's reheated then I do exactly the same. I press on here or if you've got a button
So, a quick idea or a quick tutorial on how to clean Your smoke machine. And again, maybe do this once every six months and it will last a lot longer. Practice and enjoy.
This transcript was produced automatically from the audio of the video and may contain mistakes.
