If you create an account, each time you make a purchase at vapekit.co.uk, you’ll automatically earn reward points. You’ll earn 2 reward points (worth £0.02) for every £1 you spend. The points will be automatically added to your account and the balance will build up over time.
Your points will never expire and will be available to use whenever you would like to redeem them against the value of a purchase. To redeem them please follow the steps below
Please log in to the Vapekit.co.uk account and click on the 'Account' icon in the top menu (it looks like a person's head and shoulders). You'll then be taken to the page shown below.
Click on the text link that says 'Reward Points (click here to convert)'.
You'll then be taken to the page shown below. Next click the button that says 'Convert points to e-wallet'. The points will then be available to redeem at the checkout (see next image).
The next time you make a purchase you'll see that the e-wallet balance has been automatically deducted from the amount you need to pay. If your e-wallet balance covers the cost of your purchase then you'll just be able to complete the transaction with the click of a button. If not, you'll just need to pay the remaining balance before you check out (as shown in the image below).
You'll also have the option not to use your e-wallet and to let the balance build up. Just click the 'Do not use e-wallet' button as shown below and your balance will roll over till the next time you visit.
You can check how many points you have accumulated by logging into your vapekit.co.uk account and clicking the 'Account' icon in the top menu (it looks like a person's head and shoulders).
On a mobile, you'll see your balance as shown in the picture below. If you're using a laptop or tablet you'll see your balance in the left hand menu.
Your reward points have no cash value and can only be redeemed against purchases made at vapekit.co.uk.
If you complete your order before 4pm Monday to Friday, we will despatch it the same day. Orders placed after 4pm will be despatched the next day. Please note that it is not possible to despatch packages at the weekend or on public holidays, including bank holidays, Christmas Day, Boxing Day and the Easter weekend. Orders completed at these times will be despatched the next working day.
From time to time, our usual swift service may be impacted by circumstances beyond our control such as extreme weather and unexpectedly high volumes of orders.
You will benefit from free UK delivery when you spend just £10 at Vapekit.co.uk on eliquids, vaping hardware or any products on our site. We will despatch your order using the most appropriate service. This would usually be Royal Mail First Class. Royal Mail aim to deliver First Class items within 48 hours but some parcels may take longer.
We are also able to offer you the following services which you can select at checkout:
This service ensures delivery before 1pm on the next working day and occasionally on Saturdays. Orders must be placed before 4pm Monday to Thursday for next day delivery. Orders placed on Friday prior to 4pm will usually be delivered the following Monday. Orders placed after 4pm on Fridays or at the weekend will be delivered the following Tuesday.
Orders must be placed before 4pm on Friday for delivery on Saturday by 1pm.
The majority of orders sent via DPD will be delivered the next day but next day delivery is not guaranteed. DPD may take longer to achieve deliveries in remote areas including the Scottish Highlands, the Channel Islands, Northern Ireland and offshore islands. Orders must be placed with vapekit.co.uk before 4pm Monday to Friday to be eligible for next day delivery. DPD couriers deliver Monday to Saturday but not on public holidays.
You can view the details of your order by logging into your vapekit.co.uk account. Once your order has been despatched, those details will include a tracking number. You will also receive a despatch confirmation email which includes the tracking number and a link to the carrier’s site.
You can only track your parcel once it has been delivered or an attempt to deliver it has been made.
Your orders can be fully tracked at each location point via Royal Mail’s website. A signature will be required when your parcel is delivered.
Orders despatched via DPD are trackable via the DPD website.
Orders over £10 are delivered to you free of charge, usually via Royal Mail First Class. The delivery charge is £1.49 for orders under £10.
You may choose an enhanced delivery service. The charges are as follows:
At this time, we are only able to ship to UK addresses.
Do you ever look at the amount of money you spend on vaping and decide that it seems like quite a lot? Do you actually find yourself spending more than ever to vape even though the price of e-liquid has done nothing but go down over the years? If you’re spending too much to vape, it’s almost certain that you can blame your coils. While vape liquid has steadily decreased in price over the years, coils have only become larger and more complex – and significantly more expensive. To make matters worse, you probably find that your coils don’t seem to last nearly as long as they once did. What’s the problem? In this article, we’ll discuss why vape coils never seem to last as long as they used to. More importantly, we’ll explain what you can do to make your coils last longer. Let’s begin!
The speed at which vape coils burn out is largely a function of three factors.
With those three factors in mind, let’s examine the things that you can do to make your vape coils last longer.
By far, the presence of sucralose is the biggest factor that causes vape coils to burn out quickly. That’s because sucralose doesn’t convert completely to an aerosol when it’s heated; a portion of it sticks to your atomizer coil. To create a mental image of what’s happening there, imagine dissolving sugar in water and boiling the mixture. The vapour would smell sweet because the vapour would carry some of the sugar. After all of the water boiled away, though, most of the sugar would still be in the pan. The sugar would then start to caramelise and burn. Essentially, the same thing happens when you use an e-liquid that contains sucralose. The vapour tastes sweet because it carries some of the sucralose, but the rest of the sweetener remains stuck to the atomizer coil. The residue eventually starts to burn, creating a horrible burned flavour. If you use unsweetened e-liquid, you’ll find that your coils last dramatically longer. Here at Vapekit, we’ve made it a special point to carry a large selection of unsweetened e-liquid due to customer demand.
It’s incredibly important that you prime a coil before using it because priming the coil dampens its wick and helps it absorb the e-liquid in your tank more quickly. If you don’t prime a coil, it could still have a dry pocket even after you’ve filled your tank and waited several minutes – and if a coil has a dry pocket, its wick could burn. A burned wick ruins a coil forever. To prime a coil, simply use the tip of a bottle to rub a little e-juice into all of the openings on the coil where you can see white cotton. When all of the cotton looks damp, install the coil and fill the tank. After a few minutes, the wick should be completely soaked, and the coil should be ready to use.
Have you ever noticed that, when your vape tank starts to get a bit low, the e-liquid no longer completely covers the coil’s wick openings? That’s the reason why some vape tanks have minimum fill lines. If the e-liquid doesn’t cover the wick openings, the wick won’t work efficiently – and that’s what leads to burned cotton. Preventing that from happening is very simple. When your tank is half empty, it’s time to top it up.
Having a device with variable wattage adds a great deal of flexibility to your vaping setup. It allows your device to deliver a great experience with any vape tank. Small adjustments in your vaping wattage can also help to bring out the distinct flavour notes in your favourite e-liquids. Having a variable-wattage vaping device, however, also makes it possible for you to use a wattage setting that’s too high for your coil. A vape coil will always have a wattage range etched into its side. The coil should work reliably within that range, but it’s important to keep in mind that the wattage range is only a suggestion. You should base your vaping wattage on the length of your puffs. If you vape in quick bursts, it’s okay to push your wattage up a bit. If you prefer longer, deeper puffs, you should set your device to the low end of your coil’s suggested wattage range.
One important thing to remember about coil life is that two of the primary factors that cause a coil to burn out quickly – the amount of e-liquid you use and the heat of the coil itself – are largely mitigated if you use a smaller vaping device such as a pod system. Companies have added sweeteners to their e-liquids almost as long as vaping has existed. Short coil life has only recently come to light as a major issue because of the amount of e-liquid people use today. If you enjoy using sweetened e-liquid and don’t want to switch to a different flavour, you might want to consider using a lower-wattage vaping device such as a pod system. You’ll need to increase the nicotine strength of your e-liquid to maintain the same level of satisfaction that you currently enjoy, but the fact that you’ll use significantly less vape juice will mean that your coils will last much longer than they currently do.
One of the greatest things about vaping – or perhaps one of the most annoying things, depending on your point of view – is the fact that even the tiniest change in equipment can have a profound effect on the performance, flavour and vapour production of your device. Nowhere is that more evident than in the humble wick that carries the e-liquid from your tank’s reservoir to its atomizer coil.
You’re probably already aware that every vaping coil has a wick. The wick is the white, fluffy material that you can see through the openings on the side and top of a vape coil. What you may not know, though, is that a vaping wick can be made from several different materials – and each of those materials imparts its own characteristics to your vaping experience. What are vaping wicks made of? This article is our exploration of the different wick materials for vaping and how those materials can affect your vaping experience.
Cotton is the most popular material for vaping wicks by a wide margin. If you use a sub-ohm tank with a replaceable coil, the coil’s wick is almost definitely cotton – and if you build your own coils, there’s a good chance that you use cotton for that as well. Cotton vape wicks aren’t perfect, but they present the best possible balance of flavour quality and wicking performance for most applications. Cotton wicks transport e-liquid efficiently enough for high-temperature vaping, and people generally find that cotton delivers a pure and accurate flavour. Although cotton is the best overall wick material for most vaping situations, it does have one minor drawback in that it can burn at high temperatures. If you’re the type of person who tends to chain vape at high wattages– or you accidentally forget to refill your tank – you can burn a cotton wick, ruining the flavour of the coil forever. If you’re careful, though, cotton is the ideal wick material for most vapers.
Some of the manufacturers in the vaping industry have experimented with using natural fibres other than cotton – or together with cotton – for their wicks. Flax and hemp are the most common alternative natural fibres that the manufacturers have used recently. Some manufacturers have also experimented with wood pulp. Most commonly, the manufacturers blend those fibres with cotton to produce a vaping experience that still feels familiar. Although fibres like hemp and flax may not greatly change the flavour that you taste when using a coil, you may find that coils with those fibres are a bit more resistant to heat than coils using only cotton.
Silica is one of the most popular wick materials for low-temperature vaping applications. If you use a pod-based vaping system, for example, it’s likely that the system’s pods have silica wicks. You’ll see the translucent threads extending from the sides of the atomizer coil. The reason why silica is used as a wick material for pod systems– but not for sub-ohm tanks – is because, while it produces a good flavour and is very resistant to heat, it doesn’t transport e-liquid as efficiently as cotton.
Ceramic was briefly popular as a wick material for sub-ohm tanks a few years ago. There are two different ways of making a ceramic vape wick. One way is by spinning liquid ceramic into fibres, which can then be woven into pads or ropes. Another way is by making a hard and porous wick from sintered ceramic. A vape wick made from a ceramic pad functions in much the same way as the cotton pads that most vape wicks use; the pad absorbs e-liquid from the tank’s reservoir and brings it to the coil. Because ceramic is so different from cotton, it has one large benefit along with one major drawback. The benefit of ceramic as a material for vape wicks is that it doesn’t burn. Unlike with a cotton wick, you can’t burn a ceramic wick if you chain tape or forget to refill your tank. You can get a dry hit, of course, but the wick won’t burn. Although ceramic’s resistance to heat is a major benefit, ceramic wicks also have a drawback in that they transport e-liquid much less efficiently than cotton. Ceramic wicks are efficient enough for sub-ohm vaping, but they’ll only work well with coils designed to operate within a range of about 30-50 watts. Since most of today’s sub-ohm coils operate at higher power levels than that, ceramic wicks aren’t as popular as they used to be. Sintered ceramic vape wicks work best with extremely thick liquids like CBD oils.
