If you were a vaper about seven years ago, you would have seen a completely different world from the one that exists today. In those days, it often seemed as though everyone who vaped used a gigantic dual-battery mod designed for direct-to-lung inhaling and enormous cloud production. It was almost like the members of the vaping community wouldn’t take you seriously if you didn’t carry a personal fog machine in your pocket.
Today, though, the vaping landscape has changed dramatically. Thanks to the popularity of new product categories like pod systems and disposable vapes, mouth-to-lung vaping has come back in a big way. Most importantly – and this might be the reason why you searched for this article in the first place – thousands of people around the world are trading their powerful vape mods for smaller mouth-to-lung devices.
So, what’s the best MTL vape on the market today? Product trends change so quickly in vaping that anything we might recommend in this article is likely to be obsolete within a couple of months. Don’t just take a vape SEO expert’s word for it – we’re going to walk you through the process of choosing the best MTL vape for your needs regardless of what’s currently on the market.
What Is Mouth-to-Lung Vaping?
If you use the mouth-to-lung inhaling style, it means that you inhale the vapor in the same what that you’d inhale when smoking a cigarette – by drawing the vapor into your mouth before inhaling it into the lungs.
Why Is Mouth-to-Lung Vaping So Popular?
From reading the paragraph above, the first reason why MTL vaping is popular is probably immediately obvious to you – it’s popular because it feels like smoking. Although the direct-to-lung inhaling style is popular with cloud chasers, there are many vapers who don’t care about cloud production at all. They want vaping to feel as close to smoking as it possibly can because that’s what helps them avoid the temptation to buy cigarettes.
During the early days of vaping, MTL vaping devices didn’t offer nearly the level of performance that they do today – and if you’re going to use a device that produces small vapor clouds, you need to use a high-nicotine e-liquid. Unfortunately, the freebase nicotine e-liquid that was available in those days tended to cause throat irritation at high nicotine strengths, and that led people to switch to higher-output hardware and lower-strength e-liquids. For those people, DTL vaping wasn’t about cloud chasing – it was the only way they could get enough nicotine to feel satisfied. Nicotine salt e-liquid has changed that by eliminating throat irritation at high nicotine strengths, and that’s encouraged many people to switch to MTL vapes.
The other reason why MTL vaping has been so popular recently is that people are tired of spending a fortune on vaping. Today’s e-liquids are often very sweet – and although the sweet flavors do taste great, they’re horrible for vape coils. If you use a sweet e-liquid with a powerful sub-ohm vaping device, you may need to replace the coil in your tank every day or two. Your costs for e-liquid and replacement coils can get out of control very quickly. If you use a mouth-to-lung vape, you’ll consume less e-liquid, and your coils will last longer. It’s a much cheaper way to vape.
How to Choose the Best Mouth-to-Lung Vape
If you want to use a mouth-to-lung vape, you need to buy a kit specifically designed for the task. Many vape kits, however, include tanks designed for direct-to-lung vaping. If you take a DTL tank and try to convert it to an MTL tank by adjusting the airflow, you’re going to be very disappointed with the experience. Small devices like pod systems and vape pens are often the best MTL vapes.
How to Buy the Best MTL Tank
The thing that makes an MTL vape what it is isn’t really the device – it’s the tank. The device, after all, is just there to supply power. The tank is what provides the airflow and flavor characteristics, and those are the things that determine whether a vaping setup will provide a good MTL experience.
The most important quality of a mouth-to-lung tank is that it needs to have the ability to produce the airflow characteristics you want. Some people prefer an MTL tank with very tight airflow like a cigarette, and others prefer slightly freer airflow because that encourages the production of bigger vapor clouds. It’s common for the best MTL tanks to offer extremely fine airflow adjustments, and we suggest looking for a tank with that feature because people who prefer the MTL vaping style are often very picky about airflow.
How can you identify an MTL tank? The easiest way is by looking at the mouthpiece. An MTL tank will have a narrow mouthpiece that looks a little like the filter of a cigarette. It’ll also have small air vents because that’s the way to replicate the tight airflow characteristics of a cigarette. If a tank has a wide mouthpiece and large airflow vents, it’s not an MTL tank.
Can You Use a Mouth-to-Lung Tank with Any Vaping Device?
What if you’ve decided that mouth-to-lung vaping is for you, but you already own a vape mod that works perfectly fine? Why should you buy an entirely new vape kit if you already have a mod that works? Can’t you just buy an MTL tank and connect it to your current device?
In most cases, the answer to that question is “yes” because you can almost always connect any vape tank to any mod. You simply need to make sure that your vape mod can operate at the low wattage required by the tank. In some cases, a vape mod’s wattage floor may be higher than the recommended wattage for an MTL tank – but that’s not common.
A dual-battery vape mod might seem like overkill for a mouth-to-lung tank, and it might look a little strange with a tiny tank connected to it. On the bright side, though, you’ll enjoy excellent battery life thanks to the tank’s low wattage requirement.