So For The First Time I Boiled Cotton

As the title says never thought that boiling really would make that much of a difference but the first wick I've made with it is like a dream with so much better taste and its been wicking so much better, has anyone else had this same experiencing after boiling for the first time or did I just get lucky at making a perfect wick on the first piece i used from the batch.  


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Walmart Cotton Balls!!!! Are They Safe?

So I needed some cotton for my new rda and I was at walmart so I picked up some swissper 100% cotton balls. It didn't say that they were organic I looked but couldn't find those. Anyway, it tastes fine, but I can't seem to find any info about whether it has been treated with chlorine or peroxide. The reason I ask is because I am not boiling. I have a dog that sheds like crazy and I live in florida so between the moisture and dog hair boiling doesn't seem to be too sanitary for me. I just want to make sure I am not harming me or my husband by doing this.  

I Got Fooled

Sooo last weeks I was able to wick my atty in a way that for me it's perfect...no dry hits no leaks or flooding or anything and I enjoy Soo much...
After vaping some strawberry cookies and chocolate....(very dark juice coil abuser) it was rewicking time...
Put fresh cotton and start vaping and dammm bad taste....dry hit
Tried make it work...nothing...
Ok let's rewick...again same dry hit
Not anything crazy but just that light dry hit bad taste....
After rewicking 3times and using almost no cotton hahaha I was like ...... Cant dry hit now

TURNS OUT IS WAS A JUICE I BOUGHT ALREADY MADE...WAS CUSTARD CARAMEL AND SOME CEREAL STUFF TOGETHER OR SOMETHING

THIS THING TASTES LIKE DRY HITS!!!
WHAAAAAAAAAAAAAA not exactly same taste but was very similar EWWWWWWW

I AM SUCH A NOOOOOOOOOB

anyways that's all....I make my own juice just forget my bottle and I was at work so I bought a juice from a store nearby  

Could The Way You Wick Change Flavor?

I just re wicked my coils and now the flavor seems muted. I used more cotton this time but not sure if it's that or the cotton itself. I usually dry burn and re wick about 2 to 3 times before replacing the coils and this would be the first time I've re wicked these coils. I use Japanese cotton I ordered from fasttech. Has anyone had issues with their cotton? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks.  

How Vapor Is Born

I have seen very different explanations of vapor production on ECF, sometimes quite weird. So, I decided to clarify a bit the process.

Disclaimer: I am not involved in any e-cig research, but I have some background in physics.

Aerosol – a cloud of tiny particles (for us – liquid droplets) in air. Each droplet is too small to be visible individually, but it reflects a tiny amount of light in odd directions and all droplets together look like a cloud or fog (clouds and fog are water aerosol).

Solubility. Solubility could be full (infinite), like PG in VG or alcohol in water, or limited, like salt in water. If solubility is limited, then saturation point exists – excess of salt will not dissolve in water, will stay on the bottom of the cap. If we leave a cap with solution, water will evaporate with time and more and more salt will settle on the bottom (like in Great Salt Lake). The same true for air. For example, water is soluble in air, but its solubility greatly depends on temperature. If after a hot humid day we have a cold night, amount of water which was good for air at high daytime temperature will become excessive for low night temperatures and excess of water dissolved in air should “settle” somehow; the result we usually see is dew or fog.

Human lungs are famous for their wetness and they provide exhaled air with a lot of water in gaseous state at the temperature of a human body. But when a human body is outside at low temperatures exhaled gases (warm air + gaseous water) are chilled and will contain excess of water, which will “settle” as tiny droplets, i.e. aerosol, and we will see clouds of exhaled breath. Nice evaporator, always with us (just add a cold room)…

Boiling. Easy explanation for single liquid system (like water). Heated to boiling point temperature water will boil and produce water vapor. A bit more complicated is boiling of two component liquid, like PG-VG mixture. Liquid will boil as a single system (no separate boiling of its components) at a temperature between boiling points of its components and it will produce vapor of both PG and VG.