Rayon isn’t used as a wick material for pre-built coils, but it has a loyal following among some people who use rebuildable atomizers and build their own coils. The most popular form of rayon for coil building is a beauty product called CelluCotton, which is available in both rayon and cotton forms – so you’ll want to get the rayon version if you want to try making a rayon vape wick yourself. When you build an atomizer coil with a rayon wick, you’ll need to stuff as much rayon as possible through the centre of the coil because rayon tends to contract when it’s wet. If you use too little rayon, the wick will lose contact with the coil, and you’ll get dry hits. If you’re the type of person who likes to chain vape – you get dry hits occasionally because you don’t wait long enough for your wick to re-saturate between puffs – you might love vaping with a rayon wick because rayon transports e-liquid extremely efficiently. It’s so efficient, in fact, that some people experience floods when they wick their RDA coils with rayon. To prevent that from happening, they cut their wicks at an angle to prevent the rayon from drawing too much e-liquid to the coil. Rayon vape wicks are so efficient that they make it possible to chain vape with virtually no possibility of dry hits. Some people don’t care for rayon as a material for vape wicks, though, because the flavour that you’ll get with a rayon wick will be very different from what you’ll get with a cotton wick. Some people find rayon wicks unenjoyable because they can’t get used to the different flavour.
The atomizer coil is like the engine of your vaping device, and it can have a profound effect on your vaping experience. If the tank that you own has a variety of coils available, choosing the right coil can make the difference between a great experience and a mediocre one. If you’re in the market for a new tank, understanding a tank’s coil selection can help you decide whether that tank is the right one for you. Keep reading, because we’re going to bring you one step further on the road to vaping mastery by helping you understand the intricacies of the atomizer coil.
The atomizer coil is the unit housing the heating wire in the centre of your e-cigarette tank. The heating wire generates the vapour that you inhale, and a wick surrounding the wire brings e-liquid to the wire from the tank’s reservoir. The vape atomizer coil determines how well the tank operates and influences the quality of your experience more than perhaps any other component of your vaping setup.
No. Vaping tanks have tight design tolerances to prevent leaking, and virtually every design is proprietary. If a coil doesn’t specifically say that it is compatible with your tank, it probably isn’t. However, some vaping product manufacturers do make coils designed to work with other companies’ tanks. The Melo coil by ELeaf, for example, works with the Aspire Atlantis tank. Other companies such as Atom Vapes have built entire businesses on manufacturing improved coils for other makers’ tanks. If you’d like to improve your experience with the tank you already have, it’s worthwhile to research whether a superior third-party coil exists.
You can tell a lot about the capabilities and intended purpose of a tank by looking at its atomizer coil. A coil with large exposed wick holes allows plenty of e-liquid to flow through from the tank’s reservoir. A wide coil houses a large heating wire. Put those two features together, and you’ll have a coil designed for big vapour clouds and deep direct-to-lung inhaling. A narrow coil with small wick holes, on the other hand, helps to provide the air resistance ideal for mouth-to-lung inhaling.
In electricity, resistance measures the extent to which a component of a circuit restricts the flow of electrical current. The higher the number is, the more the component restricts the current. A 1.0-ohm component, in other words, restricts the current more than a 0.5-ohm component. If the voltage of the battery remains the same, reducing the coil resistance means that the circuit will operate at a higher wattage. The coil, in other words, produces more vapour without requiring a corresponding increase in battery voltage.
There’s a catch, though; you can’t use just any atomizer coil with any vaping device because reducing the resistance of the coil comes with a corresponding increase in the amperage drawn from the battery. Every battery has a maximum current that it can safely support. Above that maximum, there’s a chance that the battery can vent hot gas and experience a catastrophic failure. It’s important, therefore, to know the capabilities of any battery that you use for vaping.
A regulated vaping mod also has built-in safety features that dictate the minimum supported atomizer resistance. A typical minimum resistance for a modern regulated mod, for example, might be 0.1 ohm. If you connect an atomizer coil with a resistance below the minimum, the mod will display an error message. A regulated mod also has a wattage range that it supports. If resistance of an atomizer coil is above the minimum for your device – and the coil’s suggested wattage range is within the range that your device supports – the atomizer coil should work with your device. You’ll need to verify those numbers each time you buy a new tank for your vaping device.
Coil material has a significant impact on your vaping experience, it affects vaping temperature, vapour production, flavour and coil durability. Both metal alloys and pure metals are used to make coils, so let's take a closer look at the specific properties of the five most common coil materials.
Kanthal coil wire is an alloy of iron, chromium and aluminium. Kanthal is a popular choice for heating wires because its resistance isn’t too high or low and because it tolerates high temperatures as well as repeated heating and cooling without breaking down.
Nichrome is an alloy of nickel, chromium and sometimes aluminium. Although it isn’t as common as kanthal, it is particularly popular among those who build exotic coils for cloud chasing. Because nichrome has a lower resistance than kanthal for a given length and thickness of wire, it’s a popular choice for higher-mass coil builds. The coils in boxed assortments of pre-made coils are often nichrome. Compared to kanthal, nichrome has two small drawbacks. The first is that nichrome’s low resistance makes it inappropriate for some devices with very low amperage limits. The second drawback is that nichrome is slightly less durable than kanthal. In practice, though, the reduced durability doesn’t matter much because residue will collect on the coil and negatively affect the vaping experience long before the coil wears out.
Note: A few people suffer from nickel allergies. If you are allergic or sensitive to nickel, you should avoid using nichrome atomizer coils.
Like nichrome, stainless steel has a lower resistance than kanthal and therefore benefits from faster heating and shorter ramp-up times. The most common type of steel used for stainless steel coils is 316 – also called “surgical” – stainless steel. This type of steel has high resistance to corrosion and is often a good coil material for those who suffer from allergies or sensitivities to certain metals. In sub-ohm tanks, stainless steel coils are becoming more common than ever. Stainless steel offers a very pure flavour, and it has enough resistance that it can work in your device’s wattage mode without a problem. Unlike nichrome, though, stainless steel also works in temperature control mode. Although vaping devices generally can’t estimate the temperature of steel coils as well as they can nickel and titanium coils, stainless steel is the only coil material that’s safe to use in both wattage mode and temperature control mode.
Nickel has an extremely low electrical resistance, and its resistance changes greatly as it’s heated. It is therefore the ideal material for temperature control vaping. All materials change their resistance in a predictable way when they’re heated. A device supporting temperature control, therefore, can estimate the temperature of a nickel coil by measuring the difference between the coil’s current resistance and its original resistance. Of all coil materials, the resistance of nickel changes the most when it’s heated. Temperature control devices, therefore, tend to be very accurate when estimating the temperature of nickel coils. The drawback of nickel is that, for some, it can trigger allergies or sensitivities. An additional drawback is that some people find that a nickel coil tends to produce a noticeably metallic flavour. Taste, however, is subjective; many people have no issues with the flavour of nickel coils.
Titanium is another popular material for temperature control atomizer coils. When a titanium coil is heated, it doesn’t change in resistance quite as dramatically as a nickel coil would. The change is far greater, however, than that of a stainless steel coil. Those who are sensitive to the taste of nickel coils often find that titanium coils do not have the same issue.
An atomizer coil has a wick – usually wrapped around the heating wire – that keeps the wire wet by drawing e-liquid in from the tank. Cotton is almost perfect as a wick material, so it’s what most atomizer coils use. There are a few atomizer coils that use alternative wick materials, though, and it’s worthwhile to know how those materials can change your vaping experience.
Cotton is the gold standard for vaping wicks. It’s a natural plant fibre, so most people are comfortable using it. Although cotton does lend a mild flavour to e-liquid, most people don’t notice the flavour because they’ve been using cotton wicks for years anyway. Cotton is a great wick material for sub-ohm atomizer coils because it’s an effective transporter of liquids and because most people find the flavour quality excellent. A few people have noted a slight “t-shirt” flavour when using cotton wicks. If you’re one of those people, you might prefer the next option on this list.
Some vaping coils use a form of porous ceramic called sintered ceramic for their wicks. Sintered ceramic is a liquid form of ceramic that’s poured into a mould and heated until it’s solid. The maker then installs a heating wire in the middle of the hardened ceramic. The ceramic wick holds liquid – and transports it from the tank to the heating wire – just like a fibre wick would. Ceramic wicks are extremely durable. Some people consider it the best wick material for flavour chasers because – unlike some other wick materials – ceramic adds virtually no flavour of its own. Ceramic does have a drawback as a wick material, though, in that it doesn’t transport liquid as efficiently as some other materials. After puffing on a vaping tank with a ceramic wick, in other words, you’ll have to wait several seconds for the wick to become wet again. For that reason, you’ll generally find ceramic wicks only in atomizer coils intended for use at lower wattage ranges.
Silica was the most popular wick material for atomizer coils until sub-ohm vaping became popular. Silica was popular for its durability and flavour quality. It’s a more efficient transporter of liquid than ceramic, but it isn’t as effective as cotton. That’s why cotton is much more popular today; modern sub-ohm tanks generate so much vapour that silica wicks can’t keep up. Some people still use braided silica ropes when building their own atomizer coils, but the rope shape doesn’t work well for sub-ohm tanks – so factory-made atomizer coils with silica wicks are rare.
Depending on the type of e-liquid that you use and how much e-liquid you consume, an atomizer coil can last anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. We’ll explain the reasons for the variability shortly. You’ll know when it’s time to replace your atomizer coil by paying attention to the way your vaping experience changes over time. When your coil is new, you’ll taste nothing but the flavour of your e-liquid when you vape. After you’ve used the coil for a while, though, residue from the sweeteners in your e-liquids will begin to collect on the coil. When that begins to happen, you’ll detect a note of caramelized sugar when you vape regardless of the e-liquid you use. When the residue on your coil becomes so thick that it prevents the coil’s wick from delivering e-liquid to the heating wire, you might notice irritation in your throat when vaping. The coil has reached the end of its life.
Coil gunk is the name that members of the vaping community have given to the dark residue that forms on atomizer coils after long-term vaping. When your atomizer coil displays the symptoms that we’ve described above, you’ll see a dark crust on the heating wire when you open your tank. Sweetener is the primary cause of coil gunk. Sweeteners such as sucralose don’t vaporise fully when they’re heated, and any sweeteners that fail to vaporise cleanly will instead collect on the heating wire of your atomizer coil.
The layer of coil gunk thickens until it eventually becomes a detriment to the vaping experience. Certain flavours – and even the vegetable glycerine used in most e-liquids – also contribute to coil gunk. The more e-liquid you use, the faster coil gunk will form. Owning a high-output vaping device, therefore, means that you’ll need to replace your atomizer coil more often than you would if you used a smaller, lower-output device.
If you use a powerful vaping device, enjoy sweetened e-liquids and are sensitive to the flavour of burned sugar, you may find yourself installing a new atomizer coil almost daily. At around £2-3 per coil, that’s potentially an expensive proposition. The two factors that contribute most strongly to the formation of coil gunk are the amount of sweetener in your e-liquid and the volume of e-liquid that you use. Changing one of those factors – by purchasing unsweetened e-liquids or using a less powerful vaping device – will improve coil life. If you don’t want to change either of those factors, you can make coil replacement less expensive by building your own coils. We discuss coil building in our ultimate guide to advanced vaping.
