Vaping for Beginners – Cleaning Tanks, Atomizers and Coils
Read a few vape forum threads about “cleaning your atomizer” and you could almost believe you need a PhD to do it properly. It’s pretty amazing what people come up with. Even more entertaining are the warnings you see in some shops: “Don’t clean your coils!” Who decided that? Everything you’re about to read is based on my own experience – you can follow it, or of course do things completely differently.
Cleaning tanks and atomizers
Let’s leave the coils aside for a moment. Some people soak the individual parts of their atomizers in vodka, others simply rinse them under running water or put the parts in the cutlery basket of the dishwasher. Apparently, there are also people who go out and buy small sterilising devices like the ones used in beauty salons, or use ultrasonic cleaners from the jewellery and watch industry to make their tanks shine.
As we’ve already pointed out, e-liquid is made from ingredients that – exactly – greatly extend the shelf life of products, so germs don’t really stand a chance. The main ingredients in e-liquids have a preserving effect. Have you ever had toothpaste go bad because of germs? And if you have, the germs would be on the mouthpiece – and they’d be your germs. Fair enough: in times of plague and cholera, I’d see the point of sterilising devices. But outside a plague epidemic, in my opinion, running tap water or the dishwasher will do the job just fine. Vodka can make sense if a flavour stubbornly lingers, but even then I’d rinse the parts with water after soaking them in spirits.
Cleaning coils
If you vape sweet flavours, you’ll notice this quickly: if you’ve recently had a tasty banana pudding in there and then fill the cleaned tank, still using the banana pudding coil, with espresso, you’ll end up with something more like banana cappuccino. That doesn’t necessarily have to taste bad, but it can spoil your morning coffee e-liquid.
Even if manufacturers and some shops like to claim otherwise – yes, you can clean stock coils too! It works. How? I rinse the coil under running water and then leave it to dry for several days. In short, what really doesn’t work is taking the coil out, washing it and putting it straight back in. You simply won’t enjoy your e-liquid that way. Inside the coil there’s cotton, or sometimes another type of wick, and if it’s wet, it will just water down your e-liquid – or the coil won’t work because it’s too wet. So always let coils dry properly. In winter, you can place the coils on a towel on the radiator, or in summer on a sunny windowsill.
What you shouldn’t really do with stock coils is a so-called dry burn – firing them dry. This is mainly done in the rebuildable scene to burn off scorched e-liquid residue from the heating wires. But when dry burning, you should be able to see the wires and remove the cotton – if you can’t see anything, it’s better to leave it alone, otherwise the coil will be ruined.
In short: if you want to use a coil that’s basically still new with a different e-liquid and get rid of the old flavour, just give it a try. In particularly stubborn cases, you can simply vape peppermint or similar strong e-liquid flavours through the coil – that banana note is guaranteed to disappear from the coil pretty quickly.
