Pete, Not a biggie but you could cut fluid use even more adding a fan switch. That airflow is doing some evaporating on its own.
Smoke doesn't need to be electrically complex, near the stack, or expensive if your clever enough. Even a modern unit is fairly cheap for "there and ready".
American Flyers and HO pushed smoke from the tender up to the loco, via a plastic tube to solve the "size" & "remote" issues.
Adding a tube fitting to Lionel fan units smoke holes, with JB weld works well. (glued right onto the board/cover)
After using silicone oven mits one day for my dinner, I got a hot idea 
, and played around with a silicone pocket pillbox used for a fluid well.
Cheap and about the size of $1.25-$1.50 stack of quarters. With a PW ceramic unit ($12-$15?), it can run dry all day if I forget.
The ceramic unit plopped down very nicely inside, sitting on a pillow of 2 handy tiki wick strands(inner) I couldn't burn easily, even dry with a lighters flame. Two slices for wires in the lid sides, 2 holes on top for a small vent, and larger hole for a bronze flange bushing as a smoke stack liner, and an insulating washer as a spacer for protecting the heat element from the metal flange. Snapping the lid on, the whole thing is very stable, not prone to spills, and flows air ok. for a non-forced air homemade job. A remote fan & tube would make things very interesting! (fire box area?)
I think you could use short 30ohm-ish (+/- 5ohm, higher=cooler temp) ceramic resistors too. Cheaper to play with if you don't burn too many up while temperature searching.
About 8 hrs so far at about 12v, and ran dry twice so far "just to see".
No signs of melting or any "burn stink". Ok smoke flow and shell temp. in the metal 0-4-0. But silcone gets too hot to hold with fingers. The fan would cool things a whole lot too.
I'll post more about it more, soon, after more testing and preparing a few "catch up posts" of my other over the winter projects. (week or so). If you want a heads up, or can't wait, just ask, I'll re-shuffle the deck, and "stack it" for you too.
Stack..Smoke..
Smokestack!
....it a joke son...
