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The fire department came to work today....
Oct. 4th, 2007 12:28 amfirst some background information. My day job is as a repair technician for a theatrical lighting company.
One of our smoke machines came back from a long duration nightclub rental, and it was covered with the icky residue that all the gear in a nightclub gets when it doesn't get cleaned. So the main cleaning procedure for a smoke machine is pumping distilled water through it to dissolve all the asorted crud inside the tubes and flush them out through the nozzle. smoke machines don't, however, allow you to run the pump unless the heater block is up to temperature.
Since I didn't want to fill the shop/warehouse with smoke, and it was a nice day anyway, I took it out to the loading dock and plugged it in. Since warmup takes ten to fifteen minutess, I went away to do another task. A little while later I look up, and I see smoke and haze down at the other end of the shop, by the loading docks. Unnoticed to me, the machine had been left in automatic mode by theprvious user, and the thing was pumping out a rather large amount of dense white smoke.
So I walk over to the loading dock with my bottle of distilled water and just as I walk up from inside, the truck from the fire department pulls up outside. The fellow inside looked through the edges of the cloud of smoke, sees it coming from this small black box, and asks me "That is normal operation, isn't it?", in a hopeful tone of voice. i assured him that it was, and he looked relieved as he drove off. It was the most interesting thing that happened today at work.
One of our smoke machines came back from a long duration nightclub rental, and it was covered with the icky residue that all the gear in a nightclub gets when it doesn't get cleaned. So the main cleaning procedure for a smoke machine is pumping distilled water through it to dissolve all the asorted crud inside the tubes and flush them out through the nozzle. smoke machines don't, however, allow you to run the pump unless the heater block is up to temperature.
Since I didn't want to fill the shop/warehouse with smoke, and it was a nice day anyway, I took it out to the loading dock and plugged it in. Since warmup takes ten to fifteen minutess, I went away to do another task. A little while later I look up, and I see smoke and haze down at the other end of the shop, by the loading docks. Unnoticed to me, the machine had been left in automatic mode by theprvious user, and the thing was pumping out a rather large amount of dense white smoke.
So I walk over to the loading dock with my bottle of distilled water and just as I walk up from inside, the truck from the fire department pulls up outside. The fellow inside looked through the edges of the cloud of smoke, sees it coming from this small black box, and asks me "That is normal operation, isn't it?", in a hopeful tone of voice. i assured him that it was, and he looked relieved as he drove off. It was the most interesting thing that happened today at work.