The wire, wicking and resistance of your coil will all impact your vaping experience. But the type of core that your coil features will also make a difference. There are two types of core to consider – standard wire and mesh. You can choose from single, dual, triple and quadruple standard wire cores. There are benefits and drawbacks to each type of core.
This type of coil will usually give you moderately strong throat hits and modest vapour production. You will enjoy good flavour and relatively warm vapes. Single coils boast slow ramp up (heating) times.
These coils deliver hotter vapes but require more power and so will drain your battery quickly. You will experience stronger throat hits, more intense flavour and bigger clouds than with single cores. This is because multiple wires combine to provide a larger heating area, vaporising a greater volume of eliquid every time you press the fire button. Dual, triple and quad core coils burn at higher temperatures. This means that the trade off for improved flavour and bigger clouds is reduced coil life.
Mesh coils provide a good compromise between single and multiple wire cores. They heat quickly and deliver both excellent flavour and impressive vapour. But they usually require less power than dual, triple or quad cores of the same resistance and so won’t drain your battery as quickly. Mesh coils tend to be long lasting which is a significant bonus. You can read more about mesh coils in our dedicated guide.
Vape coils with ceramic wicks have been available for several years. During that time, they have never really progressed beyond niche status in terms of their popularity. While ceramic as a wick material for vaping has never enjoyed anywhere near the popularity of cotton, it does have plenty of devoted fans who wouldn’t want to use any other type of wick – which means there definitely must be situations in which using a ceramic wick makes perfect sense. So, what’s the deal with ceramic vape wicks? How do they work, and what are the reasons why some people use them? Most importantly, is a ceramic wick viable for sub-ohm vaping? Let’s dig in.
If the idea of a vape wick made from ceramic sounds odd to you, it’s probably because you’ve never really thought of ceramic as an absorbent material. If you pour water on a ceramic plate, for instance, it doesn’t soak in – it beads and rolls off. It is actually possible, however, to take thin fibres of spun ceramic and weave them into ceramic textile pads that absorb liquid just like a natural fibre pad would. That property makes it possible to construct a vape coil with a ceramic wick by wrapping a ceramic pad – rather than the traditional cotton pad – around the coil. Another form of ceramic wick is made from liquid ceramic that’s poured into a mould, dried and fired just like traditional ceramic pottery. The difference, though, is that when ceramic is used to make a hard wick, organic substances are added to the liquid ceramic mixture. After it’s dried, the ceramic wick is fired at an extremely high temperature. The organic material burns away, leaving a hard ceramic wick with a network of tiny holes. The holes make the ceramic porous and allow liquid to pass through it. Ceramic textile is the most popular form of ceramic for e-liquid vaping, but hard ceramic wicks have a useful application that we’ll discuss in a moment.
To fully understand what a ceramic wick can do to benefit your vaping experience, you must first consider the drawbacks of what you’re currently using. What is the biggest drawback of cotton as a material for vape wicks? It must be the fact that cotton burns easily. If you’re using a coil with a cotton wick and don’t prime the coil properly before installing it, the wick can burn. If you forget to refill the tank, the wick can burn. If you set your vaping wattage too high – well, you get the idea. Ceramic, on the other hand, can get as hot as around 2,000 degrees Celsius before it begins to melt. It is virtually impossible for the heat of a vaping coil to burn a ceramic wick – so heat resistance is a major benefit. Another benefit of ceramic as a wick material for vaping is that it should be completely inert and shouldn’t react with the e-liquid in any way. Some people find, therefore, that a ceramic wick tends to offer a purer flavour than a cotton wick. Taste is subjective, of course, and that means your opinion may differ. When ceramic coils reached the peak of their popularity in the mid-2010s, though, the manufacturers often marketed them as “flavour chasers’ coils.” Ceramic wicks also offer an additional benefit over cotton, in that they tend to work much better with extremely thick substances like CBD oils. Hard, porous ceramic wicks tend to work particularly well with thick liquids. So, while ceramic wicks may not be particularly popular for e-liquid vaping – you’ll learn the reasons for that shortly – they are quite popular among CBD aficionados.
Ceramic has one major drawback as a wick material for vaping, and it’s the fact that ceramic doesn’t transport liquid as efficiently as cotton does. When you use a vape tank with a cotton wick, you’ve probably noticed that bubbles begin to rise to the surface of the tank’s reservoir almost as soon as you release your mod’s fire button after puffing. Those bubbles indicate that your coil’s cotton wick is absorbing more e-liquid from the reservoir. After just a couple of seconds, the tank is ready to use again. That’s not the experience you’ll have with a ceramic wick. When you use a tank with a ceramic wick, you’ll need to wait several seconds after each puff for the wick to absorb more e-liquid before the tank will be ready to use again – and that’s true even if you’re using a relatively high-resistance coil that doesn’t produce enormous clouds. So, ceramic wicks do work for sub-ohm vaping, but they’re going to give you a very different experience from what you might be used to because you’ll need to wait much longer between puffs for the wick to absorb more e-liquid. If you don’t wait long enough, you’ll get dry hits.
While ceramic wicks are definitely viable for sub-ohm vaping, using a coil with a ceramic wick may mean that you’ll need to lower your expectations a bit with regards to cloud production. The reason why virtually all of today’s sub-ohm tanks use coils with cotton wicks is because cotton is a very efficient carrier of liquid. Even if you’re using an extremely powerful mesh coil, a cotton wick will have no trouble keeping up with the coil’s demands as long as you wait a few seconds for the wick to get wet again after each puff. Ceramic, on the other hand, transports e-liquid so much more slowly than cotton that it may not work at all as a wick material for a high-end coil. As long as you’re not trying to chase enormous clouds, though, you may be very happy with a coil that uses a ceramic wick – especially if you find that a ceramic wick produces a purer flavour. If you stick with coil-friendly e-liquids and avoid sweetened vape juices, you’ll probably also find that using a ceramic wick helps your coils last much longer.
If you’re in the mood for some quick entertainment, go to Google and type “dry hit meme.” See anything familiar? We bet you do, because every person who vapes has experienced a burnt taste at one time or another. Don't become another dry hit meme! Find out why your vape tastes burnt and fix it now. Nothing in the world can go from absolutely delicious to completely vile quite as quickly as a dry hit vape or one that tastes like burnt sugar because its atomizer coil is covered with black residue.
The bad news is that experiencing an occasional burnt taste when vaping is something that’s definitely going to happen to you at one time or another. When you’re sucking on an 80-watt heating coil all day, there’s always a small chance that things won’t work exactly as they should. The good news is that, when your vape tastes burnt, it’s always due to a specific preventable cause. Therefore, knowing the most common causes of dry hits and burnt flavours when vaping makes it a fairly trivial matter to minimise those sets of circumstances. Let’s begin!
If you get a burnt taste when vaping, it’s because one of two things is happening.
You’re getting a dry hit. That’s what happens when e-liquid fails to feed through to your atomizer coil’s wick. With no liquid to cool it off, the atomizer coil becomes red hot and emits noxious fumes. A dry hit is terrible while it’s happening, and it often leaves a long-term effect behind by burning your coil’s cotton wick. Even a tiny burned spot on the wick can ruin the flavour of an atomizer coil.
Your coil is covered with residue. The residue comes from sucralose, the most common e-liquid sweetener. If your e-liquid tastes sweet like candy, it probably contains sucralose. Although it’s very common in e-liquid, the issue with sucralose as a sweetener is that it doesn’t vaporize. It creates a layer of coil gunk on the atomizer coil that thickens, darkens and eventually burns. A thin layer of sucralose residue on your coil will create a flavour that tastes like burnt sugar. A thick layer will prevent e-liquid from reaching your coil efficiently, creating an effect much like that of a dry hit.
So, why does your vape taste burnt? You can determine the cause simply by looking at your atomizer coil. If it’s covered with sticky black residue, sweetened e-liquid is the cause of your problem. If that’s the case, the solution is simple; you can stop using sweetened e-liquid, or you can put up with poor coil life.
If your vape tastes burnt because you’re getting dry hits, though, the solution is a bit more complex because dry hits have several common causes. We’ll explain how to prevent the four most common causes of dry hits.
The most common cause of dry hits is actually incredibly simple – dry hits happen when you forget to keep your tank full. You don’t ever want to use a tank until it is completely empty. Do you see the white openings on the side of your atomizer coil? Through the openings, you can see the coil’s cotton wick. E-liquid reaches the coil by traveling through those openings and soaking into the wick. If the e-liquid in your tank doesn’t cover those holes, the wick isn’t getting e-liquid – and that leads to dry hits. Keep your tank topped up.
Dry hits can happen if your atomizer coil burns e-liquid away more quickly than the wick can replenish itself, and that will happen if you’ve set your device’s wattage too high or you’re puffing too deeply when vaping. If you experience dry hits when you’re trying to extract bigger clouds out of your vape, it’s a sign that you need to consider buying a more capable sub-ohm tank. In the meantime, lower your device’s wattage or reduce the duration of your puffs.
Let's take a moment to talk about vape wattage because not only can too much of it cause a burnt hit and a burnt coil head but it also affects the flavour of your vape. Depending on what you're vaping, you're going to want to adjust your wattage to fit the flavour profile. This is why variable wattage products are great and perfect to experiment with, especially if you're keen to try new flavours and tastes. Ah, yes - it's like appreciating the intricate tastes of fine wine or a cigar - except you get to control it and set it to your optimal flavour preference (and hopefully avoiding that nasty burnt taste altogether). First of all, don't just stick to one wattage if you're experimenting with new vape juice. If you're new to this game, you'll be surprised to learn that most experienced vapers stick to 50-75 watt levels. This is where most of the flavour notes and complexities come out of the vape juice. E-liquids are a complex creation and need the right temperature to get the whole symphony of taste out of them. Again with the wine metaphor - you wouldn't serve a fine red wine chilled or warm, would you? It has to be the right temperature for the taste to really show up. If you're used to a higher wattage, make sure to adjust it if you decide to experiment with those sticky sugary e-juice. Likewise, some flavours simply taste better when heated up more - this is because different parts of the vape juice react to different temperatures and while you should definitely experiment to unlock them, try not to go overboard and burn them until you need a new coil to get the burnt flavour out of your vape. In conclusion, remember - variable wattage products are there for a reason. Don't just get stuck with one go-to wattage!
Do you use a small device such as a pod vape? If you do, it’s time to start paying attention to VG/PG ratios when you buy e-liquid. The smaller your vaping device is, the smaller your atomizer coil’s wick openings are. As we’ve just explained, dry coils lead to dry hits – and a thick high-VG e-liquid can have trouble getting through the wick openings in a small vaping device. If you use a pod system, stick with nicotine salt e-liquid for the best possible performance.
