I'm going to go ahead and re-do a whole explanation, but for bottom line is that your vape depends on volts and ohms. The higher the volts and the lower the ohms, the warmer the vape. Once you have a variable voltage device you need to worry less about the Ohms, and you should stick to a "standard resistance" of around 3 Ohm and just play with the voltage to keep things simple.
Now for the rest, if you don't mind:
Volts - measure what is called "difference of potential"; essentially it measures how much "force" there is to drive the current through a circuit - you can make up several analogies, but the most common would be with pressure: the battery is like two gas cylinders, one at high pressure, one at low pressure and the voltage is the difference of pressure. If you connect them with a tube, the gas will flow...
Amps - refer to the electrical current - how much electricity flows through the circuit in a unit of time; it's the equivalent of flow rate as it were...
Ohms - refer to resistance - how hard does the circuit / conductor / atomizer coil fight against the flow of current
Watts - measure power. That translates into energy - power is energy in a unit of time. For us, this is the key measure because it directly translates into heat and that into amount of vapor and vapor warmth.
All of the above are related, to simplify everything to our case, by the fact that
voltage pushes current to flow through a resistance and that generates heat. You try to push something through, and the wire fights back - things get heated
The higher the current and the higher the resistance, the more heat. It just so happens that the current matters much more than the resistance. The mathematical expression is:
Watts = Amps x Amps x Ohms
BUT, this is a wonderful example on how two intuitive relationships combined give a less intuitive one.
The current itself depends on how hard it is pushed and how much resistance it encounters. That is logical, too... The mathematical expression is:
Amps = Volts / Ohms
If you combine them, then you get:
Watts = Volts x Volts / Ohms
So for practical purposes,
to get the same power you can increase the Volts or decrease the Ohms within certain limits. You get more by increasing the volts than by decreasing the resistance by the same amount...
Basically you vary your power to get a warmer or a cooler vapor. As you do that you find that for some juices, or for some times of the day even, you like a differently powered vape. Some juices taste better at a higher power, while some may get burned at that same power.
The variable voltage devices let you do that by changing the voltage, but you need to remember your power also depends on the resistance. If you lower the resistance, you will need less volts, so you have to kind of keep that in mind. Moreover, if you lower the resistance too much and you keep pushing a lot of volts, you can fry your low resistance atty.
But there is no need for you to really change the resistance of your atties if you use a variable voltage device, so most people settle on, say, 3 Ohms, and then only play with the voltage.
It's just something to keep in mind if you happen to put a differently resisted head on your PV...
The other type of devices are variable power: Darwin and the Kick. With these, you need not worry about the math, they do it for you; so regardless what resistance you put on, the
Darwin / Kick will fix the voltage so you get the power you had set them on.
The only problem with that are dual coil devices. These have a low total resistance, but in fact they are made of two standard resistance coils linked in parallel. Therefore, they draw power like a low resistance attachment, but their vape is cooler, because it's pretty much
as if you vaped two standard resistance attachments at the same time. Darwin/Kick doesn't know that and treats them according to their total resistance. You do get the power you set, but the warmth is no longer proportional to the power, because each coil gets only one part of that power...
And finally, this is one of the posts that best explains this in a metaphoric manner:
http://www.e-cigarette-forum.com/fo...w-plus-bit-electronic-theory.html#post1988870
That plus a spare battery knocked a nice dent in my meager vaping budget but that's okay because I've spent very little over the past coupe months. OTOH my "analog reduction plan" has taken a terrible plunge of late so this month I'm committed to renewing my attack. This upgrade to a VV PV struck me as an excellent place to begin. I figure with this, a couple good attys & a few new juices I should be ready to explore some new territory & regain some of the enthusiasm I've been missing. We shall see. Now, to score a couple of IkenVape's Cannon SR atomizers & a few new flavorings....
