Long, Slow Burn

I’ve wanted to make snow for about 12 years now. I finally succeeded last night. Mind you, I haven’t been trying continuously. Just here and there. I’m proud to say that I made a small amount of snow last night.

Here in Georgia, it rarely snows. It rarely gets below 32 degrees, even in winter. For the last couple of days however, it has been very cold. One morning, it was 10 degrees! For Christmas I received a compressor and a brad nail gun and a finish nail gun. Very nice. I knew that the compressor was my ticket to lots of things, including making snow.

I searched around and found SnowGuns.com and they pointed me to a T-Gun design. I didn’t have the money for a brass outfit, so I decided to make my T-gun out of PVC as a “proof of concept” design. $20 later (and $5 of that was a brass fitting to convert from my air compressor to PVC) I had a prototype. Would it work?

At 8pm at night it was already down to about 28F with no wind. My son, Griffin, and I set up the ladder, garden hose, and compressor. I got things all hooked up and tested out the compressor settings. The garden hose had some ice in the line so it took some time to express out the ice. I cranked up the compressor, got the water going, … and got some water spray. I adjusted the compressor settings between 60PSI and 35PSI. It appeared at if with that temperature that 45PSI was the right balance between water pressure, air pressure, and temperature. Before long, a small patch of snow was appearing on my grass. Very cool. Below are some pictures. We’re in a drought here so I didn’t leave it running but for 45 minutes or so.

I’ve got some tweaks to make but I’m happy with my success.