If you’ve been vaping for a while, you may have heard the term “dry burning” being thrown around here and there. You may be wondering what dry burning is and whether or not you need to do it.

Dry burning is basically firing your atomizer coil with no wick or liquid in order to burn off any residue that may have accumulated through use, thereby cleaning the coil and improving the flavour of the vape.

What you need to know about dry burning

Dry burning is for rebuildables

If you use pre-made coil assemblies, dry burning is generally not recommended (although there may be a few exceptions to this). The idea behind pre-made coil assemblies is ease of use, convenience and disposability. Once the coil has gunked up, you throw it out and insert a new one. You can dry burn a pre-made coil but you probably won’t like the results!

Dry burning is no substitute for a fresh coil

At best, dry burning may give you a day or two of extra use, unless you get into the habit of doing it every day, in which case it does significantly increase its lifespan. If you're like me and prefer the "set and forget" method of using your coils, the metal of the coil itself will eventually degrade with use. Therefore dry burning won't give you much benefit when your coil is getting long in the tooth.

Dry burning can be dangerous

There is the real risk of spitting hot fluid and even fire when dry burning, therefore you should follow all precautions and do it sensibly and responsibly.

How to dry burn your coils

Clear your space

As said previously, dry burning may involve combustion products. Therefore make sure you’re in a ventilated space away from any easily combustible materials. Yes of course you’re a tough guy (or gal), but make sure you don’t breathe the vapour in and be careful you don’t burn your hands or fingers. 

Remove your wick

Unless you’re using silica wick or SS mesh, the first thing you need to do is remove the old wick and throw it out. Even with silica, I would still recommend removing it. Dry burning with a cotton or rayon wick still inserted will burn it and can cause damage to your deck.

Check for residue prior to burning

Make sure you have no hanger-onners still attached, otherwise these will burn to the coil and be very difficult to remove, kind of rendering the whole exercise pointless.

Fire your mod

Just like when burning in a new coil, press the fire button and hold it down until there is no vapour coming off the coil and the coil glows red hot. Remember, when you start this, a lot of crap will come spitting off, so be careful!

Check again for any stubborn residue

Make sure there are no sneaky bits of gunk or fluff hanging on for dear life (as you may notice in the above photo). If you can’t see any but want to make absolutely certain, you can rinse the coil or even soak it in isopropyl alcohol overnight, but then again why not just build a new one? Each to their own.

Fire your mod (again)

Once you’re sure the coil is residue free, fire again to ensure the coil heats up from the inner wraps outwards and that there is no flame, smoke or vapour. 

And there you go – you’ve just dry-burned and cleaned your coil and are ready to re-wick!

Remember – don’t dry-burn your little Ego atty, best results are achieved if done daily, and make sure you take due care when dry-burning. Have fun!

If you haven't read our last blog post on all things vaping and electricity, please do so first before reading this post, as it contains information vital to understanding this one (I was tempted to call it "voltage and wattage and amps - ohm my!" - but I'm glad I didn't).

As we discussed in this blog post, mech mods used to be the only way to draw high power for sub-ohm coils, but these days we have high-powered regulated mods to do that job, and most mech mod owners stick to them for aesthetic or sentimental reasons.

Mech mods are still highly popular, and still better than regulated mods for durability. However, because they are not regulated and don't have all that fancy circuitry, they are not as safe, and require a degree of knowledge to prevent battery or peripheral limb destruction.

With this in mind, let's take a look at some of the most important things you need to know about using a mech mod safely, so that your batteries - and peripheral limbs - keep functioning as long as the maker intended.

Batteries - it's all about the batteries

Ah, the good old electrochemical battery - first invented by Alessandro Volta in the year 1800, with only modest improvements in functionality since then. Yes, the chemicals have changed, they've gotten smaller, and slightly safer, but they really haven't changed all that much in the past two centuries.

Let's not go into all the ins and outs of it - if you're really curious about how batteries work there is ample information on the Internet. For our purposes, we know that batteries store electricity, our mods need electricity, therefore we need batteries to power our mods.

What you do need to know is which battery is the right battery to put in your mod.