Now to vaping. Coil heat liquid supplied by a wick and transfer it into gaseous state (by boiling). But this vaporized liquid can stay in gaseous state only in small area of hot air surrounding a coil. Air draw is chilling this gaseous mixture and PG and VG form tiny aerosol droplets, our beloved clouds.

What’s wrong in my simplified explanations. When multicomponent liquid boils it produces more vapor of its components with lower boiling point, sometimes much more. For example, if we vape 30/70 solution of PG/VG, then PG (boiling point 371 F) will evaporate much faster than VG (477). If things were going as I described above, pretty soon we will be vaping almost pure VG (PG will be gone). It could be even worse. Suppose we have a third component – raspberry ketone (raspberry flavor) with boiling point of just 284 F. It should be gone in no time and most of the tank will be left flavorless.

Fortunately things are a bit more complicated then were described (a bit more complicated than my ability to comprehend them fully). In reality we have a mild overheating and a mild undersupply of liquid by a wick, plus mostly unidirectional liquid movement along a wick. In these conditions boiling produce vapor which is much closer in it composition to composition of a juice.  

Tips On Wicking / Re-wicking

It's about that time that I have started to re-wick the OCC coils in the subtank. Looking for some performance tips. I'm currently using Muji japanese cotton which is working well and this is what I have noticed...

too little cotton, the atom will leak and burn easily
too much cotton; no issues burning at all but the flavor is muted.

I've re-wicked 5-6 times this week to experiment. With the Muji sheets, I cut about 5-6mm strip, remove 1/2 the thickness, then after threading through the coil, I will cut about 4mm from the end and stuff it back in the OCC head.

What are your tips and preferred materials?  

Rewicking Kanger Coils

So a juice im using is gunking up coils quick. I hate dry burning (it leaves a bad taste no matter how careful I am) and I've read you can re wick it with 1mm wick.

I heard ekowool is good, will that work? if so, what kind do I get hollow,cotton core or silica core?
And would I have to boil/clean the wick before I use it?

thx  

Cotton Wicks Making Me Sick?

I have been using an evod for two years now. Yeah, I know, minor leagues, but it gets the job done just fine for me.

For the first 18 months I was constantly buying new coils. I work from home so I can basically vape all I want and I vape A LOT. I use Swagger as my ADV and it will destroy a coil in just a couple days. It was becoming difficult to even find coils to buy and it was getting expensive, so I did some research on rebuilding my own coils. At first I tried to build them with silica wick, but I could never get them to work right. Using 1mm silica wick wrapping around a stick pin the wraps would always be too big and there was lots of leak/gurgling. So I went the cotton route and would wrap around a 1/32 drill bit and then slide the cotton through the coil. Works great, perfect ohms, great flavor. I've been doing this for the past six months. In the first 18 months of vaping I never got sick once. Since I've been using the cotton wicks I've been SEVERELY sick twice (probably a respiratory infection but never went to the Doc), and now I feel like I'm getting sick AGAIN.

I've noticed that I can see little flecks of what looks like cotton building up on the mouthpiece, and I'm assuming, going into my lungs. I think this is what is making me sick--the buildup over time. Anyone else had issues with this? I think I may have reached the end of my rope with vaping and now maybe I'll do what my original intention was (quitting altogether after vaping for a short period of time).

Anyone have any tips on rebuilding coils with silica? I've watched a million Youtube videos and replicate the process perfectly, but the wraps end up being twice the size they should be and I've been unable to slide silica wicks into the coil like I do with cotton because even at 1mm it's too big to fit through the hole. Thanks for any help.  

