Ok So It May Just Be Me But.

I live on the East Coast USA.

Walking down the street, it's hard to notice that vaping is taking off in any meaningful way, because most people that I see still smoke analogs, that includes both young people and older people too. I'm not going to judge them, because it wasn't that long ago that I was still puffing on an analog, and I had failed to see the awesomeness of vaping.

Besides myself, I don't really see too many people vaping outside on sidewalks. I vape outside in the same way that I'd smoke analogs before, so that means practically all of the time, and especially when I'm walking outside. I'm using a thin e-cig, so I don't usually get too many strange looks. I can imagine what kind of looks somebody walking down the sidewalk must get if they're using one of those big, fancy and shiny looking mods to vape with.

Just 6 months ago, there were no vape shops at all in the immediate local area where I live, and now there are 4 that have opened up, all within a very short walking distance of me (10 minutes or less). I'm pretty sure that a lot of non vapers who live here are walking past those stores every day and wondering, what the hell kind of store is that and why are so many of them opening up in this neighborhood?

One of those four stores will probably fail though, because their sign says tobacco/vape store, while the other 3 are dedicated to vaping only. A store can't be both in my opinion. That's a bit of a contradiction and a stupid combination to put it bluntly.

I've been to a couple of the vape stores so far, and in the short time that I was in those stores there were always new customers there who were smokers who were looking to start vaping.

So while I might not notice how popular vaping is by walking on the sidewalks, I think that it's safe to say that vaping is taking off big time with so many small vape shops opening up, and the amount of people vaping will only increase, because there's still a lot of smelly smokers out there who haven't yet given up on their cancer sticks.

And if this is happening where I live, then I bet that similar things are happening all across the country. Every small town should have at least one dedicated vape shop! I like the quick and easy access to all sorts of liquids and brands.

Just today, I was reading online about some premium liquids, and instead of ordering it online (I didn't want to wait), I had acquired a bottle of that exact liquid five minutes later, after sampling it quickly, and I was already at home and vaping it 10 minutes later.  

Hello fellow vapers.
Here is a topic I was thinking of lately and I wanted to ask your opinion/plans.

Generally speaking, e-cigs were invented in order to help smokers switch from smoking regular cigs to something much less harmful and eventually help people quit this (one of the worst) habit of smoking / adding nicotine to your system.

Ideal plan was to give a smoker something similar (as a process) with enough nicotine to satisfy his needs but without all that sh@t that cigs contain.
After some time this ex-smoker was suppose to start lowering amounts of nicotine in his e-juice up until he is OK with 0 mg. nic vaping.
And eventually quit vaping as well, eliminating the habit.

In reality, I'd say about 80% of ex-smokers who became vapers don't even plan to quit vaping, they have their preferred nic. level and they keep on vaping it year after year being happy about it.

So what's your opinion on that? Do you also plan to keep on vaping or you might quit it in the future?  

Hey guys and gals,

So I've been vaping for a couple of months after being on the stinkies for about 10 years, but my father has been in it for many years. This has lead to me skipping a great deal of rookie mistakes and learning how things work quite fast. This resulted in having a decent build in a community that has either no or bad opinions on vaping. I'm from a smaller town in Croatia, and if anyone mentions vaping it's what they've heard from the news on how bad it is (mostly the ever present study of old clearomisers fired at 5V).
After a month or two i was so enthusiastic about it i wanted to share it with my smoking friends. Trying to explain the possibilities, the fine tuning, ranging from wicking, atomizer types and coils to DIY juices. Some were interested, others were not.
Lately though, perfect example tonight, unexpected things started happening. I was out in my local pub, tootle puffing on my vamo5 and veritas and somebody i barely know came up to me asking what that was. I gave him a puff at 8W with my DIY 10mg VG chocolate peanut butter and he was thrilled. Friday night and he was like "just tell me what to order and i'm taking it right now".
I feel as if there's about to be an avalanche of vapers in my town and i'm loving it. This is the fifth or sixth person that has fully committed to dropping the analogs and switching to vaping in a very short time period, I'm gonna have to hold a class soon for all the basics

Have you guys from smaller towns had similar experiences? Because i feel that all the bad media regarding vaping is having little to no effect once a smoker takes a puff. Of course the problem is "making" the sceptical ones actually take the first puff due to the propaganda, but in my experience, once they do it's almost always a done deal!
God i hope i'll have someone recommending me flavors and atties in a couple months  

It was my birthday the other night, so I decided to give myself a treat by bumming a cigarette from a friend while we were out having drinks. Holy heck, it was awful. I wanted to puke! I can't believe I used to smoke those things. Haha! I guess that means I'm definitely a vaper and not a smoker now. Yay! Have any of you temporarily returned to smoking and hated it?  

Seen it mentioned over and over here that after vaping for a variable period
of time analogs start tasting 'nasty' to many (most?) people. Happened with
my father in law after about two months. Has not yet happened with a coworker
who vapes and still smokes. Think he has vaped over a year total and at
least four months with a proper rig.

