Burning out atomizers: causes and precautions

[P-Funk]

You all know the flavor... I call it gluey, but it has been variously described as metallic, melted plastic, burnt, off, acrid, and others: it's the flavor that an atomizer gone bad imparts to your vaping experience. And it is not pleasant. Once a disposable coil head gets it, you gotta replace the head to get away from it.

I have recently seen a rash of atomizers going bad before their time. Here's my situation:

Gear:
- Kanger KBOX-70 regulated mod in wattage mode at 7.0 watts
- Aspire Nautilus Mini with authentic 1.8ohm BVC(bottom vertical coil) heads

juice:
- Black Note Sonata 12mg/ml

Here's the question: has anyone had coils that seem to go bad after a few days for no explicable reason? I have been vaping at a low wattage, and despite that several of my atomizers have gone bad after no apparent incident and I can't figure the cause. This morning I picked up a tank I hadn't used in a day or so and with the first hit I knew the atty was fried. It was only a few days old, and I know that for certain because the same thing happened this past weekend and I replaced the atty at that time.

I am an experienced vaper; I know how to keep my gear in working condition and I haven't had issues such as these since the early days. What explanation is there for this phenomenon? Can it be avoided? Is this kind of occurrence normal for you?

 

[mcclintock]

NETs such as that are often considered coil-gunkers that require fairly often rewicking/cleaning at least. Personally I prefer them in original EVODs with cotton wicks and and it can take a day (or several now that I use them less) to get properly gunked and develop full flavor. That was especially true of Sonata or maybe it would have never happened if I hadn't found a few drops remaining of GeJ Patriot to add in.

A few weird things can happen that cause coils to "go bad". Poor contacts, which especially causes problems with VW mods since they can get faked out on how much voltage to deliver. And I'm convinced that sometimes coil gunk can act as a semiconductor, providing the same reading on your mod's ohmmeter and yet shorting out part of the coil as soon as the power is applied.

Could also be something with those coils, but I don't have any experience with the Nautilus. Pushing coils hard can cause a buildup of burning which suddenly becomes highly noticable, although there's usually something noticable before that.