Newbie Mech Mod - Low voltage question

[crank2211]

Not new to vaping, It's been a little over a year for me now with various cheap VV spinners/twists/grippers and such. Just saw how far rba's & mechs have come and after being amazed and confused for awhile, purched my first mech. I picked up a magneto mech, MVP, IGO-L & AGA-T2.

Anyway, I'm curious about low voltage on a mech mod. The ego/vision/any vv/vw has an automatic cutoff when the battery drains too far. With a mechanical though, how do I know when I should stop vaping and recharge the battery before I discharge too much. Does the battery have built in protection and automatically stop or do I constantly need to test it throughout the day? BTW, I'm using AW IMR 18650's.

 

[ClippinWings]

The vape changes.... It's subtle change from 4.2(fresh off the charger) to about 3.8... Then the vape just isn't as good.... And you will WANT a fresh battery.

AW IMR are the most popular battery to use in a mechanical.... Because they have no protection circuit.. And a high amp drain limit... Due to this, you can vape super low resistance... They're built with safe chemistry, so unless you do something stupid.... you're relatively safe.

Sent from my mobile, using Tapatalk... so ignore the typos.

 

[Ryedan]

A mechanical mod has no electronics in it, so you have no protections built in. You are on your own for everything.

After a while you will learn when your voltage is getting low. The first few days I used a mechanical I checked the volts a lot until I got to know the low volt symptoms from my AGA-T the way I build it. I aim to change batteries at between 3.7 and 3.6 volts. The battery will spend a lot of time in that range. When the voltage drops below 3.6, it goes down faster so it's harder to catch at say 3.2 volts. It's safe to discharge to about 2.7 volts, but at some point after that battery damage results and by then the voltage is dropping really fast.

The AW IMR 18650's are great batteries for this application. They have no protection built in, but that's OK because they are what is known as safer chemistry. If you pull too much current from them they will get quite hot before they go into thermal runaway and become dangerous. If you ever feel your PV get warm, something is wrong and you need to figure it out and fix it before continuing to vape. The higher your coil resistance is, generally the less you need to worry about this, but a hard short can happen in any device. In that case the PV will heat up fast and you need to stop the PV from firing. Taking the battery out or the RBA off will work. I use a K100 which has vent holes in three locations on the barrels. If my battery ever goes this bad and I can't stop it, I count on those holes to vent gasses produced by the battery before the PV blows up.

Electronic mods take care of all these issues, but they are not infallible either and problems can develop with then also.

 

[ohh EPiC FAiL]

I'm also considering getting a mech mod to do some sub ohm vaping, I have an MVP for regular use. I have been eyeballing the Sony 18650 battery with 30a discharge rating, but its unprotected I believe. Is there a chip like a short stop or 2cent that has a low voltage cutoff?

 

[Jazzi Mike]

You should try your hand with RBAs before you try to build a subohm setup. It's not as easy or quick as they make it look in the videos.