Awesome Experience so far!

[mstern]

Hello!

Been lurking here for some time now, and been a dedicaed vaper for about 4 months now. Not completely off the analogs, but getting there.

So far, I have bought all my hardware from Volcano; magma and inferno parts. Lots of them. All my flavors have come from DIYFlavorShack.

Between these two companies, I have not had a better customer service experience in quite some time.

I picked up a nice mixing kit and now am exclusively a home-brew vaper.

I suppose if I had any real question at this point, it is this: If anyone dry-burns their cartos to clean them, have you noticed any permanent harm that does them?

I bought enough cartos to dedicate one to each of my favorite flavors, and even with out cross-contamination from other flavors, eventually the taste suffers as the coil gets all caked up. I'm open to other suggestions for cleaning (aside from dry-burn) the coil. Gotta say, dry-burn works pretty well.

 

[banjo]

Welcome to the community. It sounds as though you did your homework and have set yourself up pretty well with juice & hardware. Thanks for posting.

 

[texasgranny]

I don't do any dry burning for cleaning and have no experience at that.
I have learned that once they burn (for me) , trash them. Some clean them, some don't.

I watched a video (can't locate it right now) on YouTube.
The guy took a cartomizer apart, that had burnt.

The filler material was burnt several layers and brown looking, had hard brown caking and pretty yucky.
In my opinion, We're trying to clean up our lungs and I don't want any burnt offerings going down.

This is my opinion and others may think differently.
They are fairly cheap in the overall scope of things.

With that being said....
Glad to have you here and Congrats on your 4 month anniversary!

 

[mstern]

I don't think the method I am using leaves behind anything undesirable, but I suppose you never know.

Let me put it out there, and see what you think. Bear in mind that this was done with a cartomizer I got from Volcano. I do not know any specific generic model number, sorry.

If one is in the end, remove the white stopper/mouthpiece.

Depending on when yours was made, there will be one or two rubber rings on top of the coil/wick assembly. If there are two, the top one comes out rather easily. Whichever version you have, the one directly over the porcelain cup can be tedious to extract.

With all the plastic removed, flush with very hot water - paying particular attention to the area underneath the wick. To get water in there effectively you will have to inject it directly. I use a large syringe and flush it thoroughly. The point here is not only to rinse out excess juice, but to also dilute as much as possible whatever is already absorbed in the wicking material.

Blow out any excess water. You can let them dry naturally at this point, but if not it just elongates the dry-burn phase.

Screw the cart to a battery - preferably one fully charged - and even more preferred: one of the new jumbo batteries.

This next step is going to produce real smoke. Not a terrible amount, and the better you did rinsing it, the less smoke you will have to deal with.

Press and hold the power button for 15 second bursts. At some point, the coil will get red hot. You should hear a familiar fizzing sound as it dries off any moisture, and once it is dry enough, the burn cycles will actualy burn off caked on residue both on the coil and the part of the wick exposed to the heat of the coil.

Every few cycles, stop pressing the button and blow off any excess moisture.

Once the wick has returned to nice bright white, and the smoke has diminished, you are done punishing your equipment

Remove the carto from the battery and allow to cool. Then, once again, rinse with hot water. particularly over the coil and wick. In my opinion, you only need one rubber ring in there, and I would suggest using the one that wasn't form-fitted over the porcelain cup.

I am sure you can burn out a carto this way, but I haven't yet. And it has removed virtually all traces of previous flavors, and removed the burnt taste old cartos seem to always develop.

As a caveat: If you use any flavor that is oil based, don't bother with this procedure. It will just make things worse. Once you've used oil based, that carto will never be rid of the old flavor, and dry burning will just make it taste even more burnt.

In other words, only do this if water soluble flavors are all you have used in that carto.

 

[CraigHB]

Hi there,

I've never dry burned a cartomizer and normally wouldn't, but if if works for you, that's good. It sounds like you're are using the E2 cartomizers which are unique. Those are the only ones that you can dry burn at all. Any other cartomizer will simply burn up. Most of them can be boiled clean. I can run about 10ml of juice through the Boge cartos I use before they're shot. The jury is still out on cleaning. I was doing it for a while, but now I'm not. I was getting too many that don't clean up well and feel like it's not always worth it.

You should avoid flavors that are oil based. For traditional cartos, it clogs them up fast and makes them taste nasty. For the E2s, I imagine it cakes up pretty fast on the wick and coil.

 

[mstern]

I learned that the hard way. Didn't take long for a particular carto to become ruined.

Have to wonder why people make oil based flavors for a system that only works when it can boil the payload into a vapor....

Speaking of which.... Do you think the same effect could be achieved by using ultrasonic-generated cold vapor? Much like what those cold-vapor room humidifiers use, only on a dramatically smaller scale. It certainly seems plausible to me.

In other words, instead of an atomizer, the vapor is produced by a small ultrasound vaporizer

 

[CraigHB]

Actually, I believe the very first e-cig ever prototyped used an ultrasonic vaping method. However, the plain ol' heating element is just so much easier and cheaper to mass produce so that's what we have. Though, if anyone ever offered an ultrasonic atomizer or cartomizer, I would definitely consider one even if it was much more expensive. I'm sure the longevity would be really good, like an incandescent light buld compared to a flourescent light bulb.

 

[pkj]

Welcome to ECF,
It's nice to meet you. Glad you decided to jump into the forum. We have quite a few people around here who make their own juices. In fact, we have a couple sections in this forum devoted to making juice.

Again, Welcome and Happy Vaping,
Paula

 

[mstern]

Craig - yeah the longevity is what made it sound interesting, but I think a better analogy would be comparing an incandescent bulb to an LED. I do agree it would probably be expensive by comparison, but would also probably be much easier to clean and i imagine would require much less energy to do its thing.

 

[CraigHB]

Don't know, I have no idea how efficient an ultrasonic atomizer would be. But if the difference was compartive to an LED versus an incandescent bulb, it would be big.

 

[mstern]

Found this on the forums. Sounds like there is some hope after all

http://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/forum/general-e-smoking-discussion/10584-piezo-ceramic-cold-ultrasonic-atomizer.html

 

[CraigHB]

Interesing info in that thread. I did some quick googling around and it looks like Ruyan has a patent on ultrasonic e-cig atomizers so that may be one reason why we don't see them. Ruyan has not really made many retail products that use one, but I found this one that does. Also, it sounds like there may be other reasons why we don't see them such as sensitivity to fluid viscosity.

 

[DC2]

There are veterans whom I respect greatly who do dry-burns on their E2 cartomizers.
I don't use cartomizers, but I trust those who I have seen saying they do it.

I do dry-burns to clean my 510 atomizers, and that is the only cleaning method I will ever use.
The rest of the cleaning methods have value, but only for awhile.

 

[mstern]

Re: The link at the bottom of your post.

Very informative thread. Bookmarked