Ingenuity & Pandemonium: Haze Machine
I have drawn the conlcusion that haze machines are the flakiest pieces of stage equipment ever made. We are on our fourth machine, and it makes you start to think that it’s something we’re doing — but it isn’t.
Anyway, on to the story… Our Magnum Hazer is broken. So, what do we do? — Rig something up! Here’s what we did…
Our dilema. We wanted haze for our worship set, but all we have is a $14 smoke machine from Walmart with a corded remote control; and we needed to be able to turn it off/on from the booth.
The solution. We duct taped the button on the remote control down to the “on” position. Then plugged the power to the smoke machine into a channel on one of the dimmer packs. Plugging it into a dimmer pack gave us control via DMX to give the smoke machine power or not. Then, we setup a cue in LightJockey that simply turns that channel on/off.
We run Jem haze fluid through the smoke machine, and it does okay. The downside to the smoke machine is that it is loud and outputs in bursts. So, we run it before services right up until worship starts. Then we kill the power to it (via LightJockey) as soon as our Service Intro starts.
We are working on getting our haze machine fixed, but until then; this has been a decent solution.
