You could make the argument that no piece of vape hardware is more vital to the quality of your vaping experience than your atomizer coil. The efficiency of the coil is what determines the vapour production of your device in large part, and the coil’s shape and materials have a large influence on the flavour quality that you experience when you vape.
While vape pens and vape mods haven’t really changed fundamentally over the past several years, manufacturers of vaping hardware have continued to pour money into the development of new coil technologies – and that’s resulted in the creation of some important new products.
If you haven’t been reading the latest news over the past few months, you could have missed an important new technology with the potential to change your vaping experience forever. What are some of those technologies? Here are just a few of the latest technologies that the vaping industry has developed for improving flavour and coil life.
Aspire U-Tech
While it’s true that vapour production is a major influence on the flavour quality that you experience when vaping, people often have a limit as to how far they’re willing to go to improve flavour by improving vapour production. The more vapour your device produces, after all, the more e-liquid you’ll use. In other words, the further you delve into the world of cloud chasing, the more you’ll pay to vape. It’s a far more economical strategy to use a coil design that focuses the vapour on your palate. That’s because using a direct-to-lung vaping device isn’t the most effective strategy for flavour; all of the vapour goes down your throat before you have an opportunity to taste it.
Devices like the Aspire PockeX use Aspire’s new U-Tech coil technology to deliver bold flavours without wasting your e-liquid. The technology is designed to work with vape pens and tanks that use top-positioned airflow vents. Air enters through the vents at the top of the tank before traveling through U-shaped channels that direct the air down through the coil’s outer section and back up through the centre. Aspire U-Tech concentrates the air flowing through the coil and delivers a supremely focused flavour straight to your palate.
Alternative Wick Fibres
Nothing can ruin the flavour of your vape more quickly than a burned wick – and considering the fact that cotton is the most popular material for vape wicks, burned wicks are unfortunately quite common. If a cotton wick is dry – which can easily happen if you vape at too high a wattage or forget to keep your tank full – it can burn easily. People have described the flavour of a dry wick as being similar to that of “vaping a burned t-shirt” – definitely not good. Clearly, there’s a large potential market for a wick material that transports e-liquid as efficiently as cotton but doesn’t burn as easily.
With that need in mind, the manufacturers of the vaping industry have begun to supplement the cotton in their wicks with a variety of alternative materials that last longer and are more resistant to heat. Those materials include ceramic and wood pulp along with various natural fibres from flax, hemp, seaweed and tea plants. These alternative fibres are carefully cleaned and stripped of plant waxes and other contaminants before they’re used in the construction of vape coils, so you can expect them to deliver a flavour that’s just as pure as what you get with a cotton wick. You may find, however, that these alternative wick materials can resist much harsher treatment without burning.
Mesh Coils
The most important new vape technology of the past few years, without a doubt, is the mesh coil. Over the years, people have demanded progressively more and more out of their vaping hardware. With traditional vape coils made from wound wire, though, the manufacturers finally reached a limit. It became impossible to deliver the huge clouds that people wanted without undesirable side effects like loud popping and spitting during operation. To make matters worse, many of the best cloud chasing coils only worked with vape mods capable of operating at well over 100 watts.
Mesh coils have taken the traditional construction of vape coils and turned it on its head by replacing the wound spiral of wire with a strip of metal mesh that’s rolled into a cylinder. Some coils even stretch that paradigm further by using multiple strips of mesh rolled into several cylinders. A strip of mesh has as much surface area as a traditional wound wire – sometimes even more – but the mesh has significantly lower mass than a wound wire and therefore can operate efficiently with significantly less power. Mesh coils also have superior wick-to-wire contact compared to wound coils. They tend to last longer and are also less likely to pop and spit.
Mesh coils are remarkably better than traditional vape coils in almost every way, in fact, and that’s why almost every current vape tank either comes with mesh coils by default or has mesh coils available.
Automatic Wick Priming
One of the most interesting new vape technologies of the past few years actually has more to do with the firmware of recent vaping devices than with the hardware itself. Manufacturers have learned that you can make a vaping device deliver a more accurate flavour – or sometimes accentuate different notes in an e-liquid – by tinkering slightly with the device’s power delivery. Some manufacturers, for instance, have begun to release vape mods that use alternating current for their power delivery rather than the traditional direct current that most vaping devices use.
One of the most interesting new developments in vape mod firmware is a new technology that causes the device to continue delivering a low current to the coil after you’ve released the fire button at the end of a puff. The current is sufficient to warm the coil, but it’s not enough to vaporize the e-liquid. The brief moment of reduced-current output encourages the wick to absorb more e-liquid, ensuring that each puff is as flavourful as it can be.