For the past several months, I've been exclusively using mechanical mods with sub-ohm coils. I've went all the way down to the safe limits of my Sony 30 amp batteries. I've made dual coils, triple coils, quad coils, micro coils, macro coils, nano coils, parallel coils, coils with twisted wire, double-twisted wire, braided wire, supermegaultramaxicoily coils, and everything else under the sun. I've had a lot of fun, and made gigantic dense clouds of vapor that filled the room with just a few puffs. All the while, my old iTaste MVP 2.0 and VV 3.0 sat unused collecting dust.
A few days ago I decided to bring these neglected PV's out of retirement. No real reason. I charged them up and gave my IGO-L RDA a good washing. I grabbed my spool of 30 gauge Kanthal and snip off a few inches. Wow. It's so thin and flimsy. It looks more like a strand of hair than a piece of wire, nothing like the 22 and 24 gauge wire I've gravitated to over the past few months.
Ten wraps around a 1/16" rod later, the coil is mounted on the IGO. I don't bother with the multimeter, the built-in ohmmeter on my MVP will do just fine. It meters out right at 2.0 ohms....perfect. (Later on, I use the multimeter, it's actually 1.97 ohms. Close enough.) A few quick fires and some tweezing, and it's heating up perfectly from the center outwards. I thread through a tiny wisp of cotton and juice it up and she's ready to go.
I set the voltage at 5.0 volts to squeeze every last bit of power from the MVP (it will fire a 2.0 ohm coil at 12.5 watts in voltage mode set to 5.0 volts, a bit more than the 11 watt maximum setting over in wattage mode), and I prepare to be completely underwhelmed. I've been vaping on mechanical mods pushing literally ten times as much power, so 12.5 puny watts will hardly even get the wire hot enough to vaporize any liquid at all, right?
But it worked great. Of course it doesn’t chuck vapor like a super low-resistance coil on a mechanical mod, but it still produced a decent cloud. It is obviously a much cooler vape, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Flavor was quite good, and the ramp-up was super quick. Even my < 0.2 ohm coil builds (with 22 gauge wire) on my mechanical mods take at least 2 seconds to heat up fully because of the sheer mass of the wire. The 30 gauge wire simply does not have this issue because it is so thin.
Even better is the juice consumption. I was going through 10 - 12 mL of juice every day with my mechanical mods. Using strictly the MVP & VV, I only use about 3 or 4 mL of juice a day, never more than 5 mL.
So what’s the lesson here? It’s very easy to fall into the trap of ever-decreasing resistance, and of building more and more complex coil designs, in the never-ending quest for bigger and bigger clouds and more intense flavor. But are they actually better? Does all this tinkering make for a more enjoyable vaping experience? I think that with a lot of the crazy coil builds popular nowadays, there is definitely some placebo effect going on. Does a zipper coil, inception coil, or fused Clapton coil really make more vapor than a well-made simple dual coil (or even single coil)?. Is ultra-low resistance and paperclip-thick wire the ultimate end-all, or is there still a place for higher resistance builds? Do you really need 100+ watts of power to get a good vape?
I’ve gone back to using my mechanical mods with low resistance builds, but now I’m also using my low-power devices with higher resistance coils right alongside of them. I’ve stopped worrying whether I am getting the most vapor and flavor humanly possible, sticking with simple yet effective builds, and I find that I’m getting more enjoyment and an overall better vaping experience. And in the end, that’s all that really matters.
A few days ago I decided to bring these neglected PV's out of retirement. No real reason. I charged them up and gave my IGO-L RDA a good washing. I grabbed my spool of 30 gauge Kanthal and snip off a few inches. Wow. It's so thin and flimsy. It looks more like a strand of hair than a piece of wire, nothing like the 22 and 24 gauge wire I've gravitated to over the past few months.
Ten wraps around a 1/16" rod later, the coil is mounted on the IGO. I don't bother with the multimeter, the built-in ohmmeter on my MVP will do just fine. It meters out right at 2.0 ohms....perfect. (Later on, I use the multimeter, it's actually 1.97 ohms. Close enough.) A few quick fires and some tweezing, and it's heating up perfectly from the center outwards. I thread through a tiny wisp of cotton and juice it up and she's ready to go.
I set the voltage at 5.0 volts to squeeze every last bit of power from the MVP (it will fire a 2.0 ohm coil at 12.5 watts in voltage mode set to 5.0 volts, a bit more than the 11 watt maximum setting over in wattage mode), and I prepare to be completely underwhelmed. I've been vaping on mechanical mods pushing literally ten times as much power, so 12.5 puny watts will hardly even get the wire hot enough to vaporize any liquid at all, right?
But it worked great. Of course it doesn’t chuck vapor like a super low-resistance coil on a mechanical mod, but it still produced a decent cloud. It is obviously a much cooler vape, but this is not necessarily a bad thing. Flavor was quite good, and the ramp-up was super quick. Even my < 0.2 ohm coil builds (with 22 gauge wire) on my mechanical mods take at least 2 seconds to heat up fully because of the sheer mass of the wire. The 30 gauge wire simply does not have this issue because it is so thin.
Even better is the juice consumption. I was going through 10 - 12 mL of juice every day with my mechanical mods. Using strictly the MVP & VV, I only use about 3 or 4 mL of juice a day, never more than 5 mL.
So what’s the lesson here? It’s very easy to fall into the trap of ever-decreasing resistance, and of building more and more complex coil designs, in the never-ending quest for bigger and bigger clouds and more intense flavor. But are they actually better? Does all this tinkering make for a more enjoyable vaping experience? I think that with a lot of the crazy coil builds popular nowadays, there is definitely some placebo effect going on. Does a zipper coil, inception coil, or fused Clapton coil really make more vapor than a well-made simple dual coil (or even single coil)?. Is ultra-low resistance and paperclip-thick wire the ultimate end-all, or is there still a place for higher resistance builds? Do you really need 100+ watts of power to get a good vape?
I’ve gone back to using my mechanical mods with low resistance builds, but now I’m also using my low-power devices with higher resistance coils right alongside of them. I’ve stopped worrying whether I am getting the most vapor and flavor humanly possible, sticking with simple yet effective builds, and I find that I’m getting more enjoyment and an overall better vaping experience. And in the end, that’s all that really matters.