If you use a rebuildable atomizer and build your own coils, you’re already familiar with the importance of checking for hot spots because you do it every time you mount your coils to your atomizer. Did you know, though, that it’s equally important to check for hot spots again after you’ve threaded your wick through the coil and added e-liquid? If you don’t have firm contact between the coil and the wick, you’ll experience dry hits even when your coil seems completely wet.
What is chain vaping? You've probably done it even if you don't know what it is. If you love chain vaping, you'll be disappointed to know that you might be killing your coil as a result. Chain vaping is probably the most common cause of burnt hits ever, and no amount of troubleshooting is going to fix your problem - you just have to give your coil a break, man! Chain vaping is when you inhale a lot of hits in a short period of time, preventing enough vape juice from getting absorbed by the coil. You're basically torturing and dry burning it. Imagine a saucepan on the hot hob - if the water evaporates, there's nothing left and the saucepan begins to smoke, burn and turn very nasty. Now imagine that the saucepan is your coil and you're inhaling all that's produced as a result of this process - is it any wonder you're getting a burnt taste in your mouth? This is a problem very common to vaping newbies because people they either experiment a lot or crank up the volume for a "full effect" - when in reality it takes some experience to learn that bigger isn't better, less gives you more in terms of flavour. This is also why "Why does my vape taste burnt" is a question mostly asked by beginners. See our beginner vaping guides if you want to read more.
If you don't have a spare coil ready to go, there is a way of getting the burnt taste out of a coil. You have to remove your sub-ohm coil and the wick very carefully, without doing any further damage to the burnt coil. Get the coil into warm water and submerge it for about 5 minutes. This will let the burned particles soak up the water and loosen their grip on the coil. Have a bowl of ice water ready, and transfer the coil into it after your 5 minutes is up. This will hopefully make the loosened burnt particles fall away from the coil, and your coil will be ready to use again after being air dried. This can save you some money and annoyance of getting a new vape coil - if it's not too badly damaged, of course. Some people try lemon juice or vinegar to clean their coils, but there is a large chance of manhandling it and breaking it, resulting in having to get a new coil anyway.
Sometimes, the secret behind vape tasting burnt is not gross mistreatment but steady prolonged use. In other words, coils should be replaced on a regular basis in order to keep your vape from tasting funky and off - not only burnt. After all, this is a part of your vaping kit that takes the most beating. Depending on how much you vape, vape coils should be changed every week for hard vapers, and every four weeks if you don't vape that much. If you burn your coil and don't want to get a burnt hit every time you want to vape, just replace it. Nothing will get rid of the burnt taste faster than just getting a new coil and treating it well.
If you have this question, there might be a simple answer to your troubles - you're probably not priming your coils correctly. Meaning that you might be getting a burnt taste because you're sucking down the hits too quickly and not letting your wick soak up the e-liquid properly, causing your beautiful new coil to burn. Make sure you saturate the wick and stop chain vaping so much!
We hope to have answered your questions about burnt vape taste troubles. Take a look at our free guides to vaping for more information - there's always more to learn and more ways to make your vape taste better.
Above all:
An unpleasant noise coming from your vaping device is one of those things that can really detract from your vaping experience. You’re holding a vape mod with a powerful lithium-ion battery, and you expect it to work properly when you press the button. If you hear an unusual noise, it’s naturally going to make you wonder if your equipment isn’t working as it should or if there might even be something going on that isn’t completely safe. If your vape is crackling, popping or spitting, we’re here to help. The first thing you need to know is that, if your vape is popping or crackling, the noise is most likely coming from the atomizer coil in your tank rather than from the vaping device itself – and in that case, there’s no need to worry about safety because a bit of popping is completely normal with certain types of atomizer coils. If the noise is detracting from your vaping experience, though, we have some information that can help. Here’s why your vape crackles, pops or spits.
First, let’s explain what we’re actually talking about when we discuss a vaping device that’s crackling, popping or spitting. What we’re specifically discussing here is a noise that comes from the atomizer coil in your vape tank. Generally, you’ll hear the noise when you first press the button on your vaping device. The noise will usually subside as you continue vaping, and it’ll generally get louder if you haven’t used your device in a while. In some cases, the initial pop that you hear when you first press your device’s fire button might be loud enough to startle people near you. The popping sound may also be accompanied by a squirt of hot e-liquid into your mouth. That’s what we mean when we talk about a vape that’s spitting. Although crackling and popping are merely annoyances, a vape that spits can be a major detraction to your vaping experience because the hot e-liquid can actually hurt when it reaches your tongue.
If your vape crackles, pops or spits during operation, you are most likely using a vaping device with a fairly powerful atomizer coil. It’s also most likely that the heating surface in your coil is made from resistance wire wound into a spiral shape. Until recently, that’s how almost all vape coils were made. The problem with the traditional design of a vape coil, though, is that the way to design a coil that produces bigger vapour clouds is by increasing the coil’s surface area. With resistance wire, the way to increase the surface area of the coil is by using a wire with a higher gauge. In other words, a thicker wire has a greater surface area. Now, imagine what a vape coil with a thick wire gauge looks like from the inside. The coil is oriented vertically, and a strip of cotton is wrapped around it. Because the wire is so thick, the cotton doesn’t rest perfectly against the wire. The cotton only touches the wire’s high points. When you wind a thick wire into a spiral shape, the side of the spiral effectively has several “hills” and “valleys.” Since the cotton doesn’t touch the coil’s valleys, the side of the coil has open spaces. E-liquid will tend to pool in those open spaces, and that’s why your vape crackles, pops and spits. Imagine a pool of e-liquid with a heating wire at the bottom. When you use your vape mod, the pool heats from the bottom. The e-liquid that touches the coil begins to boil while the e-liquid at the top of the pool is still liquid. The vapor that forms at the bottom of the pool bursts through the liquid at the top, and that’s what creates the popping noise. In summary, the reason why your vape crackles is because tiny pools of e-liquid have formed on the heating surface of your atomizer coil. With a high-end coil made from traditional resistance wire, that’s a shortcoming of the coil’s design. That’s why mesh coils are so popular today. We’ll discuss mesh coils in greater detail shortly. First, though, let’s talk about how to reduce crackling, popping and spitting with the tank you’re currently using.
As we’ve explained above, there’s no way to completely prevent an atomizer from crackling or popping if it’s a problem inherent to the design of the atomizer coil. The more you optimise a traditional wire-based coil for vapour production, the more the coil will crackle because of the hills and valleys created by the thick wire. However, there are three things that you can potentially do to make the crackling less annoying.
If you’re tired of using a vape that crackles, pops or spits, the way to eliminate the problem for good is by buying a new vape tank with a mesh coil. A mesh coil uses a strip of mesh rather than a length of wire as its heating surface. Since the mesh has a much flatter profile than a spiral of wire, it doesn’t have the same hills and valleys that cause the e-liquid to gather and form pools. As a result, mesh coils operate in near silence. They also offer superior vapour production at lower wattages compared to traditional vape coils, so there’s really no reason why almost every vaper in the world shouldn’t be using a vape tank with a mesh coil right now.
Are you an expert vaper? Are you looking for a new frontier to explore because you believe you’ve reached the maximum level of performance that you can get with a vape tank? Maybe you’re just a fan of heavily sweetened vape juice and are tired of spending a fortune on replacement coils. Either way, you’ve examined the pros and cons of rebuildable atomizers, and you’ve decided that you’d like to explore the wide world of coil building. As soon as you begin shopping for a rebuildable atomizer, though, one of the first things you’ll learn is that there isn’t just one type of atomizer that you can buy. There are, in fact, two primary types: rebuildable dripping atomizers (RDAs) and rebuildable tank atomizers (RTAs). Your choice is going to have a profound effect on your vaping experience because the two types of atomizers have almost nothing in common aside from the fact that using them means you’ll build your coils yourself. So, which type of rebuildable atomizer is right for you? In this article, we’ll explore the differences between RDAs and RTAs to help you make the right decision for your needs.
An RDA is a rebuildable atomizer that’s designed for dripping and has no e-liquid storage except a small depression that holds enough vape juice for a few puffs. You drip vape juice directly onto the atomizer's wick from the bottle, through the atomizer's mouthpiece. You’ll puff on the RDA a few times, and then you’ll need to add more e-liquid.
If you currently use a traditional vape tank, the idea of switching to an atomizer that offers almost no e-liquid storage might strike you as a little odd. Why would anyone want to use an atomizer that requires constant refilling? The reason why RDAs are so popular is because the coil isn’t contained within a glass enclosure, so it can be much larger. An RDA gives you a very large platform for coil building. That makes the building process easier, which you’ll like if you haven’t built your own vape coils before. The main reason why having a large build platform is so useful, though, is because it allows you to build extremely large and elaborate coils if you like. An RDA can give you the biggest clouds that you’ll ever get with a vaping device – and since the coil isn’t submerged in a tank, an RDA also offers smooth, open airflow that allows you to inhale deeply and easily.
As you’ve probably guessed, the design feature that allows an RDA to deliver such impressive performance is also its biggest drawback. Since there’s no e-liquid storage, you’ll have to carry a bottle of e-liquid everywhere you go if you use an RDA. Vaping while driving is impossible with an RDA, and you’ll have a mess on your hands – literally! – if you happen to use a bit too much e-liquid when dripping. With this drawback in mind, choosing between RDAs vs. RTAs is really a question of performance vs. convenience.
An RTA is a rebuildable atomizer that gives you the e-liquid storage of a traditional vape tank. At the core of an RTA, you’ll find a build platform that looks much like the build platform of an RDA. It’ll be smaller, though, since it’ll have a glass tank enclosing it. Once you’ve built the coil, using an RTA will be the same as using any other vape tank.
The major benefit of using an RTA is that it gives you the freedom of building your own coils along with the convenience of a tank. Unlike a traditional vape tank with pre-built coils, though, an RTA is much less expensive to own because kanthal wire and organic cotton are both very affordable when purchased in bulk. The cost savings of using an RTA can be especially considerable if you typically buy e-liquid that’s heavily sweetened. Sucralose leaves so much residue on a vape coil that you might find yourself wishing that you could replace the coil in your tank every day rather than tolerating the “burnt sugar” flavour of coil gunk in order to keep your costs down. When you use an RTA, you can replace your coil whenever you like without worrying about the expense.
The main drawback of using an RTA is that it requires all the effort of using an RDA without any of the performance benefit. While an RDA can be capable of producing enormous clouds if you’re willing to put in the time required to build more complex coils, an RTA will give you roughly the same performance as the tank you’re using right now. People don’t really use RTAs for the performance; they use them because they’re tired of spending a fortune on pre-built replacement coils. One thing to consider before you buy an RTA, though, is that your time also has value. When you use a tank with pre-built coils, unscrewing the old coil and screwing in a new one takes only a few seconds. Building a coil for an RDA or RTA, on the other hand, takes several minutes even if you’re an experienced coil builder. You should budget around 10-20 minutes for building a new coil – and that’s if you don’t make a mistake during the building process. Making a mistake often means that you need to start over from scratch. Switching from a traditional tank to a rebuildable atomizer always means that you’re committing to make a significant time investment each time you want to rebuild your coil. When you use an RDA, you get two benefits for the time spent – you save money, and you enjoy better performance. When you use an RTA, though, you don’t get better performance compared to a standard vape tank – you just save money.