Kangerteck Modified

Two issues I wanted to fix. The first is the battery run time using the low ohm coils. Second is when the e-liquid gets to the top of the sub ohm coil housing in the Kangertech I've noticed a lot of dry hits when heavy vaping, ( I like a higher VG juice. ) I would find myself closing the air intakes and sucking hard to get the wick saturated, ( a real pain in the ***. )
NOTE: I like an airy hit and run the air intake ports full open.
So here's what I did.
I've drilled the wick holes out to 3.5mm in the Kangertech coil housing. Then built a 1.1 ohm coil with 4 strands of 32ga. kanthal, ( twisted together first ), 5 wraps around a 3.47mm screwdriver. The coil was very springy to work with but got a bit stiffer after torching t closed to 1/4" width using adjustable tweezers. I used regular ball cotton for the wick in this experiment. The coil came in at 1.1 ohm.
Primed the wick and filled tank with a little bit of juice, just below the top of the coil housing.
All I can say is WOW. The first 10 hits taste a bit crappy but after the break in, WOW.
Taste and vapor production are great. There's a bit of crackle but no pops. Crackle I don't mind, Pops I mind. The ClouporT8 counted 75 hits and now the e-juice level is just above the wicking ports by a hair and still working great with full open air intake ports.
I will add post after I've used this set up for awhile.
Curious what other think!
VapeOn  

"airlock". The True Cause Of Wicking Issues And Dry Hits.

So i'm not familiar with every single atomizer on the market. They're all different in their design. One potential problem i do believe to be universal in all these devices though is an "Airlock".

Regardless of how much cotton wool has been crammed into the wells of an RTA, or whether you primed your drop in coil enough, an airlock will prevent the e liquid from getting to the wick everytime. Time and time again you either re-wick or swap out the drop in coil. Then you think "there is definitely something wrong with the atomizer".

How many times have you built a new coil, or simply re-fiiled on an existing wick, and then found all you get is dry hits and you can't figure out why ?. Maybe you eventually decide "this atomizer is no good".

The simple solution is to add more e liquid than you think you should when "priming" the coil/wick. It's not a process which takes just a minute or two. The whole idea is to let the e liquid soak right through the cotton wool, through the channels until it starts to seep out the other end of those channels, where ever that might be !. To go from a tank to a coil/wick the e liquid has to travel through the channels.

If cotton wool soaked in e liquid is at one end of the channels then that is what is causing the "airlock".

Simply put "it's "trapping" the air in the channels and causing an airlock".

You get rid of all the air in the channels by "bleeding" the system. This should be the most important part of "priming". Allowing the e liquid you've added as a primer to expel all the air from the system. Without doing this you are running the risk of successive dry hits and confusion.

So you add e liquid as a primer, let it soak into the cotton wool then add a few drops more. Then, wait a few minutes to see how far the e liquid has got. Wait for it to come out the other end because that what you should be looking for. Once you see it coming out the other end of the channels you know the system has been fully bled. And then you can reassemble your device and fill the tank.

 

Silica Wick?

Hi,
I'm posting because I just encountered some silica wick on ebay while looking for pre-built coils and different kinds of pre-built wire.
I've only used cotton so far- gonna get some rayon eventually but I think I'll order some from USA, people here in UK buy the rayon in bulk from US and resell it by meter for ridiculous price. And whatever material Smok supplies with their RBA heads for TFV12 tank (I must say this material was pretty good, used it both in smok tfv12 rta and berserker mini rta, wicked well, tasted fine and lasted slightly longer than my normal muji cotton. It's gone now so I can't post a picture.).

Anyway- I tried to research here about silica wick but the latest posts were from 2013. Same on youtube- bunch of old videos. Found a thread with a few posts on reddit from like 3 years ago with some folks saying they still use silica wick, claiming the taste is cleaner, you can't physically burn it, you can dry burn it, lasts longer etc.
Why is it not popular anymore, why has it disappeared? Is it worth giving a shot? What are the disadvantages, as clearly there were some advantages I found, but there must have been a reason for folks to abandon this material (other than the one mention below)?

Wicking the coil itself is not a big concern for me, I've read about trouble to get it through a coil and I think I know how to deal with it.

Thanks