My Hermetic RDA arrived this morning. I quickly built and mounted a 3 mm twisted 24 gauge nichrome coil. It was stupid simple to mount, and the coil placement was perfect without having to adjust it up or down. But if you do want to move the coil, the semi-circular cutouts on the sides make it easy to slip a rod through.
This is my first RDA with a ceramic clamp. I am a bit concerned about this since ceramic is brittle, but the clamp is quite beefy, and there is a spare clamp included with the RDA.
Due to this being a 22 mm RDA, and the "bridged airflow" channel taking up a fairly large portion of the drip well, tucking the wicks for the 3 mm coil (actually around 3.25 mm since twisted wire is pretty springy) was a bit difficult. People who just shove their wick tails down into the well won't have any issues, but if you're like me and prefer to actually tuck the wick tails down underneath the coil then push them outwards to the edge of the deck, this design makes doing so a little tricky. I think I'll be going with 2.5 mm coils on this RDA in the future to make this easier.
Amazingly, this thing really is leak resistant! Even if you dump in enough juice to fill the bottom airflow channel, it still won't leak unless you tilt the RDA enough for the juice to travel up the "ramp" to exit the top cap. Basically, instead of juice leaking everywhere if you overfill even a tiny bit, you just get some gurgling for the first hit or two (until the "exit" holes on the top of the airflow channel get fully uncovered). Of course, it is still possible to make it leak if you grossly over-drip – as in enough which would make even a side-airflow RDA leak out the air holes.
The main drawback is the fairly small juice well. Yes, it is pretty deep, but the 22 mm diameter, combined with the large airflow channel, means it doesn't really hold that much juice. Vaping my 24 gauge twisted build at 70 watts, I only get around 5 hits before needing to re-drip. But the fact that you can just dump juice down through the drip tip without worrying about leaking minimizes this shortcoming. Going down to a 2.5 mm coil will also help, since the wick tails of my ~3.25 mm coil fill up most of the well. A 2.5 mm coil's wick tails will leave more room for juice.
The airflow is smooth. I've been running it wide open, which gives a nice restricted lung hit. It's just right for single-coil builds in the 50-80 watt range. There isn't enough airflow to handle builds requiring more power, but most of the single-coil builds I use are right in that 50-80 watt range. I'm sure those who vape at lower power levels will also be fine – the airflow is still smooth, quiet, and non-turbulent when closed down.
Flavor is very good, just as expected.
Granted, I've only been using it for a few hours, but so far I'm quite impressed. I've tried several bottom-airflow RDA's in the past, but all of them leaked to some degree. They now sit unused. Even when I get the urge to give one of them another go, my enthusiasm quickly disappears due to the leaking. That's why when browsing new RDA's released by the various companies, if it was bottom-airflow, I didn't consider it at all, even if I liked everything else about it. My experience with bottom-airflow RDA's has been that bad.
But the Hermetic is different. It is the first bottom-airflow RDA which can honestly be advertised as leak-resistant. It really is just as resistant to leaking as a standard side-airflow RDA.
I definitely would have preferred it to be a 24 mm RDA. Making this design leak-resistant requires a lot of space to be taken up by the airflow system, so even though the juice well is quite deep, its capacity leaves much to be desired. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that a dual-coil version is in the works, and that it would be a 24 mm RDA. But I think it would suffer from the same capacity issue. A 24 mm single-coil version and a 25.5 or 26 mm dual-coil version would get around this.
Would I have paid full price ($30) for the Hermetic RDA? Without knowing what I now know – that this actually is a bottom-airflow RDA which doesn't leak – no, I wouldn't have. But if mine gets lost or broken, or if a dual-coil version is released, then yes, I definitely would buy it at full price.