Just about every year, the vaping industry develops a new technology – or an existing technology comes of age – and that technology goes on to become the signature thing that defines the state of the art for vaping in that year.
In 2020, the defining technology in vaping was definitely the mesh coil. It’s difficult to remember any technology in the history of vaping that went from something that a few people were using – to something that was practically a requirement for any modern piece of vape gear – in the span of just a year. With mesh vape coils, though, that’s exactly what happened. If you aren’t using a mesh coil yet, this article is going to explain why you definitely need to upgrade without further delay. First, though, let’s take a brief look at how the vaping industry got to this point.
The manufacturer Freemax was the company that introduced most of us in the vaping community to mesh coils. Freemax didn’t invent the mesh coil; some users of rebuildable atomizers were already experimenting with mesh coils when Freemax released the Fireluke Mesh tank in 2017. The Fireluke Mesh was the first vape tank designed to use pre-built mesh coils. It was a big hit, and Freemax quickly followed that success with the release of the Mesh Pro tank in 2018. The Mesh Pro took everything that was great about the Fireluke Mesh and made it even bigger, becoming the first tank with pre-built dual-coil, triple-coil, quadruple-coil and quintuple-coil atomizers. As we approached the end of the decade, many people still felt that the Freemax Mesh Pro was the best vape tank on the market. For anyone to say that about a vape tank after more than two years on the market is truly unprecedented. It’s safe to say that the mesh coil truly came of age in 2020. Mesh coils were so obviously better than traditional wound coils that, by the end of 2020, they were seemingly everywhere. Virtually every new tank that comes out today has a mesh coil as its default coil option. The biggest vape manufacturers also released mesh coils for most of their existing tanks in 2020. If you can’t find a mesh coil for the tank that you’re using now, it’s probably because the manufacturer no longer makes coils for that tank. The speed with which mesh coils became ubiquitous in the vaping industry is truly impressive. So, what makes mesh coils so much better than traditional vaping coils? A mesh coil has two unique design elements that can bring some dramatic benefits to your vaping experience.
A traditional vape coil uses a wound wire as its heating surface. The traditional wound wire works well for vaping until you try to push the limits of that design for greater cloud production. Getting bigger clouds with a wound coil requires you to lower the coil’s electrical resistance, and doing that requires to use a thicker wire. By the time mesh coils hit the market, a typical cloud chasing coil had so much metal that you couldn’t hope to use a modern vape tank efficiently with a vaping device that generated anything under 100 watts of power. Clearly, asking every vaper to carry a dual-battery mod was a bit much. A mesh coil replaces the traditional wound wire with a strip – or sometimes multiple strips – of thin metal mesh. A strip of mesh has as much surface area as a coil made from high-gauge wire, but it has much lower mass and requires significantly less power to operate. A mesh coil, in other words, makes it possible for you to use a single-battery mod – or even a small vape pen– to get the level of vapor production that used to require a dual-battery mod. Unless you’ve used a high-end cloud chasing tank with a dual-battery mod, you’ve never experienced the high level of cloud production that you can get with a mesh coil. It gets better. The low mass of a mesh coil also has a second benefit in that it allows the coil to reach the optimal temperature for vaping almost instantly. When you use a tank with a mesh coil, you’ll get huge clouds from the instant that you press your mod’s fire button. A traditional cloud chasing tank has a lengthy ramp-up time; you need to give the coil a chance to heat up before it begins to produce serious clouds. Mesh coils have made ramp-up time a thing of the past.
So, the first benefit of mesh coils has to do with their surface area and weight. The second benefit, however, has more to do with a mesh coil’s shape. If you examine a traditional wound coil from the side, you’ll see that the contour of the wire creates ridges and valleys. In the valleys of the coil, the wire doesn’t touch the wick. E-liquid pools in those valleys, and that often causes traditional coils to pop loudly when they’re used. In the worst cases, the popping can cause the e-liquid to spray with such force that the coil spits hot e-liquid into your mouth. That’s an extremely unpleasant experience, and as a general rule, it doesn’t happen with mesh coils. That’s because a mesh coil has a flat cross section, so the coil makes firm, even contact with the wick. Since e-liquid has nowhere to pool, mesh coils typically operate almost silently and do not spit or gurgle. The fact that the entire surface of a mesh coil makes firm contact with the wick also means that mesh coils don’t have the hot spots that traditional wound coils often have. Without those areas of uneven heating, a mesh coil is much less likely than a wound coil to burn its wick during periods of heavy use. A coil that doesn’t tend to burn its wick is a longer-lasting coil, and people often report that switching from traditional coils to mesh coils increases their average coil life by anywhere from several days to several weeks.
For most of the people who switch from smoking to vaping, vaping never becomes a hobby or passion. For them, vaping is just a means to an end; a way to stay off of tobacco. For others, though, vaping is a way of life. For those people, the quest to improve their vaping experience never truly ends – and almost as long as there has been a dedicated community of vaping hobbyists, rebuildable atomizers have existed. In the beginning, rebuildable atomizers existed almost out of necessity. The first e-cigarette atomizers were woefully underpowered. With their tiny heating wires wrapped around silica wicks, early atomizers were good enough to prove to smokers that e-cigarettes truly had potential to help people quit, but they weren’t good enough to produce an enjoyable or satisfying experience. Rebuildable atomizers provided the extra performance that some people needed, and before long, they were mass produced and sold all over the world. Rebuildable atomizers remain mainstays of the vaping industry today, but they no longer quite hold the position of superiority they once did. Owning an RBA was once a requirement if you wanted to experience the best performance that the world of vaping had to offer. Today, though, answering the question of which vaping equipment performs the best isn’t quite so simple. In light of the many different types of vape tanks and other gear available today, do rebuildable atomizers still have a place? What are their pros and cons? Those are the things you’re about to learn.
When the first rebuildable atomizers appeared, one of the primary reasons why people wanted to buy them was because they offered performance unquestionably superior to anything else that was available at the time. Rebuildable atomizers still have the potential to offer the best performance in vaping, but the gap isn’t as wide as it used to be for reasons we’ll discuss shortly. If you own a rebuildable atomizer and want it to deliver the absolute best performance possible, you’ve got to be willing to put some time and effort into your coil building process. A simple dual-coil build isn’t going to offer performance greater than that of a good tank, but a more complex build – something with multiple mesh strips or braided nichrome wires, for example – can still produce bigger vapour clouds than what you’ll get with a tank.
The biggest performance feature of a standard rebuildable atomizer – a rebuildable dripping atomizer or RDA – is the fact that the coil isn’t submerged within a tank of e-liquid. Today’s vape tanks have excellent airflow characteristics, but you can only push so much air through an atomizer coil when the coil is submerged in e-liquid. A rebuildable atomizer, on the other hand, has almost no airflow resistance at all. If you like to inhale very deeply when vaping, you’ll probably appreciate the extremely open airflow characteristics of a rebuildable atomizer.
One of the greatest aspects of using a rebuildable atomizer is the fact that building your own coils is significantly less expensive than buying pre-built coils. A typical pre-built coil for a sub-ohm tank costs at least £2-3 or so. Heavily sweetened e-liquids are more popular than ever. Do you enjoy sweet e-liquid flavours? If you do, coil gunk is a constant concern for you. If you’re a heavy vaper and use heavily sweetened e-liquid, you probably can’t use a new coil for very long at all before you start to detect the burned flavour of sucralose residue. Do you hate the burned taste of coil gunk? Do you find yourself using coils longer than you’d like because they cost so much to replace? Would you replace your coil every day if you could afford to do so? If you answered “yes” to all of those questions, you might love using a rebuildable atomizer because building your own coils is so inexpensive compared to buying pre-built coils for a sub-ohm tank. To build a basic coil, you only need two things: a spool of kanthal wire and a bag of organic cotton balls or pads. You can buy both of those things in bulk for just a few pounds, and then you’ll have sufficient supplies to build a new coil every day – for months or possibly years – at a cost of just a few pence per coil. If you use a sub-ohm tank and replace your coil every couple of days, then you almost definitely spend more money on replacement coils than you do on e-liquid. Using a rebuildable atomizer can easily cut your vaping expenses in half.
As many benefits as rebuildable atomizers may have, they still aren’t as popular within the vaping community as sub-ohm tanks. Why is it that rebuildable atomizers have never become particularly popular among mainstream vapers? The main reason is probably the fact that building a coil from scratch is a lot of work. When you replace the coil in a sub-ohm tank, the actual act of replacing the coil only takes a few seconds. After that, you probably wait a few minutes for the coil’s cotton wick to become completely saturated with e-liquid, and then you’re ready to vape. It’s easy – and people want vaping to be easy. Building a coil, on the other hand, isn’t particularly easy or fast at all. No matter how much coil building experience you may have, you can look forward to at least 10-20 minutes of downtime each time you sit down with your rebuildable atomizer to build a new coil. The effort might seem fun the first few times you do it, but for many people, coil building loses its appeal rather quickly.
The final thing that you need to know before buying a rebuildable atomizer is that RBAs are no longer the undisputed performance champions of the vaping world. Innovations such as mesh coils have made sub-ohm tanks so good that you might actually find yourself disappointed if you try a rebuildable atomizer after using a high-end tank. It’s still possible for a rebuildable atomizer to produce bigger clouds than a sub-ohm tank, but that’s only true if you’re willing to put in the time required to build a truly high-end coil.
Even if you’re a new vaper, you probably already know that replacing your vape coil periodically is one of the most important aspects of maintaining a vaping device. It’s so important, in fact, that we’ve devoted an entire article here at Vapekit to explaining how to replace a vape coil the right way. Replacing a vape coil correctly is incredibly important because it’ll help to ensure that the new coil will last as long as it possibly can. Before you get to that point, though, you need to know when your vape coil needs replacing. If you replace your coils too soon, it means that you’re spending too much to vape. If you continue using a coil when it’s well past its prime, you’re probably not going to have a very enjoyable experience. We want to prevent both of those things from happening. Knowing when to replace your vape coil isn’t just a matter of understanding how to maintain your vaping device — it’s also a matter of prolonging the life of your equipment The important thing isn’t understanding when a vape coil needs replacing — it’s knowing why your coils burn out and what you can do to make them last longer. You already know when your vape coil needs replacing — it’s time for a new coil when you’re no longer happy with the flavour quality of the coil you’re using. If you really want to get the most out of your vaping experience, though, you need to know why that’s happening. So, why do your vape coils burn out?
The two key components of any vape coil are the heating surface — which vaporises your e-liquid — and the wick, which delivers e-liquid from the reservoir to the heating surface. When a vape coil no longer delivers an acceptable flavour, it’s because of a problem with one of those two components. Either the coil’s wick is burned, or the heating surface is covered with residue. In either case, the coil will produce a burned flavour — although the nature of the flavour will change depending on the specific problem affecting your coil. To understand what you can do to make your vape coils last longer, you need to know whether the wick or the heating surface is the source of the problem. That’s what we’ll discuss next.
