Beginners’ Guide to Electronic Cigarettes – Juice and Coils

Beginners’ Guide to Vaping – JUICES AND COILS

A constantly-evolving guide, continued every-so-often (once monthly at worst), continued from https://gazettereview.com/2016/01/how-to-vape-ecig-beginners-guide/ …

So you have your electronic cigarette, your blister kit, your box mod, your mechanical mod, your whatever… You have your rig. And now you need some electronic juice for your electronic cigarette! What do?

Running out of juice can be a pretty frequent mishap for even the most diligent vapers. It is up to the person using the vaporizer to be smart, vigilant, keep an eye on their supplies, and know what to do should they run out.

A general rule of thumb for vaporizing is that purchasing stuff online will ALWAYS be cheaper. The trade-off is that you don’t necessarily get the support you would from a brick and mortar store, who might offer to give you a juice on-the-house if you aren’t satisfied, provide support should your parts break or be all-around nice guys. Ordering something online may be cheaper, but it could ultimately cost more in the long run if you are not happy with it or find fault in the product.

Personally, I try to order most of my physical parts online and then order my juice through a store. High street stores always have a welcoming and relaxed environment and 9 times out of 10 the employee is going to be friendly and chat with you, possibly giving some recommendations. Some stores even will allow you to customize your juice, adding flavor shots or a menthol crystal. Most stores will have samplers with no nicotine and a base of 50 pg/50 vg, allowing you to taste the flavor; you should always bear in mind that nicotine will alter the flavor should you choose to add nicotine, with more potent strengths affecting the flavor far more.

JUICE

Nicotine can also crack your glass, and certain juices can crack tanks as well – I recently had an Aspire Nautilus gore me because I was out of juice, desperate for a vape, and decided to put in year-old 24 mg/ml strength nicotine. This caused the glass to expand and crack, and I sliced my finger webbing a little when attempting to remove the glass. PLEASE take care when using anything with nicotine, especially if it is in higher concentration. Also take great precaution when attempting to remove a fractured or shattered tank.

Darker juices, such as those made to resemble coffee flavors or syrup-y flavors, can clog your coils and cause your coils to die sooner. Flavors that are more acidic in nature, like colas or coffees, will wear through the cotton quicker. My roommate was complaining that he went through two coils in the span of 30 mL of juice, whereas he normally has to replace a coil every five or six days. The culprit? His new coffee juice.

Parts will always be cheaper online, despite having to wait – most electronic cigarettes are fairly blatantly Chinese-made. Chinese-made goods have never been well-known for their quality. Electronic cigarettes seem to be a far cry, with most clones actually being acceptable substitutes for branded products. They may have some faults, such as not being completely sealed or maybe being a little bit more flimsy than the real thing, but overall, 95% of the knock-offs will be acceptable replacements. Clones are always far cheaper. However, if you are not on a budget, just purchase the real thing – companies like Aspire, who are frequently cloned, take care of their customers and will see to it that you are happy for the little bit of an added price tag.

COILS

As with juice, coils can be a limited thing – I recently had to revert back to my old Kanger Protank because I ran out of coils for my Aspire Nautilus and couldn’t get the money to get new ones. Coils, in my opinion, should be purchased online – coils can be purchased from a variety of sources, and they are all almost the same. I have purchased coils directly from China, purchased coils from the brick and mortar across the street, purchased coils from eBay, and purchased coils from numerous online retailers – all of them have worked just fine with my tank and caused me no issues.

Should you choose to get fancy, and this is uncharted territory for me, you can build your own coils with the use of a jig – stuff them with cotton, and you can place them in specific tanks and drippers. These coils are a lot cheaper to make and a lot more plentiful, but require specific types of tanks – one tank I know that accepts homemade coils are Kayfun type tanks. Coil jigs run cheap, and the wire for making coils is also cheap as well. However, understanding and how to perfect the skill of making a coil takes time and a delicate touch.

SAVINGS

If you’re a budget vaper, like me, then juice deals are almost always going to be better online. Just recently, I picked up around 40~ mL of juice, 10 mL of which was free. I got juice from MyFreedomSmokes since they were offering a neat deal on the Super Bowl hype, offering 10 mL of free “Panther Paw” juice (they were also offering “Bronco Blood,” which I think I would have preferred to try but hey; free juice!) for any order over $20. This was great, because I also ordered 5 coils. These 5 coils would have probably cost me twice the price in the brick-and-mortar shop just across the street. When purchasing online, you’re almost always going to get a better deal; for that reason, I highly recommend that a vaper get his or her staple juices from online and her coils from online marketplaces as well.

By staple juices, I mean a juice that you as a vaper really enjoy and can turn to; for example, I’m a big fan of menthol-y juices and dessert-tasting juices, such as Vanilla Cupcake from MyFreedomSmokes. These should be cheap enough that you can get enough juice to last a month for cheaper than what would be a pack of smokes (assume a pack of smokes is $5 to $6). However, some juices can also be nice little delicacies; heading to the brick and mortar across the street from where I live is always a nice little trip, plus they offer some deals (such as $10 30 mLs or $20 mLs on certain days) on top of a membership reward program (buy 9 10 mLs, get the 10th free). Still, I would rather save a bit of money than have to constantly re-up on juce that, despite being high quality, is still getting vaporized and drained from the tank fairly quickly.

Do also keep in mind that tanks that are running coils sub-ohm or running coils at a high temperature (for rigs with temperature control) will burn through juice at a much faster rate than otherwise not doing so. My Aspire Nautilus, for example, I fill up maybe every 2 days or every day if I’m vaping hard; my roommate fills up his eGo Mega One, that is sub ohm, at least daily. My tank is 5 mL, but I hardly ever cap it off; my roommate’s tank is 4 mL. I use far less juice than he does, but I vape just as frequently (this also has to do with air control – my tank is more restricted than his).

With that in mind, try out new juices and enjoy them! Read reviews, and always try to order the smallest size if you can help it – Julybe get a large size of a new juice if it sounds like a must-have to you, and you are either low on juice or getting juice for the very first time. Send in questions to people at online marketplaces, or ask them at the brick-and-mortars; they are there to keep you happy and find juice you like so you’ll come back.