Choosing the right battery

Mechanical mods don't have the circuitry that senses the resistance of the coil, adjusts the wattage and voltage, prevents short circuits or overheating. A mechanical mod simply has a switch that connects your battery directly to your atomizer. If your resistance is too low, or your battery not powerful enough, all sorts of nasty stuff can happen, both to your battery and to your peripheral limbs.

I'm going to go out on a limb (no pun intended!) and say the only batteries you should ever use are IMR Lithium Ion batteries. The chemistry of IMR batteries is a lot more stable, meaning they can handle a lot more stress, deal with a lot more heat and are less likely to become volatile.

The only question you need to answer then is: what size, and what capacity? 18350? 18650? 26650? 1600mAh? 2000mAh? 2500mAh?

In terms of size, this will simply come down to what your mod is designed to accommodate. 18650 is by far the most common, fitting in 22mm-type devices such as the Nemesis or in box mods such as this one. 26650 are wider and are usually seen in really thick stick mods like the Hades.

Capacity is where it gets a little more complicated. Just because a battery has a higher capacity in mAh, doesn't mean you'll get more current out of it!

Back before battery manufacturers clearly told us, it was important to calculate the maximum continuous discharge based on the battery's C-rating using a fairly complicated formula. In these more enlightened times, however, it's a simple case of reading the battery specs to see what the max discharge in amps is.

In short, you need a battery that is capable of pushing the amps you need for the resistance of your atomizer.

Maximum Continuous Discharge Current

You will generally pick your mod and battery setup based on the target resistance you are aiming for.

Remember that the lower the resistance of your coil, the more power you will need to draw from your battery, therefore you will be looking for the one with the highest max continuous discharge in amps.

Ohm's Law

Here is where you will need to use Ohm's law in determining how much current your desired setup is going to draw, and in choosing the right battery for the job.

The formula you will need to use is A=V/Ω.

Your typical 18650 battery when fully charged will draw 4.2V, dropping to around the 4.0V mark for the majority of its cycle.

Let's say you want to build a 0.5Ω coil.

4.2/0.5 = 8.4 amps when fully charged.

4.0/0.5 = 8 amps for the majority of its cycle.

Therefore you will need a battery that is capable of easily producing at least a continuous 8.4 amps before you can use your 0.5Ω coil.

Most good high drain IMR 18650s will pump around the 20amp mark, so you will be perfectly safe with one of those. But if dealing with your stealthy little 18350s, you will be paying close attention to the rated max continuous discharge before going ahead. You will always want to leave yourself substantial headroom - constantly pushing a battery to its maximum rated discharge current is not good for battery life or peripheral limb safety.

Building coils for your setup

Most of the time, you will purchase your mod and batteries first, then set about building coils to suit your equipment, having made sure you purchased a mod and batteries that can handle what you are aiming for. In this case, you definitely need the following equipment:

• Ohms tester - you need to make sure your coil is in the right resistance range before testing it on your battery.
• Multimeter - you need to make sure your battery's voltage is reading correctly and there are no shorts.

Other random safety tips

• Buy a battery charger with a full charge cutoff so you don't overcharge your batteries.
• Do not completely drain your batteries - as soon as they drop to 3.6V, recharge them.
• Do not short circuit your battery! It leads to nothing good, either for battery life or peripheral limbs.
• Do not invert your batteries! Refer above point for why not.
• Do not stack your batteries unless your mod supports stacking. Box mods that can take two or more batteries are wired to cope with it.
• Make sure your mod has adequate ventilation holes. If it doesn't - make some with a drill.
• Make sure your mod has a fire button lock feature. Unintentional and continuous firing is bad as per points 3 and 4 above.
• For extra safety, you can install a kick to control the watts or for short-circuit cutoff.

Hopefully I have armed you with enough information to save your batteries and peripheral limbs, and to ensure your mech mod days are filled with cloudy bliss! Keep reading below for some more useful info if you are planning on really pushing your mod to its limits.

Massively sub-ohm

In these days of nickel resistance wire, clapton coils and multi-coil atomizers, you may find the below table fairly useful.

You can find the excel sheet and input your own data here.