How to Buy New Vape Coils - Beginners Guide
February 22, 2017Though most portable vaporizers are different in the ways in which they go about heating and delivering smoke or vapor, there are several components to vape pens that are shared by every model. One such component is the vape battery: every vaporizer pen must have something that powers it. Another such component is the mouthpiece through which the consumer inhales the vapor or smoke.
Just as vital as the battery and mouthpiece, however, is the vaporizer’s atomizer-- the heating chamber into which the consumer places the wax or dry herbs that they wish to vaporize. Depending on what substance you're using, every atomizer or vape coil is different.
Dry Herb atomizers are usually designed with a pancake style coil or a convection oven heating chamber where you can cook and truly vaporize dry herbs. Wax atomizers can be manufactured with a few different types of components: Wick Coils, ceramic rod coils, ceramic donut coil, and dual quartz coils. E-liquid Tanks are also atomizers used for vaping e-liquids or e-juice. Those atomizers use cotton with the coil. Then there are oil cartridges, which can be wick or ceramic based vape coils. This type of oil is thicker than e-juice. So it's better to use wick or ceramic in the coil. Ceramic is better to use because the oil flavor is a lot better.
While all vaporizers have some iteration of an atomizer, not all atomizers are created equal. When assessing an atomizer, it is important to keep a number of factors in mind: The substance for which it is used, the sort of battery by which it must be accompanied, and how much wax or dry herbs may be placed into it before it is filled.
Multi-Purpose Atomizers
One of the main aspects for many vaporizers is the coil -- the heating element that heats the dry herbs, wax, e-juice or oil that are placed into the atomizer.
While there exist many different kinds of vape coils, there is only one that is widely available and is compatible with both dry herbs and wax. It is what is known as a pancake coil. This small titanium heating element is round and flat and is found in a number of different multi-purpose vaporizers, including the Atmos Rx, the AGO vaporizer vaporizer, and the AGO Junior vape pen.
It is important to note that a single pancake coil should not be used for both dry herbs and wax: Though pancake coils are compatible with both, using one particular vape coil for both substances will clog the atomizer and will severely shorten its lifespan.
Wax Atomizers
While there are some atomizers that are compatible with both wax and dry herbs, there are many others that are only compatible with one substance or the other. There are a number of different wax atomizers available for vaporizers that only handle wax and shatter.
Among the more moderately priced, though among the most portable wax vape pen is the Micro Vape Pen for wax. When people first started using these vapes, wick coils were being used. The problem with wick coils is that it gives off a harsh flavor when vaping wax. Now, people are using either ceramic or dual quartz vape coils, which significantly improved the flavor when vaping shatter or wax.
Ceramic Coils were made to improve the flavor of the wax. Ceramic has high heat retention, making it a better alternative to wick designed coils. The pocket vape pen is the only vaporizer in our store that uses a ceramic rod vape coil.
Finally, the most celebrated vape coil type is the quartz coil. Glass-like in nature, the quartz rod conducts heat most efficiently and thereby ensures that the least amount of wax is wasted per vaping session. It is also known for producing the best-flavored vapor.
Most vape pens are only able to accommodate one atomizer or heating chamber, which, while making a given pen more lightweight and thus more portable, nonetheless limits the amount of vapor that a consumer is able to produce from that particular atomizer and pen. In the beginning, wax pen atomizers only came with one ceramic or quartz rod coil.
Newer generations of portable vape pens, however, have considerably increased the number of coils and atomizers that a vape may accommodate. For example, the popular Yocan Evolve Plus features a wax atomizer that is both large in size and includes dual quartz rod coils.
Things can get even more intense from there. The Yocan Pandon wax pen features two separate wax atomizer heating chambers, each with dual quartz rod coils. That amounts to four quartz coils and two wax atomizers for one wax pen. The atomizers are also larger than those of normally-sized vaporizers, meaning that, when filled with wax, this vape is able to deliver a larger hit than anyone but the more advanced vape user will likely find a vape pen like this to be very comfortable or fun to use.
An often-overlooked aspect of wax atomizers is the material out of which the actual heating chamber is made, not just the heating coil. Glass, for example, is frequently the substance out of which many wax atomizers are made, due to its ability to produce better-flavored vapor or smoke. An example of this is a Glass Globe Wax Atomizer, compatible with 510 thread batteries.
