This is an interesting read, and a good reason to
buy a quality piece of merchandise. Safety
IS a factor.
Hi Jason,
I understand you may be wondering why you are not able to reach 3.5 amps with your current setup. Hopefully this information will help to explain why.
We use both an amp limit and a watts limit on the ProVari. What this means is if the ProVari is pushed past it's amp limit, it will
throw an error.
However, it will also
throw an error if you push it past its wattage limit as well.
Say you have a 1.4 ohm atty on the ProVari and you set the ProVari to 3.7 volts. The resulting amps (current) that are being drawn are 2.64 and the watts (power) are 9.78. Both are well within the safety parameters designed for the ProVari and the ProVari should fire just fine.
Now, to reach the maximum amp draw on a 1.4 ohm atty, the voltage would need to be set at 4.9. This will create a 3.5 amp draw on the ProVari. However, the watts would go all the way up to 17.15.
The ProVari's limit on watts from 4.3 volts to 6 volts is 14.50 watts. As you can see, 17.15 watts exceeds the safety parameter designed into the ProVari and will cause it to throw an error.
So, with a 1.4 ohm atomizer or cartomizer, the highest recommended voltage setting you can go to without the ProVari throwing an error is 4.5 volts. This keeps you under the 14.50 watt limit.
However, it's also important to keep in mind that the heating elements can and will drop resistance as they heat up, run dry or get old. As the resistance drops and the voltage stays the same, the wattage increases and so does the heat. The ProVari will throw an error to let you know it's going into a dangerous zone. This is to protect itself and you from having a shorted atomizer.
They can catch fire when they short!
This can also be a factor as to why the ProVari is throwing an error when you have it set so high. If the resistance is fluctuating or dropping as you're using the atomizer, it will trigger the ProVari to shut down and throw an error.
But there's more to this than even that.
Let's say your setup is 1.4 ohms at 4.7 volts which is 3.3 amps and 15.779 watts. So your ProVari stops, not because of the current (amps) but because of excess power (watts). 4.3 volts and up cuts off at 14.5 watts like I mentioned.
What could be puzzling though is if you reduce it to 4.6 volts, resulting in 15.11 watts, and the ProVari still works. But isn't this over the watt limit?
You are correct that it is over the watt limit.
The interesting part of this is the combined value of the watts and amps.
For instance, if you multiply 3.5A with 14.5w, you get 50.75 in combined power.
Now, if you multiply the 4.6 volt setting of 3.285A with 15.114w, you get a total combined power of 49.65 (within the total combined power limits)
But what happens when you multiply the amps to watts for 4.7 volts and 1.4 ohms? 3.357x15.778 will total to 52.97 (exceeds the total combined power limits)
If you go over the total combined limit, then it will definitely shut down. However, if the watts and amps do not exceed the total combined limit, then the ProVari will continue to work.
This is because at 4.6 volts, the amps dropped enough along with the watts to allow you to use a 1.4 ohm atty.
Here is a link to our V1 vs. V2 chart, showing the amps and watts:
http://www.provape.com/v/images/ProVariV1vsV2.pdf
And a link where you can calculate the Ohms Law:
Ohm's Law Calculations With Power
Hopefully this clarifies things for you. If you have any questions about this information, please don't hesitate to ask. I'm more than happy to help.
Kindly,
Cecilia
