Boxman
Well-Known Member
Does anyone know why most vaporizer manufacturers keep making the same elementary mistake? Why is it that only a handful of designers bothered to incorporate some of sort of method to cool the vapor before it reaches your delicate lungs?
For their Crafty and Mighty vapes, Storz and Bickel designed a cooling unit with a series of chambers that the vapor gets routed through. The vapor has to go through several twists and turns, all of which serve to dissipate heat (and also clean up the vapor, catching resin and other fine particulates that get past the filter). This method works well and only requires a tiny amount of space.
S&B went even further with their Plenty vape, using a coiled metal stem that acts like a big heatsink and cools the vapor even more effectively, although this solution is a bit unwieldy.
Arizer manages to cool the vapor from its Solo & Air units with the use of longish glass stems (standard on the Solo, optional on the Air). However this doesn't cool as effectively as the S&B solutions.
Firefly uses cleverly designed metal air channels to cool the vapor and (hopefully) catch particulates, although the latter part doesn't work that well as users report still getting occasional bits of ground herb in their mouth. But still a great design (they probably just need to incorporate a filter).
Some other manufacturers use tricks like having a stem that goes through the body of the unit, with the oven on the other side (Pax, Pax2, Haze, Vapium Summit, etc). Having the oven on the opposite end of the draw stem is smart, as it allows a longer internal air path to dissipate some of the heat before it hits your throat. But still not nearly as effective as the solutions implemented by S&B or Firefly.
As for everyone else's portables, the vast majority of them have the stem sitting right on the oven. No cooling units, no clever solutions to dissipate heat, just you sucking hot air straight out of an oven (doesn't sound very healthy when you put it that way, does it?). I'm just wondering why is that? There are many cheap, simple and effective cooling methods that can be used without adding significant cost, and which still lend themselves to easy cleaning. So why not implement them?
For their Crafty and Mighty vapes, Storz and Bickel designed a cooling unit with a series of chambers that the vapor gets routed through. The vapor has to go through several twists and turns, all of which serve to dissipate heat (and also clean up the vapor, catching resin and other fine particulates that get past the filter). This method works well and only requires a tiny amount of space.
S&B went even further with their Plenty vape, using a coiled metal stem that acts like a big heatsink and cools the vapor even more effectively, although this solution is a bit unwieldy.
Arizer manages to cool the vapor from its Solo & Air units with the use of longish glass stems (standard on the Solo, optional on the Air). However this doesn't cool as effectively as the S&B solutions.
Firefly uses cleverly designed metal air channels to cool the vapor and (hopefully) catch particulates, although the latter part doesn't work that well as users report still getting occasional bits of ground herb in their mouth. But still a great design (they probably just need to incorporate a filter).
Some other manufacturers use tricks like having a stem that goes through the body of the unit, with the oven on the other side (Pax, Pax2, Haze, Vapium Summit, etc). Having the oven on the opposite end of the draw stem is smart, as it allows a longer internal air path to dissipate some of the heat before it hits your throat. But still not nearly as effective as the solutions implemented by S&B or Firefly.
As for everyone else's portables, the vast majority of them have the stem sitting right on the oven. No cooling units, no clever solutions to dissipate heat, just you sucking hot air straight out of an oven (doesn't sound very healthy when you put it that way, does it?). I'm just wondering why is that? There are many cheap, simple and effective cooling methods that can be used without adding significant cost, and which still lend themselves to easy cleaning. So why not implement them?
I believe that there is a lot of ways to affect the draw from any unit. Not just having a vapor path, but how wide the pathway can affect the type of performance. The pull off of my Summit is huge compared to my PAX. (Sometimes I don't taste anything until I exhale.) Both long metal pathways. Same principle. But The Summit's path is wider and has more open area below the oven chamber area. Making it more of a heavy single hitter then say for light continuous sipping. Also, I think this affects the thickness of the vapor. If the pathway is too open, the vapor is too thin and misty. There is a lot of small, seemingly trivial considerations with designing the pathway, that can impact the type of performance. And less directly battery life. That's why I get intrigued when I read that a NASA engineer designed a particular model of vaporizer.
