6 Reasons Why Your Coil Keeps Burning Out
There’s nothing worse than the taste of a burnt coil. Here’s the 6 most likely reasons why your coils keep burning out and costing you your sanity.
- Chain Vaping
Taking multiple puffs one after another can cause your coil to burn out quicker. When you take several drags in a short period, you’re vaporising the eliquid that’s suspended in the cotton of the coil. It takes a bit of time for the eliquid to soak back into the cotton after each drag, so if you’re using the eliquid quicker than the coil can soak it up again, then it’s going to go dry and burn the cotton. This can happen more frequently in “sub-ohm” tanks because you’re often vaping at a higher wattage and the eliquid is getting used quicker.
- Eliquids With A Lot Of Sugar
There’s nothing like a sweet tasting eliquid, but the more sugar in an eliquid, the more likely it is to kill your coil. Sweeter eliquids will have a higher sugar content and when sugar is heated it will caramelise. While sugary eliquids shouldn’t burn your coil out instantly, they will gunk up the loops of wire and the cotton, making it impossible for fresh eliquid to soak back into the coil and be vaporised.
- Setting Your Wattage/Voltage Too High
Generally speaking you should set your wattage/voltage within the range of the manufacturer’s recommended limits. Although, we do think that some manufacturers are a bit ambitious with their recommended limits. Setting your wattage/voltage too high will create too much heat inside the coil and singe or burn the cotton next to the wire. Conversely, if you set your wattage or voltage too low then the temperature of the wire will not be high enough to vaporise the eliquid and it will leak and/or cause “spit-back”.
- Not Priming Your Coil
Priming a coil is essential for almost all coil types, but especially for sub-ohm coils. Priming a coil basically means you apply a small amount of eliquid directly onto the cotton inside the coil, either via the wicking holes or from the top if accessible. Without going too in-depth, thanks to fluid dynamics the eliquid in the cotton helps to pull more eliquid into the cotton and should eliminate most air pockets lingering inside the cotton.
- Using Thick Eliquid
We all love a great big cloud and that’s fine if you’re using a sub-ohm coil with large wicking holes, not so great if you’re using something with tiny wicking holes. This point is a bit controversial because VG (the chemical responsible for those dank clouds) is thicker when it’s colder and thinner when it’s heated. So, technically if the tank has heated up a bit then wicking shouldn’t be an issue. But we’ve found that high VG eliquids in a MTL (mouth-to-lung) tank is a no go.
- Not Refilling Your Tank
This 1 is pretty obvious, letting your eliquid level drop below the wicking holes will inevitably make the cotton in the coil go dry. And if the cotton goes dry and you fire up your device then the cotton just burns, yuck!
