An important thing to consider in determining when you've had "enough" is that with vaping there is a bit of a time lag for the nicotine to hit your brain that doesn't exist with analogs.
With analogs, the nicotine is absorbed directly in the lungs and hits your brain within just a few seconds. With e-cigarettes, the nicotine is predominantly absorbed through your mucus membranes -- your cheeks, gums, tongue, throat, etc.
Because the nicotine is distributed across a wider surface area than when using nicotine gum, it is absorbed more quickly than with the gum, but it is nevertheless nowhere near as rapid as with analogs. As a result, it can take as long as 30-45 minutes for the full nicotine intake from a vaping session to have an impact.
What can happen as a result is that you vape a lot of nicotine thinking that maybe you aren't getting much because you don't feel immediate effects, and then 30-40 minutes later you have rapid heartbeat, a headache, shortness of breath, etc.
I figured out my dosing in two ways -- by drug test and by calculation.
You can buy over the counter nicotine drug tests that show a positive at 200ng metabolite per ml of urine. What I did before I started vaping is diluted by urine until I could just barely get a positive, and then used that to calculate the concentration.
Then I used the FTC numbers for nicotine for what I was smoking, how many, etc. I also counted how many drags I usually took off a cigarette (14). I'm sort of a numbers type, I'll skip the math but I calculated 27.5 mg nicotine daily and that I would need it in 2 ml of juice for an equivalent number of puffs; so I would need 14 mg juice.
When I did this, though, I was always craving and the metabolite urine test showed about 1/3rd less metabolite than when smoking. Presumably this is due to less efficient absorption of nicotine via vaping or because I was deriving more nicotine from the analogs than the FTC numbers would reflect. So I wound up increasing the nicotine concentration to 18mg/ml; which has worked fine for me.
Later on I discovered that there is a difference in how much vapor you get depending on whether you are using a tank, cartridge, cartomizer, etc. When using a tank system or an Ikenvape cartomizer, I use 14mg juice; but when using a cartridge/atomizer or a regular cartomizer I use 18-20mg juice to compensate for the difference.
I've droned on. The main idea I wanted to convey is that of the time lag in absorption. If you limit the number of puffs per vaping session and then wait a set amount of time before doing it again (for a heavy smoker maybe 15 mins is more appropriate than 30 mins), you are less likely to end up dizzy from too much nicotine. Hopefully this helps!
With analogs, the nicotine is absorbed directly in the lungs and hits your brain within just a few seconds. With e-cigarettes, the nicotine is predominantly absorbed through your mucus membranes -- your cheeks, gums, tongue, throat, etc.
Because the nicotine is distributed across a wider surface area than when using nicotine gum, it is absorbed more quickly than with the gum, but it is nevertheless nowhere near as rapid as with analogs. As a result, it can take as long as 30-45 minutes for the full nicotine intake from a vaping session to have an impact.
What can happen as a result is that you vape a lot of nicotine thinking that maybe you aren't getting much because you don't feel immediate effects, and then 30-40 minutes later you have rapid heartbeat, a headache, shortness of breath, etc.
I figured out my dosing in two ways -- by drug test and by calculation.
You can buy over the counter nicotine drug tests that show a positive at 200ng metabolite per ml of urine. What I did before I started vaping is diluted by urine until I could just barely get a positive, and then used that to calculate the concentration.
Then I used the FTC numbers for nicotine for what I was smoking, how many, etc. I also counted how many drags I usually took off a cigarette (14). I'm sort of a numbers type, I'll skip the math but I calculated 27.5 mg nicotine daily and that I would need it in 2 ml of juice for an equivalent number of puffs; so I would need 14 mg juice.
When I did this, though, I was always craving and the metabolite urine test showed about 1/3rd less metabolite than when smoking. Presumably this is due to less efficient absorption of nicotine via vaping or because I was deriving more nicotine from the analogs than the FTC numbers would reflect. So I wound up increasing the nicotine concentration to 18mg/ml; which has worked fine for me.
Later on I discovered that there is a difference in how much vapor you get depending on whether you are using a tank, cartridge, cartomizer, etc. When using a tank system or an Ikenvape cartomizer, I use 14mg juice; but when using a cartridge/atomizer or a regular cartomizer I use 18-20mg juice to compensate for the difference.
I've droned on. The main idea I wanted to convey is that of the time lag in absorption. If you limit the number of puffs per vaping session and then wait a set amount of time before doing it again (for a heavy smoker maybe 15 mins is more appropriate than 30 mins), you are less likely to end up dizzy from too much nicotine. Hopefully this helps!
