@florduh The Nomad actually gets around it by not even having electronics.
The battery is exposed to the air path, but if anything’s coming out of that you’ve got bigger problems! Otherwise the metal parts you see form the electrical circuit so there aren’t even wires or anything, let alone circuit boards.
There are a few other similar unregulated convection devices like the Milaana, Li’l Bud, etc. but I’m not sure whether or not they’re as clean. I’d guess not quite, but they should be fairly good on that front.
Anything that has the electronics as a separate piece like the FlowerPot, or in the portable world any of the 510 attachments (Splinter, Imp, Stempod, etc.) wouldn’t provide a direct line into the air path, but I can’t think of any portables with built-in electronics that I’ve looked into and found to be completely isolated.
I think at least some make that claim, and in some cases it may be true, but there are a variety of things that trouble me a bit about many vaporizers (electronics, glue, insulation, plastics, etc) and I don’t think I’ve seen one that I understand as well or that I’d personally trust as much as the Nomad in those areas. Well, VapCaps and stuff like that but they’re again a heater isolated from the heat source and don’t contain any electronics.
That’s one of the biggest reasons I’ve only actually bought a few devices (what’s in my signature) after years of reading tons of threads here. I’m not sure I’d buy the Ascent now, but it was my first vaporizer picked up from a local shop before I had started to consider some of these issues. I was already on the ceramic/glass vapor path train though!
Other than the sale and the high praise the Firewood 7’s been getting though, one of the reasons I was willing to give it a shot was that it has a clean ceramic oven and (other than the screen) glass air/vapor path.
I don’t love the bits of silicon that hold the glass together, but since they’re outside of the main flow of vapor and shouldn’t get super hot, I’m not too worried about them.
With that and the air leaking in from the electronics being the only things that give me pause, unless I’m missing something big I still think it’s one of the cleanest designs around and I’m still glad to have one on the way.
Whether or not it turns out to be a real health concern though, ideally I would rather not be breathing in air from the electronics compartment, so I do hope that more designers find good ways of isolating the air path moving forward.