When temperatures dropped into the teens in January, some students weren’t discouraged that the chill was not accompanied by precipitation that would blanket the campus in white. Instead, they took it upon themselves to make their own snow.

“We had just been snowboarding in West Virginia over the holidays where they were making snow,” said Nick Beyer, a fourth-year mechanical engineering major. “When we came back to Tech, we thought it’d be cool to try it here.” 

Beyer and Adam Borsch, a civil engineering major, both live at Theta Xi on Techwood Drive. They already had some of the equipment they would need for the project, including an air compressor and hose, so they spent $30 on a nozzle at Home Depot and got to work.

As they explain it, their snow machine takes one tube for compressed air and one for water. The air expands and chills the water, creating droplets that freeze when they hit the cold air. Beyer and Borsch improvised a “heat exchanger” by creating an ice bath to cool the hoses and the water even further.

On the night of Jan. 7, they were able to bring a belated white Christmas to the front lawn of Theta Xi. 

“People passing by were confused at first,” Borsch said. He initially hoped to create enough snow to be able to snowboard off the front ledge of the patio area. “If we perfect the design and it gets cold again, we’ll be back at it.”