Those of you who are into ham radio know what QRP is: transmitting at low power, and compensating by carefully designing antennas.
Well, I have several mods and eGo batteries here that aren't particularly powerful, and I'm reluctant to buy a powerful device because I'm kind of fed up buying vaping stuff. But I want to make the most of what I have. So I've been experimenting with coils and wicks in my rebuildables - the "antennas" of the vaping world, so to speak - and I'm starting to get pretty good at getting big clouds and massive flavor production at miserly power levels.
It's all a matter of turning as much liquid juice into vapor as efficiently as possible. That means:
- Maximizing the coil area in contact with the juice while maintaining a decently fast warm-up speed
- Avoiding heat losses: too much wetting draws heat away from the coil. So do steel wicks, I've found out. Raising the coil off the deck and away from the rest of the wick, even a little, also helps a lot.
- Maintaining a good wicking flow, but not too much: that's counterintuitive, but a wick that works too well wets the coil too much and wastes heat. Conversely, a wick that restricts the flow leads to dry hits, obviously. There's a fine balance, determined by how much the coil constricts the wick inside it (or how tight the wick is wrapped around it outside, if you do a central exhaust coil). I find a properly tight wick - i.e. not too tight and not too loose - is key to vapor and flavor yields, much more so than the coil itself.
- Make it wick from both sides of the coil, to avoid having an unevenly wet wick. That way, you can make the wick just wet enough to work well, without getting dry hits, and not flood the atty and kill vapor production.
- Avoiding heat loses through the atty's structure: atomizers are made of metal, and metals conduct heat like crazy. That's heat that's not being used to vaporize juice. Lining the bottom of the deck and the inner wall of the atty with silica keeps the coil warmer. It's tricky to keep it all together though...
If you experiment a little, you'll be getting really good vapes with cheap, off-the-shelf devices, a cooler drip tip and a much better battery life to boot. Right now, I'm vaping 9 mg menthol juice at 5W in 5 second puffs that's blowing my head off as much as the same juice in 12 mg and 10W with a quickly-thrown-together coil and wick job.
You should try "QRP vaping" : it's really great, and a lot more satisfactory than pumping massive amounts of power in an inefficient setup. Nothing like the feeling of a job well done, when you take one fabulous draw after the other, with the power all the way down
Well, I have several mods and eGo batteries here that aren't particularly powerful, and I'm reluctant to buy a powerful device because I'm kind of fed up buying vaping stuff. But I want to make the most of what I have. So I've been experimenting with coils and wicks in my rebuildables - the "antennas" of the vaping world, so to speak - and I'm starting to get pretty good at getting big clouds and massive flavor production at miserly power levels.
It's all a matter of turning as much liquid juice into vapor as efficiently as possible. That means:
- Maximizing the coil area in contact with the juice while maintaining a decently fast warm-up speed
- Avoiding heat losses: too much wetting draws heat away from the coil. So do steel wicks, I've found out. Raising the coil off the deck and away from the rest of the wick, even a little, also helps a lot.
- Maintaining a good wicking flow, but not too much: that's counterintuitive, but a wick that works too well wets the coil too much and wastes heat. Conversely, a wick that restricts the flow leads to dry hits, obviously. There's a fine balance, determined by how much the coil constricts the wick inside it (or how tight the wick is wrapped around it outside, if you do a central exhaust coil). I find a properly tight wick - i.e. not too tight and not too loose - is key to vapor and flavor yields, much more so than the coil itself.
- Make it wick from both sides of the coil, to avoid having an unevenly wet wick. That way, you can make the wick just wet enough to work well, without getting dry hits, and not flood the atty and kill vapor production.
- Avoiding heat loses through the atty's structure: atomizers are made of metal, and metals conduct heat like crazy. That's heat that's not being used to vaporize juice. Lining the bottom of the deck and the inner wall of the atty with silica keeps the coil warmer. It's tricky to keep it all together though...
If you experiment a little, you'll be getting really good vapes with cheap, off-the-shelf devices, a cooler drip tip and a much better battery life to boot. Right now, I'm vaping 9 mg menthol juice at 5W in 5 second puffs that's blowing my head off as much as the same juice in 12 mg and 10W with a quickly-thrown-together coil and wick job.
You should try "QRP vaping" : it's really great, and a lot more satisfactory than pumping massive amounts of power in an inefficient setup. Nothing like the feeling of a job well done, when you take one fabulous draw after the other, with the power all the way down
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