Electronic cigarettes or e-cigs, just like any other piece of equipment, need regular maintenance and cleaning if you want to keep using them without any hassles.
The problem with most of these types of devices is that people let debris and resin build up quickly. After all, if you're enjoying some nice tobacco or marijuana, your prized priority is probably the buzz that you're trying to get. Properly cleaning your vaporizer device, water pipe, or any other smoking equipment is probably not high on your agenda. Fair enough.
However, you have to understand that if you want to get your full money’s worth from any smoking, vaporizing, or electronic cigarette device that you buy, you have to know how to clean your equipment properly. A lot of users would say that cleaning equipment is just one of those things that they'll get to when they have the time.
The High Price of Dirty Vaporizers
You have to understand that modern strains of marijuana are very sticky. They have a lot of buds and some strains are so tightly bred that they are basically all kief or the sticky portion of marijuana flowers. These are the parts of the plant that is just so packed with THC that you don't need to inhale much of it to get blown out of your mind.
A little goes a long way but this also means if you allow the debris from your plant material to pile up, you might just end up with a useless hunk of metal, plastic, and steel parts.
Depending on how much you vaporize, this might come sooner rather than later. It's always a good idea to familiarize yourself with proper e-cig cleaning. It's not as hard as you think.
Cleaning Your E-cig Doesn't Have to be a Hassle
Like with most things in life, if you think something is going to be a chore or is going to be difficult, it will. It all boils down to our expectations. I’m sure this definitely applies to homework, jobs, responsibilities around the house, and this definitely is the truth when it comes to cleaning your vaporizer devices, vape pens, electronic cigarettes, bongs, water pipes, hookahs, you name it.
You have to have a plan. It doesn't have to be elaborate. It doesn't have to be overly complicated. There's no need to overdo it. You just have to do it. The good news is that the more you clean your stuff, the better you get at it. It takes less and less time.
Also, you start developing some game plan or some sort of sequence where you don't have to spend too much time and effort making sure that each and every draw you get from your vaporizer is nice and clean. It becomes a ritual eventually. You just have to do it.
What follows is a quick guide on how to take the hassle out of cleaning your electronic cigarette or of vaporizer device.
Make Sure You Start with the Manual
The first thing that you need to do is to avoid the temptation to think that just because you have used many vaporizer devices before or electronic cigarettes of different brands of models that you pretty much know how everything works.
Please understand that just because you know how something works doesn’t necessarily mean that you know how to pull it apart, properly clean it, and put it back together again. While you can try to do those things, if you put them together wrong or if you change setting or you move something that you shouldn’t be moving or clean something that you shouldn’t be cleaning, this might seriously affect the product life of your e-cigarette unit.
Before you know it, it's no longer working as efficiently and as effectively as before. This can be very expensive because eventually, you will start replacing these models when you didn't have to.
You just have to look at the manual and see which parts can be taken apart and cleaned. Other parts, you just have to leave alone. Maybe the best you could do to them is to wipe down their surfaces and make sure they don’t stink. That’s pretty much all you could do with those parts.
There are other parts, however, that you can pull apart, put in some sort of cleaning solution, leave overnight or over the course of several hours, and then fish out, wipe down, dry, and then put together again.
You have to know which part is which. Don’t automatically assume that just because you can take apart certain components, that these can then be dunked into some sort of solvent or liquid and properly cleaned. This might cause a lot of problems if they weren’t designed for that type of cleaning. So, always consult the manual.
Developer a Sequence
Now that you have taken apart pieces of the electronic cigarette that you can clean, the next part involves cleaning time. There are really two ways to clean electronic cigarette parts. You can either dip them in a cleaning solution or just plain water and soap or you have to wipe down.
I know most people would rather just take something apart, drop it in a soapy water solution and let the liquid take care of their problem. However, this is not always possible. For certain parts, a little elbow grease from you is required. I know it's a hassle but that's the way it is.
Do yourself a big favor. If you think that the electronic cigarette that you bought is just too much bother when it comes time to clean it, you might want to buy another model later on. The next time you are on the market for a new electronic cigarette, keep in could mind ease of cleaning.
Things are not always clear-cut. Some models are actually designed from the ground up to be modular, easy to clean, easy to wipe down, and doesn't require special equipment. Others have a lot more details going for them and you might have to put in a lot more effort cleaning those units.
What's the Big Deal about Cleaning and Maintaining Your Electronic Cigarette Anyway?
Please understand that whenever you buy any kind of product, it's very easy to throw good money out the bag. If you want to waste a lot of money buying stuff, and I’m not just talking about products, consumables, or equipment, I’m talking any kind of product, it would be very easy to do that.
Basically, you look at things that you buy as commodities. If you buy a pack of mashed potatoes, once you eat those mashed potatoes, you head back to Costco to grab yourself another package. That’s how it works. It's basically consumable. It is not intended to last a long time but, unfortunately, even when it comes to equipment, a lot of people have the mindset that they are disposable.
So, you’re puffing along on your vaporizer or electronic cigarette and after a while, it gets gummed up and you just think that it’s too much hassle to clean it so you buy another model and then you do the same thing over and over again.
What if I told you that all those purchases do add up? Each electronic cigarette might not set you back all that much. Most people can spare $50 dollars for a unit.
However, if you burn through several of those electronic cigarettes in a course of a year, that can add up to a pretty penny. It’s not unusual for really heavy vapers to spend upwards of $500 or more every single year and I’m just talking about the electronic cigarette unit.
This doesn't even factor in how much it cost them to buy stuff that they load into their vaporizer. Marijuana, tobacco leaves, and other herbal substances cost quite a bit of money. However, I’m sure you priced that in already.
Still, most vaporizer or electronic cigarettes users are just taken back by how much it costs to replace their electronic cigarettes over the course of a year. Even though electronic cigarettes just vaporize the liquid, there’s still a lot of potential for debris buildup and other effects that come about because you just refuse to clean your device.
With everything else being equal, you can probably go a much longer time without cleaning your electronic cigarette. This can’t be said of vaporizers because when you apply heat to produce vapor in a vaporizer, there will be debris create. This is especially true if you’re dealing with really sticky bud.
So, whether you’re using e-juice to get a buzz or you’re vaporizing the real thing, you have to get into the habit of properly disassembling, wiping down, dipping, and otherwise cleaning your device. Otherwise, the cost of your equipment will pile up sooner than you expect and this can set you back quite a bit.
Also, understand that whenever you’re buying any kind of product, you have to factor in total use value. Total use value is a simple calculation. You take the price that you paid for the product, divide it by the number of times you used it. That's the actual price you're paying for the product.
For example, if I got a laptop computer and I paid $1000 for it and I used it for about a thousand days, my total use value for my computer is a dollar a day.
If I bought another computer and I paid only $200 for it but it only lasted me fifty days, I’m actually paying four times for that seemingly “cheaper” computer than my thousand-dollar unit. You have to think along these lines when calculating the value of the stuff you buy because if you don't, you might end up with a very expensive habit.
You probably are thinking that vaporizing all sorts of stuff and having to buy a lot of e-liquids already makes for an expensive habit. Well, wait. It can get even worse, and the worst part to all of this is it’s invisible unless you choose to invest the proper time inadequately cleaning your equipment.
Check out this great video on how to clean an analog vape, the Hippie Pipe. It's a great step-by-step tutorial on how to properly disassemble and clean your Hippie Pipe!