In response to the above post, let me ellaborate:
Several vaporizer designs have been made which require the user to inhale a heated gas, generally produced by a butane lighter or burning hemp wick. These include the VaporGenie, VapeOrSmoke, VaporStar and Ubie (how quaint!) among others. When designing the Gnome vape, I wanted to get away from this design for a number of reasons:
-Commercially available butane is not pure. Ask anyone who produces or consumes concentrates, and they will tell you that the brand of butane they use affects the quality of their concentrate. Commercial butane purification from other petroleum distillates involves passing it over several adsorptive filters, which filter out one impurity specifically - if an impurity is present other than that which is targeted by those filters, it passes through and remains in the butane - the number of "#x Refined" is the number of adsorptive filters present, not how many times a distillation has taken place. Most of these impurities are paraffin waxes, as well as various thiols that are added to give the butane a smell. In addition, many cans for sale in Cali have the required warning stating that "This product contains or produces a chemical known by the state of California to cause cancer." Commercially available butane is not meant to be consumed in any way, and to do so is to entrust a refinery, which does not take into account the inhalation of their product, with your health.
-The products of combustion of butane and oxygen are indeed only H2O and CO2 if adiabatically perfect combustion is occurring between C4H10 and O2. However, this is a theoretical situation, and in the real world is not the case. A non-torch lighter is the very model of imperfect combustion - the yellow in the flame consists of microscopic particles of carbon which didn't have enough oxygen to be converted directly from Butane to CO2. Carbon monoxide is a byproduct of such combustion types, whether burning butane or hemp wick.
Using a torch lighter can eliminate the CO aspect of the exhaust, but then encounters another problem - the gases present are not only O2 and C4H10 (and some C3H8, C5H12, etc), but also Nitrogen. Various Nitrogen-Oxygen compounds are formed during combustion at elevated flame temperatures (such as those of a torch lighter). You eliminate most of the carbon monoxide when using a torch lighter for these vaporizers, but at the cost of increased NOx composition.
There may be a burner that at some specific fuel and atmospheric pressure produces a nearly pure exhaust stream, but when taken to consumer level operation that will almost always not be the case. This is the reason your natural gas appliances have their exhaust routed to the outside - obviously, the goal of the engineer designing such burners is to get close to adiabatically perfect combustion because it's the most efficient. CO and NOx are still produced, however, and must be vented to the outside. To inhale a gas directly from a source of combustion and pretend it's only CO2 and H2O is fallacy, especially considering the intended medical applications of the device.
With all that out of the way, I can't speak as to the byproducts of the catalytic system used by O&B, as I don't have information on what catalyst they use. Catalytic systems largely resolve the matter of CO production, but without information on how hot they are operating, there is no way of knowing whether or not they produce NOx emissions (since they are still using nitrogen rich air as the source of oxygen). Still, the user of one of these products is entrusting their health to the purity of commercially available butane - I think it is best to avoid the assumption that anyone in the oil and gas industry is looking out for your health in the first place.
I hope this adds some clarity.
-gn0me!
Some further reading can be found here:
http://www.miaqc.org/Sleuth - Combustion Byproducts.htm
www.epa.gov/ttnchie1/ap42/ch01/final/c01s05.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOx
Edit to add: I don't want you to think that I don't appreciate your input on my advertisement and word choice - I'll be sure to take it into account in the upcoming revision of my website. I'll try to be more clear about just why I avoid the exhaust of a butane lighter in the user's air stream
..Hope it will be of good use once i get my hands on my long dreamed package.... LOL.