So, exactly how can vaping while quitting change the taste of cigarettes when
cold turkey or the patch do not? At least they did not in the past, wife and
I quit and started back at least four times each before we finally
succeeded. Final time was almost six years ago so we were well before the
fire retardant / carpet glue was added.

Anyone quit and restart via vaping both before and after fire retardant was
added? Was the nasty taste absent back then or less pronounced?

Curious to hear from from anyone who has quit and restarted with different
methods and how the taste differs. Have read that Chantix and similar also
can cause a nasty taste. Is it the same as from vaping or different?

Never seen or found a thread devoted to this so though I would start one.  

I started vaping after seeing a hardcore heavy shag smoker 50+ years old (a colleague of mine) successfully made the switch to vaping. After witnessing it for a couple of months and asking him questions about it, i figured to give it a shot.

A while back ago i met with a old friend of mine and was happily surprised that she also started vaping.

So for me, i know 2 people who vape. I have seen 2 other people on the street vaping, but i suspect they were tourists.
This is in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.

At the moment i'm the only one in my friends group who doesn't walk with a lighter in my pocket. Now it's a battery. To me it feels like i'm at a beginning of something, nobody is doing it and actually claiming that i'm mad..

What about you guys/girls? How normalized is it over there?  

Hey guys, I'm sure this topic pops up quite often round these parts but since everyone's a little different I thought I'd make my own thread

I, myself, have been vaping for 2 years now and I absolutely love it. I'm 26 and I smoked for about 7 years at around 15 cigarettes a day, and then spent about a year and a half transitioning exclusively to vaping. I'm now happy to say I've been smoke free for nearly 6 months thanks to my vape

My aunt has been a smoker for much much longer than I was, around 25 years I believe, and she goes through more than a pack a day (possibly 2). I'm going to visit her in a couple days and I plan on bringing all my old vape hardware for her to check out, and we're gonna hit a b&m as well. Since this forum has done a great deal to help me in so many aspects of vaping, I was hoping you could help me to help her by answering some questions, giving some of your opinions, etc. In framing your answers, it might be important to know that as of now she's pretty lukewarm to the idea. She doesn't reject and is willing to try it, but she's skeptical it'll work for her.

First: from someone who's done this with a serious heavy smoker before preferably, what's the best way to go about this in your opinion? What worked for you? The last thing I would wanna do is overwhelm or do something that turned her off to the possibility of vaping.

Second: what is the comparison of cigarettes to ejuice. Everyone who doesn't know much about vaping seems to want to know: how much ejuice equals one cigarette/one pack/etc. At this point I don't care much, and I never really did, I found something that works for me and that's what matters. But I'm sure she'll want to know. So lets say, for this questions purposes, around how many cigarettes would a 15ml, 6mg bottle of juice equate to?

Third: do you think it's worth investing in a set up more advanced than a basic ego twist/cartomizer initially with the thought that something higher quality might have a better chance to work long term for her? I'm thinking something like an istick/atlantis set up might be a good way to go since they're so popular and replacement atomizers will be easy to pick up online or in a store.

Fourth: I live in southern California, but my aunt is in Leander, Texas, which is around an hour drive from Austin. Can anyone suggest a quality b&m that we can go check out? I've been to enough b&ms myself to know if it's a quality shop or not, and I'd feel much better about her chance to succeed with vaping if I found a nice shop with great customer service to leave her with. we'll likely go into Austin while I'm there and it'd be fun to check out some shops there so feel free to suggest Austin shops (in sure there's a lot) but that would be a mission for her on a regular basis. Something in Leander that she can frequent would be best.

I know this is horribly long so thank you to anyone who reads it all and replies to help me out with any part of this. I love my aunt very much and I know her want to quit is there. She just needs to find something that'll work and I really hope it can be vaping. Thank you again.  

I know this is useless for most of you and if the mods want to delete it please do but I am so frustrated with the media and the politicians and I have no outlet for this, so here we are.

I actually have never smoked or vaped (aside from a trial puff here and there), but my wife and mother both have smoked and do vape. I'm on here because I'm the research and order guy.

They switched from smoking to vaping in 2007 almost at the same time, so it's been 12 years for them.

My mom was a smoker for 50ish years, and as a waitress, she was at about 2 packs a day. She's always had fairly good health because she worked on it, but as she got older you could hear the "smoker's cough" develop and just see the symptoms of aging and the early signs of lung issues. One of her sisters has COPD and another died of lung cancer. She swapped to e-cigs and never had a relapse to cigarettes. Within a year the cough was gone. She is 75 and most people think she is in her 50s. She is active and in great health with only mild diabetes (controlled with diet and I think the minimum dose of a pill, no insulin). She has had chest x-rays and a few other exams and they doubt her when she tells them she is an ex-smoker.

My wife has a similar story. Lighter smoker for a shorter time, but same results. Better health, lungs fully healed from smoking. No side effects from vaping.

