The Pros and Cons of Squonking Is a Bottom Feeder Mod Right for You

April 04, 2025
Posted by Robert Reid
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The Pros and Cons of Squonking: Is a Bottom Feeder Mod Right for You?

Introducing the squonk mod

Is dripping your preferred way to vape? If it is, you’ve learned to put up with the many shortcomings that RDAs have.

An RDA doesn’t hold enough e-liquid for more than a few puffs. Adding the right amount of e-liquid to an RDA is tricky. If you add too much, the RDA leaks. If you add too little, you get a dry hit. You have to bring a bottle of e-liquid everywhere. Vaping while driving is essentially impossible. For putting up with those inconveniences, your reward is the purest flavour and best vapour production possible with an e-cigarette.

What if we told you, though, that most of those inconveniences aren’t necessary – that it’s actually possible to get the performance of an RDA without dripping, without carrying a bottle of e-liquid everywhere and without leaks? Get ready; we’re about to add an unusual new word to your vocabulary

A squonk mod – also known as a bottom feeder mod – is about the same size as a dual-battery box mod. Rather than two batteries, though, a squonk mod contains a battery and a bottle. The bottle usually stores about 7 ml of e-liquid, but some squonk bottles hold as much as 30 ml.

A hollow 510 connector allows the bottle to feed e-liquid to the bottom of the atomizer through a tube.

When the atomizer is dry, adding more e-liquid is as simple as squeezing the bottle. You can use an RDA with a squonk mod – enjoying all of its benefits for flavour and vapour production – but there’s no need to drip or carry a separate bottle of e-liquid.

What are the benefits of squonking?

Squonk mods also eliminate one of the biggest problems with RDAs: the mess. It’s likely that you’ve had plenty of times in which you added too much e-liquid to your RDA and had to grab a paper towel to clean the resulting mess. An RDA typically has very open airflow characteristics.

The feature that helps an RDA generate so much vapour also makes it terribly prone to leaking. With a Squonk mod, there’s no need to worry about adding too much e-liquid to your atomizer because releasing the bottle creates a gentle vacuum that draws the excess e-liquid out of the atomizer.

Squonk mods are so efficient at removing excess e-liquid that most RDAs designed for bottom feeding don’t even require drip wells.

drawbacks to squonking

What are the drawbacks of squonking?

Squonk boxes essentially combine the best aspects of RDAs and sub-ohm tanks while eliminating almost all of the drawbacks of both types of vaping attachments – but that doesn’t mean they’re perfect.

For many people, the primary drawback of squonk mods is their size. A squonk bottle is about the same size as a battery.

Using a squonk mod, therefore, means that you’ll have a device that’s about the same size as a dual-battery box mod – but you’ll only get half of the battery life. Do you prefer extremely low-resistance coils designed to operate at high wattages?

Using a single battery means that you’ll have a lower potential wattage range than you’d enjoy with a dual-battery mod. You’ll need to build coils that operate at lower wattages. Dual-battery squonk mods do exist, but they are very large and a bit difficult to find.

The second drawback of Squonk mods is that most of them don’t have regulated power. Although a few Regulated squonk boxes do exist, there aren’t many choices. Most squonk mods are mechanical mods. Using one means taking responsibility for your own safety.

A mechanical squonk mod can’t display an error message if you install the battery backwards, connect an atomizer with a short or demand more power than your battery can deliver.

Like all mechanical mods, mechanical squonk mods are for experienced e-cigarette users who understand Ohm’s law and know how exercise proper precautions with battery safety.

E-cigarette battery explosions have happened due to user error with mechanical mods. If you’re a newer e-cigarette user or simply don’t understand battery safety, you’re probably better off buying a regulated squonk box. At the moment, though, you’ll find that there aren’t many choices.

Why do they call it “Squonking?”

Although bottom feeder mods exploded in popularity fairly recently, they have actually been around for a long time. E-cigarette users created the first bottom feeder mods in 2009 because they weren’t happy with the vaping devices available at the time. The e-cigarettes that were available in stores in 2009 were expensive and unreliable.

Bottom feeders resolved those problems by allowing people to enjoy better vapour production and massively increased e-liquid storage. It took squonk mods a while to catch on with mainstream vapers, but nearly every good online or local vape shop today carries a squonk mod.

A member of E-Cigarette-Forum invented the term “squonk” in 2010, and the word quickly caught on among the vaping community. When you squeeze a squonk bottle, you force e-liquid through a small tube.

That process creates a peculiar sound. What does it sound like? One person thought it sounded like “squonk,” and the word caught on. Today, “squonk” is part of nearly every experienced vaper’s vocabulary.