Dry Herbs Atomizers
To makes things simple, there are two types of dry herb atomizers: Atomizers that create combustion and atomizers that help truly vaporize the dry herbs The AGO Vaporizer and Yocan 94F combusts dry herbs. If you want to truly vaporize your dry herbs from these two vape pens, then you need to buy glass screen filters. The purpose of the glass screen filters is to create separation between the dry herbs and the coil. (You can check out our article about how to use glass screens) As long as there's separation, then the heat coming from the coil will vaporize the dry herbs rather than burn them.
Portable Vaporizers that truly vape your dry herbs, utilize what is called convection oven technology-- that is, they produce vapor from dry herbs without having the herbs come into direct contact with the heating element.
There are also dry herb vaporizers with convection ovens that are made of ceramics. These vape pens -- some of which include the E-CLIPSE and Titan 2 Vaporizer - create vapor that is often more flavorful than that produced by stainless steel or other components.
E-liquid Tanks
E-liquid Tanks or atomizers are built very differently than dry herb or wax atomizers because e-juice is a completely different substance than dry herbs and wax. In order to vape e-liquids or oils, you need to have a chamber within the atomizer where the cotton wick or ceramic coils are protected and there are only small holes in the chamber for the liquid or oil to slowly enter into. If the coils weren't protected, you would only be able to vape a very small amount of e-juice at a time.
There are many different sizes for e-liquid tanks or atomizers. For example, there are the Q Tank and the Kamry X6 Atomizer available at Vape Vet Store. The Q-Tank can store 2ml of liquid and the X6 can store 4ml. Another difference with e-liquid tanks is the resistance. The lower the resistance, the more voltage you can use to create thicker clouds of smoke. The higher the resistance, the smoother the vapor will be. The Q-Tank has a higher resistance than the X6 atomizer, meaning you can only heat the Q-Tank at 40 watts and the X6 can be vaped using 60 watts.
If you ever wanted to vape dry herbs, wax or oil from an e-liquid tank, it would NEVER work. So if you're an e-cigarette user, then you need a vaporizer thats specifically for your e-juice. If you're vaping cbd oil or cannabis oil, that type of liquid is much thicker, which means you'll need to use a different atomizer.
Oil Vape Cartridges
What's interesting about oil cartridges is that the current models were the first type of cartridges used for e-liquids. Over time, the technology developed and e-juice users like to create huge clouds of vapor. As a result, they started using bigger and more powerful tanks with more e-liquid capacity. When it comes to oil users, they don't want to create huge clouds of vapor. They want to take small and smooth vape hits. So the only way oil cartridges or atomizers developed is the material used to make the same type of atomizer, which is a small and skinny 510 thread cylindrical atomizer where there is a heating chamber built inside the atomizer. Oil cartridges usually store 0.3ml, 0.5ml, and 1ml. This size is much smaller than the e-liquid tanks we were describing before.All oil cartridges fit in 510 threaded batteries.
All oil cartridges fit in 510 threaded batteries. They can fit in our 510 Thread Vape Battery or our stylus pen vape battery. Our newest oil vaporizer battery, the SteamCloud Mini, comes with a metal ring you screw onto the atomizer and then the atomizer will magnetically connect to the battery.This type of oil vaporizer is one of the smallest and most discrete vaporizers you can use today.
Oil cartridges usually store 0.3ml, 0.5ml, and 1ml. This size is much smaller than e-liquid tanks. The oil is thicker and usually takes a lot longer to run out. When oil cartridges were first produced, the atomizer tube was made of plastic with a plastic mouthpiece, and the heating element inside the chamber was made of cotton wick. Now, more and more atomizer tubes are made of glass, the mouthpiece is made of stainless steel, and the heating element inside the chamber is made of ceramic. Both types of cartridges are fine to use. Some of the more advanced users strive for more flavor and purity. So they spend more money to buy better quality oil cartridges for their vape pen.
To Sum Up: Before purchasing an atomizer for your vaporizer or vape pen, it is important to determine what kind of substance the atomizer is meant to vaporize, as well as the kind of battery with which it may be paired. Check out our vape parts at Vape Vet Store if you want to see the different accessories we carry or you can continue reading related articles in our Vaporizer Learning Center.
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