Oh and my wife's father was a huge smoker and used e-cigs to completely quit smoking/vaping altogether when the pills/patches/gum wouldn't work at all.

Now, they both utilize products from vapor4life.com that resemble cigarettes and use the "light or ultralight" (I wanna say 1.8% or 1.1%... something like that) equivalent nicotine level. They don't have the giant boxes the "kids" use that produce a room full of vape smoke to be edgy and cool. They vape pretty much the same times they'd take a smoke break though I think less often really... I think they take fewer puffs maybe a little more often? I dunno, it's hard to remember since they haven't smoked in 12 years. My wife will hold hers casually hidden in her hand and get a couple puffs during movies and slowly let the vapor escape and NOBODY knows. Not even me sitting next to her.

Their health is so much better. My mom uses a plain nicotine flavor that tastes like her Winston lights did and my wife has a Menthol that tastes close to her Salem Slim Light 100s. Neither were fond of the fun flavors. I got some 0 nicotine grape the first year and puffed on it once in a while and it was neat (not really inhaling, more like a cigar or a pipe) and that was that.

I am so pissed off at the Trumps and the media for their generalized reporting and the banning of products. I'm pissed at the people/kids who use vaping like its a toy and fun hipster trend and got it banned from airplanes and restaurants. I look at my mom who most likely would have died of lung cancer or be on oxygen by now if not for vaping and I just want to punch these people in the face. How can single digit deaths, which I understand was using sketchy products anyway, trigger fear and a ban when the cigarette companies kill MILLIONS and cause cancer (to smokers and people who are adjacent to smokers via 2nd hand smoke) just have to put a warning label on their product?

Anyway, I'm rambling. I don't know where this goes. Maybe it'll spark discussion. Maybe it'll be deleted and I'll be told I'm an idiot. Maybe someone who isn't sure if vaping will help them quit smoking will see three success stories and take a step in the right direction. I dunno...

Fight the good fight people.  

This past week marks 5 years since I smoked a cigarette. It honestly doesn't seem that long, it seems like yesterday I was huddled out in the cold at work with the smokers. I had been a smoker for 28 years.

Unlike many I see posting here, I cannot say vaping helped me quit. I quit cold turkey, and never tried an ecig until about a year after I quit smoking. At that point I was still doing well as a non-smoker, I didn't physically crave smoking, but I missed the 28 year habit of lighting up, having something to fiddle with, and just the relaxing feeling of the inhale/exhale. I had been eating a lot more to make up for the void, and having been underweight all my life I started packing on pounds (too many!). I sorely needed a non-food substitute for the comfort I was missing, but wasn't about to go back to smoking.

I tried a junky convenience store ecig after that first year, and thought "if this was what they were like than forget it". I continued on not smoking, but still missing the habit. About two years after that I began seeing the new advanced products coming out, and did a lot of research. I bought my first starter kit in 2013, and slowly advanced up to bigger and better gear.

People ask why would start vaping after I had already kicked the cigarette habit, and I say, "Why not?". Other than nicotine I'm not getting any of the negative things I got with cigarettes. And in my opinion, there's really nothing wrong with a little nicotine. Nicotine is not what was killing me, it was the smoke that was delivering the nicotine that was killing me.

So I'm 5 years smoke free, I no longer hack in the mornings, my chest never hurts and my clothes, car and hair don't stink anymore.
I have no intentions on giving up vaping, as it has no negative impact on my life, and i enjoy it, so why stop?

I have since gotten my son, my step-son, and his wife to all trade vaping for smoking, so bonus points for saving all their lives too!  

Folks, I apologize for the newbie questions but trust me, I've spent a lot of time reading and still have some confusion - partly because I find contradictory information everywhere. I hate when people come on forums asking questions before doing their research but I've tried.

While I've been vaping for over a year, it's been with a Juul. (3rd party pods) My flavored pod horde is about to be exhausted so here I am.

What I'm looking for is something comparable to what my Juul with 3% pods gave me - smoothness (I do NOT want a harsh throat feel like many seem to be after), availability of nice flavors, no need for a lot of nicotine, no need for 'clouds'. I was using the 3% not really because of the lower nicotine but because it wasn't as harsh as the 5-6% pods.

I guess my question is what type juice and coil resistance should I be looking for? I purchased a Smok NFix and like the device but I seem to be getting a tad bit of juice in my mouth regardless of what wattage I set it to. (I've tried multiple .8 Ohm coils and 3mg juice labeled for "subohm" use) I also seem to be getting a lot more nicotine than I'm used to.

I've also tried a Novo 2 and occasionally get that juice in my mouth but not nearly as often. I also seem to be getting a lot more nicotine than I'm used to.

Obviously I'm doing something wrong.

Another thing I'm confused about is the wide range of nicotine strengths - 3% on up to 55+%? I must be missing something because the 3% seems to be killing me, again I must be doing something wrong.

Suggestions for what I should be looking at to find something comparable to the 3% Juul?

Thanks