Dry Burn Cleaning of An Atomizer

[breakfastchef]

This is my experience today. My BE112 penstyle atomizer was not producing as much vapor as it should. A new BE112 has a resistance of 3.5 ohms; this particular atomizer was reading near 12 ohms. Normally, I would pitch an atomizer with a high resistance as it is FTD (fixin' to die). On a lark, I decided to do a series of 20 second dry burns on my 6 volt vaping device. After six dry burns, the resistance fell to 4.1 ohms.

While this is very positive, the atomizer still does not hit as well as it did a few days ago. I can say that the dry burns must have destroyed much of the junk on the atomizer heating coil, thereby reducing resistance. While I do not see any benefit from cleaning atomizers, the dry burn (periodically or regularly) may be of benefit to atomizer health.

 

[kinabaloo]

breakfastchef - you were lucky not to finish it off

used daily with a shorter time and at 3.7v it can keep the coil clean; have seen it work on a coil outside of the atty casing.

what's so curious about what you report though is the chnge in resistance.

one would expect deposit buildup to reduce efficiency because it heat insulates the coil from the liquid / raises the heat capacity of the coil.

if the deposit were fairly electrically conductive it would lower the resistance a little (perhaps very little). but i can't think of a reason why the resistance could ncrease by nearly 3x. heat insulation by the deposit would increase the coil temp on the inside f the deposit and that would increase the resistance of the nichrome - but by only about 1% or so. so quite a mystery. i can only assume for now that this was a faulty measurement somehow (easily done, no blame intended). how did you do the resistance measurement? off-load with a meter set to R or by measuring the current?

one might imagine that the coil resistance would increase with age if it does indeed get thinner, but you report that after cleaning the resistance dropped again.

very interesting because maybe there is something new to learn / explore in this ...

 

[breakfastchef]

how did you do the resistance measurement? off-load with a meter set to R or by measuring the current?

I figured you would be interested in the topic, kin. Yes, I make the resistance readings off-load with an auto-ranging DMM. I iave a few high resistance atomizers that have been retired, so I will fiddle with the dry burning to see if my first results were a fluke.