First testing on Resistherm NiFe30
I've made my first NiFe coil and am
vaping on it at the moment on my Aqua SE RTA.
It seems to work well. 0.28mm / 29G is a bit of a pain as expected, thicker would be much preferable, but as we know that's unlikely to happen any time soon, if ever. So something I plan to try pretty soon, maybe tomorrow, is twisted.
I did a single coil build: a contact coil of 9 x 3.0mm wraps reading 0.53Ω on the SXK. Real resistance should be 0.60Ω - 0.61Ω according to Steam Engine.
It was pretty easy to coil on the Kuro, and straightforward to adjust - though the thinness did make this a little more fiddly than I would like. It did shift a bit when I was pulling the rayon wick in - the wire being thin enough to move pretty easily.
Overall I would say it handles similarly to Kanthal wire of a similar size/gauge.
Just like SS and Kanthal, it was necessary to dry pulse the coil to get it heating properly. I left the mod in TC but set the watts to 15W for the first pulses. I tweaked it a bit, Kanthal style, and after a few seconds of pulsing @ 15W, TC kicked in as normal. On the first pulses, just as with SS, resistance did not rise properly so it was in effect a non-TC, power-mode fire (hence setting it to 15W for those first pulses.)
I did not try pre-pulsing it to pre-oxidise it in the hope it would work immediately as a contact coil. That didn't work at all with an SS coil but does seem to with Ti, so it is worth a try.
I set the SXK to NP41 for this first coil, based on calculations and then refinements I'll explain in the next post. With NP41 it's
vaping well - a nice cloudy vape, decent flavour, and no dry hits during the vape or when draining the tank dry.
Thoughts on Resistherm NiFe30 thus far
I like it, and my first experience is, as expected, much nicer than with Ni200. Had I tried this before Ti and SS, I would be really impressed. But I didn't, and as a result it's merely 'fine', not anything amazing or new in its own right.
Quite possibly I won't stick with it after I finish this spool. It's very early days but so far it doesn't seem dramatically better than SS or Titanium, if it's really better at all.
It has handling benefits over Ti, and there's no need to pre-pulse, but then both are also true of SS. SS is right at the lower limits of accurate TC, but, as Dicodes themselves said, it will be very 'repeatable' - it might take a little longer to find the right settings, but once they are found, they will work every time. NiFe does share the advantage with Ti of being usable on any mod with appropriate temp adjustments.
I will do more Resistherm testing tomorrow and in particular with twisted wire. I'd like to use dual strand most of the time if possible - which would make it handle much better. But then the trouble is that I'm now, for the first time with any wire, counting the cost. €13/10m is bad enough, but €26/10m or €13/5m for twisted begins to feel a little silly!
So there's a lot to consider and testing to be done to compare each to the others. There are plusses and minuses on all the wires. I can see how Resistherm might technically be the best combination of immediate usability with reasonable TCR, but cost and availability is another important factor and there it loses out a lot.