When a vape coil has a burned wick, the extent to which the coil’s flavour is affected depends on how badly burned the wick is. If the wick is only slightly burned, you may just detect a bit of irritation in the back of your throat when vaping. If the wick is badly burned, though, you may notice the distinctly unpleasant flavour of scorched cotton when you vape.
There’s an easy way to tell if a coil needs replacing because of a burned wick. When you remove the coil from your vape tank, look at the heating surface through the top of the coil. The metal will probably still be white and shiny. To confirm, you can disassemble the coil by removing the metal cap from the bottom of the coil and pushing the heating surface and wick out through the top. Unwrap the wick and examine it. If you see a black spot on the cotton, it’s burned. Even a very small dark spot will cause a noticeable change in the coil’s flavour. There is no way to fix burned cotton. Although it’s technically possible to repair the coil by replacing the cotton, you’ll probably find that it’s not really worth the trouble. It’s far simpler to replace the coil. If you find that you’re constantly burning your coils’ wicks, use these bits of advice to help your coils last longer.
Always install a new coil properly by priming the wick and allowing the coil to rest for several minutes after filling the tank. These steps ensure that the wick will be completely wet when you begin using the coil.
Avoid vaping at extremely high wattage settings. Always keep your device set to a power level within the recommended power range for the coil you’re using. Remember that you may need to vape at an even lower wattage if you prefer very long, deep puffs.
Don’t chain vape.
Always wait a moment between puffs to give the wick time to absorb more e-liquid.
When a layer of residue forms on the heating surface of your vape coil, it means that you’re using e-liquid sweetened with sucralose. Sucralose is a potent sweetener that can enhance vape juices with flavour profiles like fruit and candy. It’s become very common in recent years for e-liquid makers to sweeten their products, but sucralose has a major downside in that it leaves a dark residue behind that slowly robs a coil of its flavour.
If your coil needs replacing because of residue, you’ll notice a gradual change in flavour as you vape. At first, you’ll notice an exaggerated sweetness when vaping. As you continue using the coil, though, the layer of residue will become thicker. At that point, you’ll notice a strong “burned sugar” note when vaping. When you replace the coil, you can confirm that it has a layer of residue by looking at the coil’s heating surface; it’ll be dark and discoloured. If you find that sucralose residue is causing you to replace your coils more often than you’d like, there’s a very simple solution for that problem: You can stop using sweetened vape juice. While it’s undeniable that sucralose is very tasty, it’ll also drastically shorten the life of your vape coils. If you’re a heavy vaper, you may find that a new coil installed at the beginning of the day has already begun to taste like burned sugar at the end of the day. Switching to unsweetened e-liquid can extend the life of your vape coils from a day or two to a week or more.
Regardless of the type of vaping device that you use, coil replacements are a regular part of your life. Modern vape tanks make changing the coil as easy as possible, but that doesn’t make coil replacements fun. If you really want to do things right, then replacing your coil means disassembling and rinsing your tank, taking out the old coil, twisting in the new one and priming the new coil before putting everything back together and refilling the tank. It’s a process that you might find yourself putting off for “some other time” on those days when you really don’t feel like doing the work – and with that, we arrive at this article’s central question - when to change a vape coil?
The short answer is that you should change your coil when you’re no longer getting a good vaping experience out of your tank, but this is a topic with plenty of depth for those who care to explore it further.
Ready for some exploration? Let’s do it.
Further Reading: Vape Coils: Ultimate Buying Guide
Think about how much you look forward to experiencing the amazing flavour and vapour production that you can only get with a brand-new coil. Vaping never gets better than that, right? As you use the coil, though, you’ll notice that certain gradual changes will begin to take place.
The coil will become less responsive when you press your device’s fire button. It’ll take slightly longer before the coil begins producing vapour.
The coil will produce less vapour than it did when it was new.
The flavour of your e-liquid will begin to change. A note of burned sugar will begin to cover the e-liquid’s more subtle notes.
If you’re trying to get the most usage out of the coil that you possibly can, you may continue using the coil even as the changes mentioned above take place. Eventually, though, you’ll reach a point at which it seems like you’re getting dry hits even though your tank isn’t empty. You may also feel irritation in the back of your throat when vaping. At that point, you can delay no further and need to change your coil as soon as possible.
If you replace your coil as soon as the flavour begins to change, you’ll have the best possible vaping experience. Whether you can do that without going through an entire box of coils in a few days, though, depends on the longevity of your coils – and coil longevity depends more on your choice of e-liquid than on the coil itself.
How long does a vape coil last? It should last several days before it requires replacement. In some cases it is even possible for vape coils to deliver excellent flavour and vapour production for weeks. If you aren’t getting that level of longevity from your coils, continue reading for advice about how to make your coils last longer.
If you aren’t getting the kind of coil longevity described above, it’s most likely because you’re using e-liquid sweetened with sucralose. Sucralose is a potent sweetener that can make an e-liquid taste almost like candy. Many people enjoy e-liquids with sweet flavour profiles, so sucralose is a very common ingredient in vape juice these days.
As tasty as it may be, though, sucralose can cause your vape coils to burn out quickly. That’s because sucralose doesn’t turn to vapour when it’s heated; it caramelises and burns. The burned sucralose residue sticks to your atomizer coil, and it becomes gradually thicker as you continue vaping. The layer of sucralose residue – vapers call it coil gunk – is the reason why you start to taste burned sugar after using the same coil for a while. It’s also why you start to experience irritation in the back of your throat when your coil is at the end of its life.
Is sweetened e-liquid shortening the life of your coils? If you can taste sweetness on your lips when you vape – almost as if you’ve been eating candy – you’re almost definitely using e-liquid with sucralose.
There’s an easy way to confirm that sucralose is the culprit causing your coils to have poor longevity.
When you remove a coil from your tank, examine the metal through the holes at the top of the coil assembly. Is the heating wire black? You’ve got coil gunk.
If the heating wire is still white, it’s possible that you killed your coil by burning the wick. You can confirm that by disassembling the coil. Pull the cap off of the bottom of the coil assembly and push the heating wire and cotton wick out through the top of the coil assembly. Unwrap the cotton from the heating wire. If the cotton has a black spot, it’s burned and consider this a message for when to change a vape coil. Even a tiny black spot will have a negative effect on flavour when you vape.
Making your coils last longer is fairly simple if you know the reason why your coil life is poor. If you followed the steps above, you should have the answer to that question.
If your coils are burning out quickly because of coil gunk, you have two options. You can either put up with the poor coil life and replace your coils every day or two, or you can start using unsweetened e-liquid. Even with unsweetened e-liquid, coil longevity can vary. It’s common for people to get several days of usage out of each coil with unsweetened e-liquid. With an e-liquid that isn’t heavily flavoured – such as a plain menthol e-liquid – you may get weeks of life out of each coil.
If your coils are burning out quickly because the wicks are burned, the source of the problem isn’t your choice of e-liquid. Rather, it’s that your coil is drying out when you vape. A vape coil can become extremely hot during operation. To prevent overheating, the coil must have a constant supply of e-liquid from the wick – and if the wick is dry, it’ll burn. To prevent your coil’s wick from burning, follow these tips .
Keep your tank topped up when vaping. Don’t try to use your tank when it is nearly empty.
Vape within your coil’s recommended wattage range. If you tend to vape at the top end of that wattage range, keep your puff length short. If you prefer longer puffs, you may need to lower your wattage.
Don’t use a high-VG e-liquid if your coil has small wick openings. If your e-liquid is too viscous, it won’t absorb into your coil’s wick quickly enough. (Further reading: PG/VG Ratios Explained)
What if we told you that going through an entire box of coils every week doesn’t have to be a regular part of your vaping routine? Learn how to clean your vape coils now.
If you had to guess what the most common complaint or everyday annoyance among vapers is, what would you say? Would you guess that it’s the lack of variety among many recent e-liquid flavour releases? Maybe it’s the companies that make minor iterations in their mods and tanks and re-release them each year as if they were completely new products? Nope – the thing that really bugs vapers is the fact that vape coils are more expensive than ever, and they never seem to last as long as they should.
Poor coil life is the result of several contributing factors. The two biggest contributors to poor coil life, though, are the popularity of heavily sweetened e-liquid and the massive e-liquid consumption of today’s high-end coils. Sucralose – the most popular e-liquid sweetener – leaves residue (coil gunk) that shortens a coil’s life, and a modern vape coil can burn through an incredible amount of sucralose.
What if by cleaning the coil you could restore some of a coil’s lost performance and extend its life by double – or potentially even more?
It’s time for you to learn how to clean a vape coil and save a bundle of money.
Before we discuss how to clean a vape coil, it’s important that we set your expectations realistically. Nothing tastes as good as a new coil fresh from the box. Cleaning a used, gunky coil is not going to give you that experience. You can get a great flavour from a cleaned coil if you do a good job of removing coil gunk, but you won’t mistake a cleaned coil for a new one. We think you’ll still find the effort worthwhile, though, if cleaning allows you to use your coils significantly longer between replacements. With vape coils costing more and more these days, cleaning and reusing your coils can potentially knock a significant amount of money off of your monthly vaping bill.
The simplest way to clean a vaping coil uses things that you already have around the house and requires almost no effort whatsoever. All that you need is a bowl, some hot water or cheap vodka and a bit of time.
To clean a vape coil using the soaking method, simply put some vodka or hot water into a bowl and drop in your coil. If you’re using vodka, you can save money by setting your used coils aside until you have several that require cleaning. Vodka obviously costs more than tap water, but alcohol also dissolves sucralose residue more quickly than plain water.
To clean your vape coils, you’ll need to soak the coils in the cleaning solution for about a day. Each time you walk by the bowl, give it a stir to agitate the coils. After a day, you’ll probably see that the liquid has changed colour slightly. You’ll probably also see little black bits floating on the surface.
Remove the coils from the cleaning solution. If you cleaned your coils with vodka, give them a good rinse. Leave the coils out to dry for a day. When they’ve completely dried, they’re ready to use. Don’t forget to prime the coils with e-liquid before using them.
Agitation is an important part of effective cleaning. That’s why people use automatic washing machines rather than washing their clothes by hand – because a machine can provide constant agitation without getting bored or tired. You can get the same effect with your vape coils by cleaning the coils in an ultrasonic jewellery cleaner.
An ultrasonic cleaner produces a gentle vibration that’s extremely effective in dissolving coil gunk, and it can do the job with nothing but plain tap water. The first step is removing the coil, just drop your coils in and let the cleaner do its job for a few hours. Although we’ve just told you that you’ll never mistake a cleaned coil for a new one, many people report that cleaning your vape coils with an ultrasonic cleaner can get dirty vape coils so thoroughly clean that it’s almost impossible to tell the difference from a new vape coil.
