What exactly is a hotspot?

[Wish]

Greetings,

So I had some trouble lately with building a twisted coil on my Phoenix V3. I made the twists fairly good and they all looked neat. I torched the wick and wire very thoroughly before I hooked them up to the poles. When I did, I made sure that the wires weren't touching the poles and I adjusted the wire spacing evenly while firing it so the wires were soft with heat. While doing that, I noticed everything was the same bright color except for the last coil on the right. Usually, the only part of the coil that's not glowing is a few millimeters from the poles. What I'm talking about is a redish color and it goes bright by the bottom. I'd like to ask what exactly is a hotspot and can it cause the wire to pop?

What exactly is a hotspot and what is it's effects? Can I get pictures as an example? How can you fix it?

I'm sorry if this is in some sort of FAQ thread of have been asked many times but I searched and the search function didn't give me useful results.

 

[shortyjacobs]

A hotspot is generally a place where the wire becomes grounded, so electricity flows back into the battery and "bypasses" (short circuits) the rest of the wire. In this case the wire will be red up until that grounding point, and then it'll be cool after it.

It can also be a place where the wire is not in good contact with the wick, (coil is too loose), in which case, the rest of the rest of the coil will be cooled by conductive heat transfer, but that one loop not in contact with anything will heat up more and turn red.

In your phoenix, what wick material are you using?

As for whether it can pop a wire - yes. In either situation I described above, if the wire gets hot enough, (either because the short-circuit lowers the effective resistance of the coil, so more electricity flows, it gets too hot...or because the one loose coil simply heats up too much), it'll melt and pop.