I'm still confused about the Cartomizer 'thingy'. I bough a eGo-T, Type B. I got the extended battery (1000 somethingamajiggies), but have heard about the Cartomizer... can someone explain the pros and cons of the atomizer/cartomizer/whatever else there is?
What little experience I have with either has me leaning towards cartos. My atty was fine but my cartridges always leaked. It may be in my head but I get a better throat hit as well as smoke production with my carto.
In the early days, the first ecigs had a version of a cartomizer where the heating coil (atomizer) was in the same housing as the absorbent filler that held the juice. These were designed to work with small cigarette style e-cigs and usually had threading patterns that prevented them from being used on other e-cig designs.
Later on, other models of e-cigs were invented and thread patterns for their attachments became somewhat standardized, hence the 510s, 808s, 901s, etc. that you see on most modern devices. The e-cigs that didn't look like cigarettes generally came with an atomizer/cartridge system. An atomizer is just a small tube that screws into the battery connector. It contains a heating element (coil) and little else. It needs some way to apply juice to the coil. So a small hollow mouthpiece (cartridge) was filled with a foam substance that acted as a juice reservoir and, when plugged into the opening of the atomizer, applied the juice to the coil. These had all kinds of problems with supplying sufficient juice and all kinds of materials were tried in order to provide a steady supply of juice to the coil. None worked that well.
The type of system that comes with the eGo-T is a modified cartridge/atomizer system. They updated it from the old obsolete system of a couple years ago where you plugged a cartridge into an atomizer in order to feed it juice. But a facelift and renaming cartridge to "tank" still doesn't make it work much better than it did 3 years ago. The eGo-C is a small improvement, but the whole concept is one big fail and you guys are having the same problems everyone else has with this kind of system.
When cartomizers were invented they made the old cartridge/atomizer system obsolete overnight. The cartomizer combined the juice reservoir with the atomizer in one unit. They were dependable, consistent and didn't mute the flavor like the cartridges did then and the so-called "tank systems" do now. But, they were susceptible to burning if allowed to dry out and the polyfill material inside of them altered the taste somewhat. So, clearomizers were born.
Clearomizers are like cartomizers without the filler. They rely on a wick system to draw the juice to the built-in atomizer from a chamber where it is held loosely instead of in an absorbent filler as in a cartomizer. They are usually transparent, which gives them the name. The first ones were notorious for not wicking juice to the coil adequately and producing dry hits. Changes were made to the wicks, the location of the heating coil and the materials and they've improved vastly. They still mute the flavor somewhat, but it's as clean as you can get without dripping juice straight into an atomizer. Unlike a cartomizer, a clearomizer can be vaped until virtually dry without any need to keep topping off the juice level. They can be rinsed, cleaned and reused multiple times with different flavors, something that you can't really do well with a filled cartomizer.
All juice delivery systems rely on a heating coil and how hot that coil gets is what determines the amount and warmth of the vapor. Like a lightbulb, the coil consumes watts. The more watts, the more power. A 100 watt light bulb is hotter and brighter than a 40 watt light bulb. An atomizer or cartomizer coil consuming 9 watts is hotter than one consuming 4 watts.
Unlike a light bulb however, we can control the wattage at which an atomizer, cartomizer, etc. is operating. We can change the voltage, change the resistance of the coil, or we can change both.
There is some elementary arithmetic involved. Watts (power) = Heat.
The formula for how many watts a coil is burning at is simple:
Watts = (Volts x Volts) / resistance (in ohms).
So, all you do is multiply your battery's voltage by itself and divide the result by the "ohms" of the cartomizer or atomizer.
When you do the math, you will see that if you keep the voltage the same and lower the resistance (lower ohms), the watts increase and the coil burns hotter.
If you increase the resistance (higher ohms), the watts decrease and the vapor is produced at a cooler temperature (fewer watts).
If you keep the resistance the same and increase the voltage, the watts increase and the vapor gets warmer.
If you keep the resistance the same and decrease the voltage, the watts decrease and the vapor is cooler.
Since there are only two factors that determine the heat, volts and resistance, if you have a fixed voltage PV, the only way to change the watts, and therefore the heat, is to change the resistance. If you like a cooler vapor, use a higher resistance. If you like a warmer vapor, use a lower resistance. Most people like somewhere between 6 and 10 watts, with 7-8 watts being the "sweet spot" for many juices.
If you plug your battery's voltage and your cartomizers resistance into the formula Volts x Volts / ohms = Watts, you can see the watts change as you change from a low to high resistance coil, or vice versa.
With dual coil cartos, you have one resistance for the carto as a whole and twice that resistance for each coil contained inside the carto. So, a 1.5ohm carto will contain two 3ohm coils. Since by doubling the resistance, you halve the watts, each coil burns 1/2 as hot as it would if it were in a single coil carto of the same total resistance. Because of this, if you want to make the coils burn at the same wattage as a single coil carto, you would have to double the voltage. This is why I don't recommend dual coil cartos for lower power (under 4.2V) batteries.