One of the things that you might have noticed if you’ve been vaping for a while is that the flavour produced by a new vapour coil is never ideal right out of the box. Usually, you need to drain your tank once or twice before it produces the best possible flavour. Those first couple of tanks are what people in the vaping community call the “break-in period” for a new coil. So, what exactly does it mean to break in a new coil? Reading this article, you’re going to become a complete expert on those crucial first few hours of a new coil’s life. You’re going to learn how to install a new coil properly and ramp it up slowly so as to avoid the burned cotton that can ruin a coil’s flavour permanently. You’re also going to learn what’s actually happening when you break in a new coil and what you can do to avoid the break-in period entirely and enjoy perfect flavour with your coils right from the start.
Before you can break in a new coil, you have to install it properly. Vape coils – especially the incredibly powerful ones that manufacturers are developing these days – operate at very high temperatures. That’s great for flavour and vapour production, but it can also result in the almost instant death of the coil if its wick isn’t completely saturated with e-liquid when you vape. That’s because virtually all vape coils have cotton wicks, and if you touch cotton with a red-hot heating element – you guessed it! – the cotton burns. There’s no way to fix a burned wick, and it ruins a coil’s flavour forever. To ensure that you won’t burn the wick when using a new coil for the first time, you need to prime the coil by putting a bit of e-liquid on each of the openings where you can see the coil’s white cotton wick poking through. Send a bit of e-liquid down the coil’s top opening as well. You might need to do this more than once. When the wick is properly primed, you should no longer see any dry cotton when examining the coil. You can now install the coil and fill the tank. Let the tank stand for at least five minutes before vaping. When you’re ready to begin using the new coil, set your mod to a lower power level than the wattage at which you’d normally vape. Take a quick puff and wait several seconds before vaping again. If the coil seems to be working properly, you can start increasing your mod’s power level gradually until you reach your usual wattage.
Even if you prime and install a new coil properly, the flavour still won’t be perfect until you’ve drained the tank once or twice, and the new coil break-in period is the reason for that. So, what’s actually happening when you break in a new coil? To understand the break-in process, it’s helpful to think about the conditions under which vape coils are manufactured. The manufacturers of vaping products aren’t the ones producing the organic cotton and heating wire or mesh strips; they’re taking those raw materials and making finished products from them. It’s unlikely that most manufacturers of vape coils are even producing the stainless-steel enclosures themselves; they’re getting everything from outside factories and assembling the finished goods. That’s how most manufacturing works in China. Now, do you think that the factories making vape coils are taking the stainless enclosures, heating wire and cotton and washing all of those materials before manufacturing the coils? That’s highly unlikely. It’s far more likely that vape coils are assembled and packaged with trace lubricants and other manufacturing residue still present in the finished products. When you break in a new coil, you’re effectively using e-liquid to wash the machine residue off the coil. Propylene glycol in particular is an excellent solvent and cleaner, and once you’ve drained your tank a couple of times, you’ll start to get the ideal flavour from the coil. There’s just one problem with this process. If you’re washing away manufacturing residue by vaping, that means you’re potentially inhaling that residue. Isn’t there a cleaner and safer way to break in a new coil? As a matter of fact, there is – and it requires less effort than you might think.
There is a very simple and straightforward way to remove the machine residue from a new coil before you use it. All that you need to do is give the coil a quick cleaning. When you clean your new coils, the one thing you’ll have to remember is that you can’t use a coil while it’s still wet because water conducts electricity and can therefore potentially cause a short circuit. After you clean your coils, you’ll need to leave them out to air dry for about 24 hours before using them. To prevent the drying process from hampering your vaping routine, you might consider cleaning and drying an entire box of coils before you actually need them. That way, when you’re ready to discard the coil you’re using, you’ll have another coil that’s ready to go. To pre-clean a new coil and remove the manufacturing residue, simply drop the coil – or several coils – into a pan with some distilled water. Place the pan on a stovetop and turn on the heat until the water begins to simmer. There’s no need to boil the water; just hold it at a low simmer for about 15 minutes. Allow the water to cool before removing the coils and leaving them out to dry. When the coils are completely dry, they’re ready to use. You can also use this coil cleaning process to clean gunky coils that you would otherwise throw away. The heat and gentle agitation combine to break up the e-liquid residue, revealing the clean metal of the coil underneath and restoring the coil’s original performance and flavour. You can usually clean and reuse a coil several times before the flavour quality begins to degrade permanently.
There are two different ways of vaping. You can use a device with pre-filled cartridges or pods, or you can use a device that you fill yourself. If you’re on the fence about which type of device to use, we can tell you that it’s a lot more fun to use a refillable device. Filling your own pods or tanks means that you can choose from hundreds of different e-liquid flavours rather than the few that are available for any one e-cigarette with pre-filled pods. Owning a refillable vaping device, though, means that you’ll need to do a little maintenance from time to time – and that maintenance comes in the form of replacing your atomizer coil periodically. As you’ll soon learn, replacing a vape coil isn’t particularly difficult. Even if the thought of replacing a part in an electronic device makes you feel a bit nervous, you’ll find that replacing an atomizer coil becomes second nature very quickly. In this article, we’re going to do to things. We’re going to explain how to replace a vape coil in the three most common types of vaping devices. More importantly, though, we’re going to teach you how to replace an atomizer coil the right way. Let’s begin!
The reason why it’s so important to replace a vape coil the right way is because of the way atomizer coils work. Inside the coil, a cotton pad is wrapped around a metal heating wire. Under normal circumstances, when a piece of cotton touches an active heating element, it’s going to burn. The only thing preventing that from happening in a vape coil is the fact that the cotton is saturated with e-liquid. Instead of burning the cotton, the heat of the atomizer coil vaporises the e-liquid. Replacing a vape coil properly will ensure the wick is wet from the very first time you use the coil. Otherwise, there’s a chance that your first puff could burn the wick, ruining the coil forever. If you’ve ever experienced an unpleasant burning sensation every time you used a particular coil – and you resolved the problem by replacing the coil – there’s a good chance that the coil’s wick was burned. The goal is to prevent that from happening.
As you use a vape coil, residue begins to form on the coil’s heating surface. The residue comes from your e-liquid; some flavourings are more prone to leaving residue behind than others. The sweetener sucralose, in particular, causes residue to form on an atomizer coil very quickly. When that happens, the flavour produced by the coil begins to change. A note of burned sugar begins to cover the subtle notes in your e-liquid, and after a while, everything tastes like overcooked caramel. That’s when it’s time to change your coil. Are you curious about what you can do to make your vape coils last longer? To get the longest life out of your coils, avoid e-liquids with sucralose. Nothing kills a vape coil more quickly.
The trick to ensuring that you won’t burn the wick when using a new vape coil for the first time is by priming the wick. Install the coil with the wick already wet to help ensure that the coil will quickly absorb e-liquid from the tank and won’t have any dry pockets that can lead to burning. Regardless of the type of vaping device you own, you should always prime new coils before installing them.
To prime a new coil, use the nozzle of a bottle of e-liquid to “paint” all of the wick openings on the side of the coil with vape juice. You should also add a bit of e-liquid through the coil’s top opening. If the wick still looks dry, keep adding e-liquid until the cotton appears damp. Once you’ve done that, you can install the coil and fill the tank. Note that while priming a coil helps the wick absorb e-liquid more quickly, you still shouldn’t use a new coil immediately after installing it. Fill the tank and wait several minutes for the wick to become completely saturated before you begin vaping.
In almost all sub-ohm tanks, you replace the coil through the bottom of the tank. When the tank is empty, remove it from your vape pen or mod and unscrew the tank’s bottom hardware. If you have a tank with a threaded coil, the coil will be attached to the tank’s hardware. Unscrew the coil and screw in a new one before reassembling the tank. If you have a tank with a push-pull coil, the coil will be inserted in the tank’s centre chimney. Pull the old coil out and push in a new one before reassembling the tank.
An all-in-one vaping device has a permanent tank that isn’t removable. In an all-in-one device, you usually replace the coil through the top of the tank. The coil is either attached to the underside of the tank’s top hardware, or it’s screwed directly into the threading at the top of the vaping device. Either way, you’ll need to remove the tank’s mouthpiece and top hardware to access the coil. Once you’ve done that, you can replace the coil by unscrewing the old one and screwing the new one in before replacing the tank’s top hardware. With some all-in-one devices, it’s possible to replace the coil while the tank still has e-liquid in it.
Pod vaping systems are designed to be as simple as possible, and that simplicity is evident in the coil replacement process. If your pod system has a replaceable atomizer coil, you’ll see the coil on the underside of the pod. After removing the pod from your device, simply pull the old coil out and push a new coil in.
You’ll have heard the word ‘priming’ a lot and might think it’s a drawn-out, complicated process. But it’s very simple once you know what to do.
In a nutshell, priming is when you soak – or saturate – the wicking material in your coil before you start vaping. If you’re unfamiliar with some of the phraseology used here, don’t worry – we clarify what we mean further down.
Let’s look at how to prime your coil and why it’s important.
This is a good place to start if you're fully up to speed with the terminology.
Broadly speaking, a coil is a piece of resistance wire wrapped around the wicking material of your electronic cigarette in a spiral shape. The image below visualises what we mean.
However, the coils of today come in numerous forms.
Many coils are now made from mesh, which is a perforated sheet of metal, and many are dual or triple coils, meaning they’re made up of two or three spiralled coils. This design helps to provide a greater heating area, resulting in more vapour.
When you fire up your vaping device, the battery inside provides power to the coil, which then heats the e liquid inside and turns it into vapour.
A coil is also known as an atomiser head. So whenever you hear or read this term, remember – an atomiser head and coil are the same things.
Coils are also called atomiser heads because both terms refer to the heating element within an e-cigarette. An atomiser is the part of your vaping device that’s responsible for producing vapour and flavour from your device and it’s made up of five parts, one of which is the coil.
As the coil is the heart of the atomiser (as you’ll see above), it’s commonly referred to as the atomiser head.
Coils, or atomiser heads, don’t last forever and need to be replaced when they’ve reached the end of their shelf life. We explore this point in more detail further down.
To expand on what we wrote in the introduction, to ‘prime the coil’ means to soak its cotton-wicking head with e liquid. (As a side note, the wicking head is typically made from Japanese organic cotton).
You’ll typically do this when using a new vaping device for the first time.
Here’s a step-by-step guide on how to prime your coil:
This handy video from Mixology Vape shows how to prime a coil using three different devices.
Once you’ve primed your coil, we recommend leaving it to soak for at least ten minutes before you vape. While waiting, you could take a couple of ‘priming puffs’.
Priming puffs are where you inhale without pressing the fire button on your device to ensure your coils are properly primed. When you take a primer puff, you’re drawing e liquid into the coil.
Take a couple of quick hits by drawing on the mouthpiece quickly without inhaling the resulting vapour. You don’t need to take more than a couple of hits, or you could flood the coil. Doing this will ensure you don’t apply too much heat to the wicking when you fire up your device.
If your device features a variable wattage mode, it’s a good idea to use a low output for the first few draws after priming a new coil.
When you prime your coil, it can take several minutes for the wicking material to become saturated.
As we wrote above, you should wait at least ten minutes before vaping, but you may want to wait for up to half an hour, depending on the coils and e liquids you’re using. Always consult the instructions for your device or replacement atomiser heads before you prime your coils.
