Robo JetFloss Support Documentation

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Everything has it's weakness in this Universe.  Superman has to deal with Kryptonite, Achilles is famed for his unprotected heal, and being nothing more than fluffed sugar, cotton candy wilts under heat and humidity.

Sooner or later you'll run into an event where your wonderful Floating Cotton Candy begins to turn into a tangled spider's web of floss inside the floss pan, rather than an airborne confection captured on a stick.

While I can't tell you how to defy the laws of nature, I can offer a few tips on how to push the limits of the environment just a bit, allowing you to get a bit closer to the absolute limits of cotton candy production (more on that later).

What follows are my personal hard earned (and hard learned) tips for fighting back against temperature and humidity.

Tips For Keeping Your Floss Fresh And Dry:

•   Mix your own floss sugar.  As covered in another blog post here on this site, mixing your own floss sugar will allow you to work with fresher ingredients that haven't sat on the shelf, absorbing humidity, and this gives you your first advantage in the war on the environment.
•   Mix your floss sugar just before your events.  It's tempting to want to prepare large quantities of floss sugar in advance so that you'll always be ready to go, but just like with prepared mixes, this allows the material to accumulate humidity and should be avoided.
•   Store your floss sugar in waterproof and air tight containers.  In the Robo JetBoss Success Guide I offer several suggestions for the most economical and efficient containers to keep your material dry.  Regardless of what you use, remember the air inside your containers also contains humidity, so store the sugar floss inside a plastic bag and then put the bag inside the storage container of your choice.  This will allow you to close the bag down around the floss itself, and seal it with a twist tie. That will prevent air (and humidity) from interacting with the floss entirely.
•   Store any materials and also premixed floss sugar indoors, in an air conditioned and humidity controlled environment whenever possible.  This may not be possible in every situation, but the more you can follow this suggestion, the dryer your sugar will be.

Heat and Humidity makes the floss coming out of the sidewall heavier and stickier than usual, and some will naturally start to collect on the stator and the bottom of the floss bowl as well.  Once even a little bit of accumulation takes hold, this creates a very irregular and sticky surface for more to follow. As a result, once it starts, it can quickly go from bad to worse, and then to a complete disaster in no time at all.

Tips for preventing floss accumulation: 

•   Believe it or not, a very, very light coating of non-stick cooking spray can be a real lifesaver when dealing with sticky floss.  Just make sure it's a light coating.  When in doubt, gently wipe down the bowl after applying. This not only makes it harder for floss to stick to the bowl (and thus puts off accumulation) but it also makes the bowl much, much, much easier to clean along the way. This simple trick has allowed me to work in some pretty humid environments that otherwise would have shut me down. Granted, I've had to stop and clean the bowl a few times each hour, but with the non-stick spray in use, the wipe down takes just a minute or so with dry paper towels, rather than being a 10 minute ordeal.
•    Lower the Floss Pan.  This is a mildly aggressive tactic, but I cut down the studs that support the floss bowl by roughly 1/3 of an inch so that I could lower the bottom of the floss pan relative to the floss bowl and sidewall.  But doing so, this reduces the amount of floss that will ever touch the bottom of the floss pan, pushing waste out closer to the edges, and thus reducing the chances of the dreaded spider web accumulation.
• '  Grind the Stator.  This last tactic is downright extreme and NOT for the faint of heart. It should only be undertaken by those who are very VERY handy, and who are also willing to accept the risks.  IF you make a mistake and destroy your stator, then you're out of business until you secure a replacement.  That said, I found that in the worst heat/humid environments, the floss was sticking at the edges of the stator first.  To help reduce that issue, I used a hand-held angle grinder to actually grind down the top of the stator by roughly 1/4 inch.  After that, I polished it smooth (as a smooth surface is less likely to give the floss an opportunity to grab) and then repainted it with a "glossy" paint..... again to minimize the opportunity for floss to catch hold.

By doing all of the above, and in particular the last two very aggressive steps, I've definitely pushed my ability to make Floating Cotton Candy to the absolute limit, or the point of environmental failure.

What exactly is the limit and how do you know when you've reached it?  I can't tell you at what point the limit is in advance, as it depends on temperature, humidity, barometric pressure, wind, sunlight and the quality of your sugar floss.

I can, however, tell you when you've reached it.  Applying all of the steps above, I can now float cotton candy floss up onto as stick where it will essentially "melt" into a hard sticky mess practically as fast as I can spin the serving.  The result is actually somewhat hysterical as this means in testing in the worst possible conditions I've managed to spin an entire bowl full of sugar onto one single stick, all the while the ball of "cotton candy" never grows beyond a rather small size.

Essentially, past perhaps 12" in diameter, the inside of the serving is melting as fast as I'm adding floss to the outside, so for the 10 minutes or so it takes to convert the entire bowl to floss, I'm spinning a ball of candy that miraculously never seems to grow in size.

The floss in such extreme conditions , by the way, is entirely inedible. But it tells me that my tactics for fighting back against heat and humidity have gone as far as they need to because there's nothing that can prevent cotton candy from melting when the temperature and humidity is too high.

That I can produce it right up to, and past the point of it's ability to survive, means that in any maintainable environment, I can serve Floating Cotton Candy all day long.