Sorry for the loooong post but I thought I should keep everyone up to date in case it helps.
I was one of the original members to report a problem with Box Elder nic. The two half litre bottles of 48mg I bought back in June tasted bad to me, they have an earthy flavour which swamps any added flavour. After making up a mix of my normal flavours, using all my normal open bottles of ingredients which I knew were OK, I vaped this liquid for approximately half a day before suffering a bout of severe diarrhoea. I stopped vaping the liquid immediately and the problem disappeared. Please note I cannot say with any certainty that the two are related and I was not inclined to repeat the test, but in my mind the two were related.
Following the thread it became apparent that there were some batches of nic from Box Elder out there that may be stronger than labelled. I wondered then if my batch was one of these and that was the reason for the illness but I had no way of testing at that stage.
Originally I emailed Box Elder with my concerns and received no reply for a week. Suddenly, once I had posted in the thread about my problem I received a response for Joe at Box Elder stating he had been away hunting for a week hence the lack of response. He assured me that my liquid would not be over strength but happily accepted it was no use if it tasted bad and offered to send me a replacement without asking for the original to be returned (I am grateful for this as I live in the UK).
Although it took almost a month to reach me I did indeed receive one litre of 48mg marked nic in PG as replacement.
Imagine my disappointment when again I mixed up a test batch using again only my open bottles of in use ingredients and again got the earthy taste of the original batch. I then made up a batch without any flavour at all and tried it. The earthy flavour was still there but less prominent and the mix was vapable even though it tasted like flavour had been added when non had. It was a mix of the BE nic, PG and VG and that is all.
So, where to now? I still did not know if the original was over strength or was bad and the replacement was the same, or if Box Elder nic just tastes like that and I never had a problem in the first place. So I decided to get hold of one of the home test kits. I know the margin for error is quite wide with these, nevertheless I am confident in my ability to work cleanly with chemicals and measure accurately so I believe the test would be worthwhile as an indication at least.
I purchased said test kit, as an overseas user the shipping would be prohibitive if the measuring cylinder was included so I got the pipette, the stirring rod, and two bottles of the .12n sulphuric and two bottles of blue all for $30 shipped. They got to me in just five days, excellent!
So this morning I sat down to do me some testing.
Lacking a measuring cylinder I decided to use a new 10ml clear plastic juice bottle and to use 1ml finely graduated syringes for measuring.
I followed the testing instructions faithfully. Prior to starting, and again before each subsequent test, I washed the bottle, the syringes and the stirring rod first in hot tap water, then rinsed three times in fresh distilled water.
I did three tests, one was with the original supply from Box Elder, the second with the replacement from them, and a final one with a supply from RTS Vapes. All are in PG. Here are my results -
Box Elder 48mg original supply - 32.709 mg/ml
Box Elder 48mg replacment supply - 39.915 mg/ml
RTSVapes 60mg - 47.312 mg/ml
And that brings me right up to date. From my tests I think I can safely conclude that neither of the two batches of Box Elder nic are over strength, and that they certainly vary in strength but apart from that I am not too sure what I can take from these and would appreciate your comments and analysis of my methods and results. I have to admit to being quite disappointed that despite taking every care in the tests the results are so far adrift from the expected values. I was expecting the Box Elder nic to be out but certainly wasn't expecting the RTS stuff to come in as it did, and that leads me to question these results myself. Nevertheless I took every care, I used pure distilled water, I rinsed everything faithfully at first and between tests and I took care to measure everything to the limit of my syringes marked in .001 ml.
The only other things I can think of to add that may be relevant is that I used four drops of the blue in every test (as the instructions say to do if the nic is over 40mg which I expected all to be) and the distilled water I am using is de-ionised water obtained from the local car accessory chain.
Congrats for reading all this
and thanks for any insight you can offer.
I was one of the original members to report a problem with Box Elder nic. The two half litre bottles of 48mg I bought back in June tasted bad to me, they have an earthy flavour which swamps any added flavour. After making up a mix of my normal flavours, using all my normal open bottles of ingredients which I knew were OK, I vaped this liquid for approximately half a day before suffering a bout of severe diarrhoea. I stopped vaping the liquid immediately and the problem disappeared. Please note I cannot say with any certainty that the two are related and I was not inclined to repeat the test, but in my mind the two were related.
Following the thread it became apparent that there were some batches of nic from Box Elder out there that may be stronger than labelled. I wondered then if my batch was one of these and that was the reason for the illness but I had no way of testing at that stage.
Originally I emailed Box Elder with my concerns and received no reply for a week. Suddenly, once I had posted in the thread about my problem I received a response for Joe at Box Elder stating he had been away hunting for a week hence the lack of response. He assured me that my liquid would not be over strength but happily accepted it was no use if it tasted bad and offered to send me a replacement without asking for the original to be returned (I am grateful for this as I live in the UK).
Although it took almost a month to reach me I did indeed receive one litre of 48mg marked nic in PG as replacement.
Imagine my disappointment when again I mixed up a test batch using again only my open bottles of in use ingredients and again got the earthy taste of the original batch. I then made up a batch without any flavour at all and tried it. The earthy flavour was still there but less prominent and the mix was vapable even though it tasted like flavour had been added when non had. It was a mix of the BE nic, PG and VG and that is all.
So, where to now? I still did not know if the original was over strength or was bad and the replacement was the same, or if Box Elder nic just tastes like that and I never had a problem in the first place. So I decided to get hold of one of the home test kits. I know the margin for error is quite wide with these, nevertheless I am confident in my ability to work cleanly with chemicals and measure accurately so I believe the test would be worthwhile as an indication at least.
I purchased said test kit, as an overseas user the shipping would be prohibitive if the measuring cylinder was included so I got the pipette, the stirring rod, and two bottles of the .12n sulphuric and two bottles of blue all for $30 shipped. They got to me in just five days, excellent!
So this morning I sat down to do me some testing.
Lacking a measuring cylinder I decided to use a new 10ml clear plastic juice bottle and to use 1ml finely graduated syringes for measuring.
I followed the testing instructions faithfully. Prior to starting, and again before each subsequent test, I washed the bottle, the syringes and the stirring rod first in hot tap water, then rinsed three times in fresh distilled water.
I did three tests, one was with the original supply from Box Elder, the second with the replacement from them, and a final one with a supply from RTS Vapes. All are in PG. Here are my results -
Box Elder 48mg original supply - 32.709 mg/ml
Box Elder 48mg replacment supply - 39.915 mg/ml
RTSVapes 60mg - 47.312 mg/ml
And that brings me right up to date. From my tests I think I can safely conclude that neither of the two batches of Box Elder nic are over strength, and that they certainly vary in strength but apart from that I am not too sure what I can take from these and would appreciate your comments and analysis of my methods and results. I have to admit to being quite disappointed that despite taking every care in the tests the results are so far adrift from the expected values. I was expecting the Box Elder nic to be out but certainly wasn't expecting the RTS stuff to come in as it did, and that leads me to question these results myself. Nevertheless I took every care, I used pure distilled water, I rinsed everything faithfully at first and between tests and I took care to measure everything to the limit of my syringes marked in .001 ml.
The only other things I can think of to add that may be relevant is that I used four drops of the blue in every test (as the instructions say to do if the nic is over 40mg which I expected all to be) and the distilled water I am using is de-ionised water obtained from the local car accessory chain.
Congrats for reading all this
and thanks for any insight you can offer.
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