You’ll find that thinner e liquids that are high in propylene glycol (PG) are absorbed more quickly than thicker e liquids which are high in vegetable glycerine (VG).
You only need to prime your coil before you fire up your vaping device for the first time or if you’ve changed your coil. If neither of these scenarios applies to you, then you don’t need to prime your coil.
If you don’t prime your coil, you’ll most likely experience an unpleasant burnt taste when you inhale. This taste is caused by your heated coil burning the dry areas of your device’s wicking material. When this burning happens, the burnt material will continue to impact the taste of your e liquid.
Burnt cotton releases chemicals that taste a bit like burnt toast. These chemicals are not good for you, and you shouldn’t inhale them.
Unfortunately, if you haven’t primed your coil and your wicking material becomes burnt, you can’t do anything to eliminate that burnt taste. You need to discard your coil and install a coil replacement.
From time to time, you may find that your coil isn’t primed, even though you’ve waited an appropriate amount of time before vaping. This could be because the coil you have installed is defective – some are "dead on arrival". In this instance, you’ll need to either notify the manufacturer within 24 hours of your coils arriving or buy a replacement.
As well as not priming your coil, you can also ‘over prime’ your coil by filling it with too much e liquid. This term is also known as ‘flooding’, as there’s more e liquid in your coil than the wicking material can absorb.
If your coil is flooded, your device will give off a gurgling or spitting sound when you fire up your device, and the vape will be sticky and leaky.
You can solve this problem by flicking your device to expel the excess juice from the coil and mouthpiece. Do this outdoors or into a sink to avoid flicking e liquid onto your furniture or carpet.
You'll notice that your juice doesn't taste as good at some point, and you'll experience burnt or dry hits. These are signs that your coil is coming to the end of its life and needs replacing.
How often you replace your coil depends on your usage and device, but the general rule of thumb is one to four weeks. The recommended time between replacements varies massively, depending on who you speak to and which articles you read.
As the priming process takes a while (as we covered above), you should ideally have more than one tank or pod at your disposal. You can then vape using your backup while your coil is priming. You can also choose a convenient time to change your coil rather than being forced to act immediately.
You can enjoy a hassle-free vaping life by choosing a disposable device or an e-cigarette with disposable pods. You won’t have to devote time to topping up or changing coils. Disposable devices and pods are pre-filled with e liquid, so their coils will already be primed and ready to use.
If you need to buy new coils, check out our full UK range. Whatever you’re looking for, we’ve got coils from the world’s leading brands, including Aspire, Innokin, SMOK, and many more. Click on the button below to get your hands on the best coils on the market.
Vape Coil Guides
If you have recently set up an account and find that you can’t login, the most likely explanation is that there was a typo in your email address. The first thing to try is to request a password reminder. If the reminder doesn't arrive within about 10 minutes, it is very likely that we don't have your correct email address.
In this event you will need to either create a new account or contact us stating as many details as you can such as your name, address, approximate date you signed up and correct email address. We'll do our best to locate your existing account and update it for you.
Reminder emails are normally sent immediately but can take up to 10 minutes to reach you. If you’ve waited 10 minutes and the email still hasn’t arrived, we suggest you check that the email hasn’t ended up in your spam or junk folder. If you can’t find the email, it could be that when you created your account, you entered your email address incorrectly.
If this is the case, the easiest thing to do is to create a new account as your actual email address won’t have been registered on our system. If, however, you’re looking to check on an existing order, you’ll need to contact us and we will endeavour to locate your account.
If your order arrived incomplete or you find that the contents are incorrect, please notify us immediately stating your order number and contact details. We will endeavour to rectify the problem as quickly as possible.
Please contact us immediately stating your order number and contact details, should you receive damaged goods. We may ask you to supply an image of the items concerned so that we can take up the issue with the carrier. If you contact us later than 14 days after receiving the goods, we may not be able to assist you.
You do not need to create an account to complete your order. However, if you create an account with vapekit.co.uk, checkout will be quicker next time you order. In addition, you can take advantage of our reorder service and accumulate reward points to benefit from savings on future orders.
If you have clicked to add a product to your virtual basket and it has not been added, this could be because there are variants of the product to choose from and you haven’t made your selection. Variants include nicotine strengths, kit colours and coil resistances. Once you have made your selections, you should be able to add your choices to your basket.
It is not possible to complete your order unless you have entered the required personal details. You will also need to select your desired delivery method, enter the security code for your payment card and check the box confirming that you have accepted our terms and conditions. When you attempt to complete an order and have omitted any required details, the area of the form that you need to complete will be highlighted in red.
Log in to your account and you will be directed to your dashboard where your orders are listed. You can view the details and status of any order you have made. If you don’t have an account or can’t find the information you need, contact us stating your order number.
You can repeat any order you have made previously. Simply log in to your account to access your dashboard. View your orders to check which you would like to repeat and then click “reorder”. The items will be automatically added to your virtual basket and you will be directed to checkout where you can make your payment and redeem reward points.
If you would like to cancel an order, please email us on support@vapekit.co.uk as soon as possible. We despatch the vast majority of orders the same day if placed before 4.00pm. If your order has already been dispatched, you can return the items to us within 30 days, unopened and in a re-saleable condition, to receive a refund.
If you have just placed an order and wish to change the address, please contact us as soon as possible. If your order has already been despatched, we won’t be able to take action until the package has been returned to us. We can then despatch it to the correct address.
If you have moved house or wish to change your default delivery address, you can amend your details by logging in to your vapekit.co.uk account.
You can make your payment using the following credit and debit cards:
You can also pay using your PayPal account.
All card payments are processed via Opayo, one of the largest card processing companies in the UK. All transactions are fully encrypted and 100% secure. Your card company may perform additional fraud prevention checks such as Verified by Visa or Mastercard's 3D Secure before authorising the payment. Payments made via PayPal are also fully encrypted and 100% secure.
If your card has been declined, it could be that you have entered your card details incorrectly or a required filed has been missed. Please input the details again making sure to complete all the required fields including your name as it appears on the card, the card number, expiry date and CVV number. Check that you have entered all details correctly, and that you have sufficient funds in your account, and try again.
Cards may also be declined if the name and billing address you have entered do not match the information held by your bank or card provider (see more below). Please make sure that the correct billing name and address are being displayed on the payment page (you may need to scroll down to see these if you're using a phone.
Occasionally, overly zealous fraud protection by your bank or provider can also see your card declined. If this is the case you may receive a text message or email asking to confirm that the transaction is being made by you. This normally only happens with higher value transactions. If this is the case, please contact your bank or card provider.
Other things to check
When our payment processor, Opayo, processes your transaction they will check that the name and address details you have input as your billing address matches what the bank has on file for you. Sometimes however these details can get out of synch, for example if you've not yet advised your bank of the move or, you have, and they've not provided Opayo with the latest details. We've had instances where this data can be out date by weeks, even months.
If you suspect this could be stopping your payment from going through please try updating your billing address to your old/new address as appropriate whilst keeping the shipping details as your current address.
If you're ordering goods in the UK and the payment processor notices that you appear to have an IP address outside of the UK they may well reject the transaction suspecting it could be fraudulent. All you need to do is turn off your VPN and you should be able to place your order. The only exception is when you've tried to put the transaction through numerous times and this triggers an additional fraud alert. In this instance if you just wait a few hours before trying again this should solve the problem.
On rare occasions, when checking your bank statement, it might appear that you have been charged twice for your order. This is because when you place our order, Worldpay automatically seeks authorisation from your bank or your card provider. When they do this, the funds to pay for the order are reserved.
Very rarely, the Worldpay system can create more than one authorisation, reserving the funds for the transaction twice. Such authorisations may remain in place for up to 3 days and could appear on your statement. However, funds will only be withdrawn once to complete your transaction. Any additional authorisations will disappear and the funds relating to them will be available to you again.
If you believe that you have been charged twice, wait three days and check your statement. If you still find that there is an issue, contact your bank or card provider and request that any pending transactions are removed from your account. If your bank advises you that more than one payment has been made, please contact us and we will investigate the problem immediately.
We stock over 100 brands and we are continually expanding our range. If the brands and products that you would like to order do not appear on the site, please feel free to let us know. We will endeavour to add these to our range. However, this might not be possible as certain brands are exclusive to particular retailers or aren’t available in the UK.
Our range is extensive but we have worked hard to ensure that our site is as easy to navigate as possible. If you can’t find what you are looking for by navigating to the brand or product category, try using the search bar or the available filters. You might discover that the item you want is there, after all! You could also find appealing alternatives.
E liquids can vary in colour for a number of reasons. Some manufacturers choose to add colouring to their liquids to create an attractive looking product (for example the legendary Heisenberg by Vampire Vape which is blue like the product produced by chemist Walter White in the awesome TV show Breaking Bad). A great many liquids however are clear, or display a slight yellow or brown colour. You will often find that the stronger the nicotine strength of a liquid the darker the shade will be, as nicotine has a slight colouration to it and this tends to darken over time. If a liquid has been exposed to air for any period of time it may also appear slightly darker in colour.
So, you could find that you buy several liquids that are exactly the same brand, strength etc yet look slightly different. This happens all the time and is nothing to worry about. It could be that the liquids are from a different batch and have been steeped for slightly longer, or are very slightly older. Either way, these factors should have zero impact on flavour.
If, of course, you feel that the flavour of your liquid has been affected in some way and you’re not happy with any purchase from us, please feel free to submit a ticket and we’ll be more than happy to help.
Some e liquid brands feature lids which spin freely despite the fact the seal remains intact. Vampire Vape in particular are known for this. If you hold a bottle in your hand and twist the cap you’ll notice that it spins freely but, in order to actually open the bottle, you’ll need to push down on the top and twist the lid quite hard in order to break the seal - and you’ll hear a cracking sound when the seal is opened.
Obviously, it is theoretically possible that a batch could be faulty, and we have encountered this once in the past but it is extremely rare. 99 times out of 100 you’ll find the seal is still intact even if it might feel like it isn’t.
If by any chance your were to receive a bottle of e liquid from us where the seal wasn’t intact, we will of course exchange it for you no questions asked. Just submit a ticket with the relevant information and we’ll take care of it for you immediately.
You may experience a variety of issues with vaping your eliquids, particularly if you are new to vaping. These include suffering from a dry throat, experiencing headaches and feeling that your flavour isn’t sufficiently intense. Please visit our Troubleshooting page where we highlight most of the issues you might be experiencing and how to solve them.
No equipment is infallible and neither are vapers! If your device is giving you problems, it could be faulty but the problems are more likely to be the result of operator error! Before contacting us to report a fault, we recommend visiting our Troubleshooting page where we highlight common issues with ecigs and how to solve them.
Elf Bars are all the rage among vapers right now. These brightly-coloured devices are everywhere – from the local park to the local pub, someone is vaping them. And they’re not going away any time soon, as sales continue to go through the roof.
But, inevitably, the more popular these pocket-friendly devices become, the more questions will arise from people who are unfamiliar with them. If you’re one of those people, you’ve come to the right place. We’ve covered the 10 most common and essential questions about the Elf Bar below.
Elf Bar Best Flavours
