How to keep your Vape coils in top shape
What are the parts of a Vape Coil?
Aside from e-liquid, there is probably nothing more influential to the type of experience you’ll have when vaping than vape coils. The coil determines the volume of vapour that your device produces. It also determines the character of the vapour. Some coils create large e-liquid droplets, giving the vapour a wet quality. Others create smaller droplets.
The material and design of a coil’s wick can also affect the flavour that you taste when vaping. All told, a vaping coil is a very important item. Vape coils can also be quite expensive. Even if you build your own coils, your time has value – and you don’t want to spend your time making a new coil every day. Keeping your coils in top shape, then, will make vaping far more pleasurable – and that’s what we’re going to discuss today.
In terms of maintaining its durability and performance, the two most important parts of a vape coil are the wick and the heating wire.
The heating wire is the component that heats your e-liquid and turns it into vapour that you can inhale. The wick draws e-liquid to the heating wire from the reservoir of your tank or the drip well of your RDA.
If either of those components doesn’t work as it should, you won’t enjoy your vaping experience. Ensuring that your coils deliver the best possible performance for as long as possible comes down to three factors.
- Avoid excess heat.
- Keep your wick wet.
- Choose your e-liquids with care.
- Find Out Why Your Vape Coils Are Burning Out
If your vape coils aren’t lasting as long as they should, it’s not hard to determine the cause.
When you’re about to replace a coil, look at it closely. Is the heating wire silver/grey, or is it black and coated with a substance that looks like burned sugar syrup?
If the wire is black and syrupy, your vape coils are burning out because of the e-liquid you’re using.
If the wire is grey, your vape coils are burning out because of dryness or excess heat.
You can confirm that by looking at the wick. If you use an RDA, you can simply pull the wick out and examine it.
If you use a tank with pre-built coils, you can usually examine a coil’s wick by pulling the cap out of the bottom of the coil and pushing the wick and heating wire out through the top.
You’ll most likely find that the wick has a burned spot under the heating wire. Even the slightest darkening of the cotton will affect the flavour of a coil – and once a wick is burned, there’s no way to fix the coil except by replacing the cotton.
Avoid excess heat and keep your wick wet.
The wick in a vaping coil must always remain wet with e-liquid. If it isn’t wet, it’ll burn. That can happen because you’re vaping at an overly high temperature or because e-liquid isn’t flowing properly through the wick.
Since those problems tend to intersect, we’ll discuss them simultaneously.
If you’re consistently burning your coils’ wicks, the first thing that you should look at is the design of the coil itself. Does the coil have very large holes on the side, or are the holes more like tiny pinpricks?
The smaller the wick holes are, the thinner your e-liquid should be – and you can determine the thickness of an e-liquid by looking at its ratio of vegetable glycerin and propylene glycol.
The more VG an e-liquid contains, the thicker it is. If you use a vaping coil with small wick holes, you should select an e-liquid with more PG than VG to ensure a consistent flow from the tank to the coil.
Even if you use an e-liquid with the ideal VG/PG blend for your coil, you can still burn the coil out due to excessive heat.
Have you ever noticed that every vaping coil has a suggested wattage range etched into the side? Manufacturers determine those suggested wattage ranges using machines that puff on vaping tanks for only two seconds at a time.
If you tend to puff more deeply than that, you’ll need to set your device to the low end of your coil’s wattage range. Otherwise, the wick will dry out while you vape.
The last thing to remember about protecting your vaping wicks is that you should never continue using your tank until the reservoir is completely empty.
E-liquid flows to the wick through the holes in the side of the coil, and that can’t happen if the holes aren’t submerged. You should always fill your tank before the level of e-liquid gets too low. If you don’t, it’s highly likely that you’ll end up burning your wick.
Choose your E-Liquids with care.
As long as vaping has existed, sweet e-liquids with flavour profiles resembling candies, fruits and desserts have been the most popular vape juices among mainstream vapers.
Everyone loves sweet flavours – and once a new vaper realizes that he or she can get nicotine without inhaling something that tastes like a cigarette, that person may never buy another tobacco or menthol e-liquid again.
When it became obvious that sweet e-liquids were going to rule the vaping industry, vape juice makers looked for ways to make their products even sweeter. They settled on sucralose – the same sweetener used in many diet sodas – as the ideal solution. You can tell that an e-liquid contains sucralose because it tastes almost as sweet as candy.
Sucralose also tends to leave a lingering sweetness that continues to coat the mouth even after you’ve exhaled the vapour.
Many mainstream e-liquids are sweetened with sucralose because that’s what many vapers prefer. The drawback of sucralose, though, is that it doesn’t vaporize fully like the other ingredients in e-liquid.
A portion of the sucralose sticks to the coil. Eventually, the layer of stuck-on sucralose becomes so thick that it begins to burn.
At that point, you’ll see a layer of black residue covering the heating wire of your coil. When a vaping coil has a thin layer of stuck-on sucralose, you’ll taste burned sugar when you vape.
When the layer becomes thick, though, the vapour becomes incredibly harsh and irritating. In some cases, you can prolong the life of a coil by cleaning away the layer of sucralose. Your coils will last much longer, however, if you use unsweetened e-liquids.
updated 28/07/2021
