Cleaning a carto?

[chris in va]

I have the Vision 2.5 cartos and would like to know how to clean out the old, entrenched juice. I've tried hot water to no avail.

One juice I tried simply will not rinse out no matter what I do.

One more thing, mine leak from the bottom something fierce. A bit of silicone around the bottom seems to help, wondering if there's a better fix.

 

[kingvitaman]

Some juices you will never get completely out ie menthol and other mint flavors once there in the wicking material there are there for good. Although I have had good luck with boiling the Cartomizers granted these are the metal one not plastic Clearomizers. You need to boiling them for about 5 minutes rinse and repeat. I have had pretty good luck with this method.

 

[Stadanko]

I stumbled across a YouTube video of a guy cleaning cartos with a turkey baster. The ones with a tube and a silicone bulb on the end. Place the carto in the tube. Connector pointing toward the opening. Squeeze the bulb... Suck in warm or hot water. Squeeze again and the carto gets flushed out. Repeat.

Worked for me.

 

[kingvitaman]

Lucky for us is that cartomizers aren't that expensive anyway.

 

[Wishdog]

I use a large 4-or-so ounce syringe and just force warm water through them. It's not perfect, but you can't smell any juice once I spend about 3 minutes or so with each carto. Dry until dry.

 

[DaveP]

I've tried the turkey baster thing a few times without "like new" results. I was using hot water from the tap. I plan to use boiling water before I give up on it, though.

The biggest barrier to a good cleaning that I have found is the juice inside the coil wrap. There's a separate piece of cottony material wrapped around the coil itself that traps juice pretty tightly inside the wrap. Here's a picture of one before cleaning. If you look closely, you can see the wrap piece where I sliced the filler lengthwise to open a cross section.

 

[cerver7]

I rinse with hot tap water, blow out, boil on stove for 10 minutes, blow out, boil again, blow out, let dry, tayrin spin dry in a paper towel then fill and vape. Works best for me with very good results. Snicker doodle was the only juice I was not able to get rid of.

Edit: that pic above, IMO, looks like you might have dried and burnt the filler by letting the carto get too dry. Also might have been used many times as well. Just IMO but keeping it wet and not going dry is the best way to avoid SOME of that.

 

[irwink]

I've tried all the recommended cleaning methods for many types of cartos and the only ones that I got fairly consistent good results with were CE2's. Even then they were only good for a couple of cycles. Vision Stardusts cleaned 2nd best but their performance afterward was never the same and declined from there. I've most recently tried cleaning Smoktech dual coil filler cartos with inconsistent results. Some perform sorta well/mediocre, maybe 30%, and some are trashed. I've used cleaning liquids ranging from vinegar to hot water and 100 proof vodka (no Everclear in Virginia) using a sonic cleaner device. Best results were with the vodka. And yeah, I've done the turkey baster thing along the way too.

As it stands I consider the time and resources (VODKA!) I've used and the juice I've wasted (more $$) dumping it into poorly performing cartos and come to the conclusion it just isn't worth the time and effort. Hopefully your mileage may vary but I won't be holding my breath.

 

[chris in va]

I may have to clarify. This is a clear plastic tank with two ropes feeding a single coil, no packing material. I don't think this will stand up to boiling water.

 

[STVNMR]

Yeah, you probably don't want to boil those if they're plastic.

Irwink is right. Using vodka to clean cartos is nowhere near as easy with regular tanks, so it becomes a huge waste of time and money after cleaning just a handful of them considering the alternative cost of new hardware. For those that want to try cleaning with ethanol, PGA is a purer and far less expensive compared to vodka if available in your state. It's worked well for me on tank atties in the past.