Halloween Without Dry Ice?
January 25th, 2009 by John Wolfe
What would Halloween be without it? For years, it was used in our haunt in homemade fog chillers, along with being dropped in strategically placed buckets of water throughout the yard. If you’ve ever done the latter, you know it never lasts for long. We were always having to change out the water and grab new blocks of ice. The awesome image in this post comes from danmcneely on Flickr. At first glance, the “fog” looks almost like soap bubbles, but upon closer inspection, you can see it curling around the edges of the cabinets and dishwasher.
This photo reminds me of something we used to do when I worked at a grocery store:
The ice cream loads would always arrive packed in a huge cooler full of dry ice. A co-worker would break off some chunks and drop them in the men’s and women’s toilet bowls! I would always toss several pieces into mop buckets around the store. It never caused any harm, just startled a few fellow employees and customers. Imagine walking into the bathroom and finding fog pouring down the edges of the toilets and onto the floor. 
January 29th, 2009 at 11:21 pm
Now how cool is that? Right over the sink and down to the floor. Totally cool. I’ve always enjoyed playing with that stuff. Hey, did you see that video on youtube of the massive block of dry ice someone threw in their pool in the backyard??? Oh man, you talk about cool as can be. In the video, (short clip about 1:30min) after they threw in the dry ice, someone mentioned for the friend to jump IN the pool, which he did, and that looked creepy too because you just saw this head floating around in the fog. Looked like alot of fun
January 30th, 2009 at 12:56 am
Goldie,
I haven’t seen that video, but it sounds great. That would have to be one humongous hunk of dry ice to cause that much fog in a pool. Wow! They used to sell it in ten pound blocks outside an old grocery store a few miles down the road. Even when we used to mess with it on the frozen loads, it was never bigger than two or three ten pound chunks. I’d like to know where they found something that large and better yet, how did they get it into their backyard?
January 30th, 2009 at 2:30 pm
Only 60 pounds of dry ice
They just carried it into the backyard. It doesn’t really look all that heavy. I’ll send you the link to your youtube account but just type in “dry ice in swimming pool” and there are tons of videos. I just watched it again and it’s just totally cool. Where they got that much from, I could not tell you. One video where 60 pounds is used is rather uneventful compared to the smaller clip where only a small bowl full was thrown over the top of the swimming pool, instantly making the whole pool look like some horror show.
January 30th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Really? Only 60 pounds? By the description, I was thinking they had to shove it off it a truck bed into a wheel barrow or something.
Yeah, it’s interesting, but even in our experiments, certain conditions created better fog production, even when using the same amount of dry ice.
Have you ever placed dry ice on a piece of metal? It actually sings! Well, sort of. It vibrates all around and makes this high pitched sound. We used to place it in the grocery carts and when it touched the metal just right, it would sing really loud.
January 30th, 2009 at 6:52 pm
Sing? For real? Woah, that must have been cool as heck dude! Oh you….I can remember well of the stories I used to hear about the “night crew” when I worked for the store. I wild bunch of men, getting away with so much “play” during the night, it often made us day workers envious wishing we had the same freedom to “play” with no managers around watching our every move, or calling your name over the store speaker. LoL, my name was called OFTEN because I would cart out the customers who I KNEW parked like a block away from the store. A fellow co-worker of mine came chasing after me telling me my name was being called every 30 seconds in the store and I had better get back in.
Woops, off the subject there….but the freedom the night crew had, the day crew could only dream about….though there WERE times we could play naughty ourselves during store hours
But I’ve told you enough about that now haven’t I 
Did ya’ll put ice in each cart and wiz them around the store, like multiple singing carts?
January 31st, 2009 at 1:57 pm
Yeah, the metal would vibrate and create this great high pitched squeal. It wasn’t loud, but it was noticeable. We actually never did that on graveyard – our frozen loads always came in the morning. All of the dry ice antics took place before I ever went to the night shift (gonna be some sweet sounds comin’ down on the night shift, night shift… sorry that phrase always breaks me out into song)
Though we had no official manger on graveyard, the night shift was a thousand times more rigorous than the days for us. Because of the fact there was no management, they were scrutinizing everything we did, once they arrived in the mornings. However, that doesn’t mean we didn’t cut loose every once in a while. I always compared it to how the doctors acted on MASH: we worked our behinds off, but when it was time for play – we had some doozies!