How do you guys clean your coils and how often? is a ultrasonic cleaner needed or is a ISO soak enough?
I built my first tiny coils from 316L fused staggered clapton. The taste from the first dab is really great and flavorful but then it's getting nasty fast. When I dry burn the unvaped oil out of the coil, the whole house is smelling like burnt roadkill ...
Congratulations on your first coils! An ISO soak gets rid of the gunk. An ultrasonic cleaner works better, and you can also use an oxide remover solution to get rid of any oxidation. Recommend building more coils - it gets easier and faster with practice.
as
@Accept stated ISO or ethanol work great for soaking coils clean. how long to soak depends on how gunky you let them get. when using an ultrasonic cleaner i would put the coils in a small jar of ISO and put that into the ultrasonic cleaner dish. no water in the dish. only ISO in the jar. and this greatly speeds up soak time. i would always leave overnight anyways after to ensure a good cleaning. then pull them out of the jar one by one, with tweezers, and hold them under scolding hot water from my tap. if the soak was long enough then the water washes anything on the coils and they should look new. the color will never be a bright silver again like when you started working with the wire. if you stay on top of your coils they clean overnight with no issue. if you let them go you may have to repeat the “soak n rinse” a couple of times. but they will come clean.
my ultrasonic cleaner crapped out on me after about two years. it was a $40 model. i find simply soaking effective enough for my needs tho.
i keep 3 or 4 coils in rotation so when im using one the others stay soaking. when it comes time for a new coil they are ready to be rinsed, dried, and installed.
@Vapology how long after the first tasty rip are you observing the degradation of flavor from the coil? how many dabs? you said “getting nasty fast”, but how fast?
you may not want to be dry burning the coils to remove residual oils. at least not if there is a considerable amount left in there...? i dont ever dry burn coils unless there is very little gunk on them. otherwise yeah youre gonna get that nice combustion aroma of death. when this happens the coil needs to be swapped.
i did mention, in the one hitter quitter thread, about dry burning mesh between rips, but that was an experiment. and i was doing it from the first dab on. making sure there is VERY little of anything to actually burn off. if done from the beginning of the clean coils life then dry burning between rips may actually help keep them from gunking as fast. if you do a 1/2g + through a coil and then dry burn youll likely have crusties left in there. do not vape on it after that if you wanna taste it. lol. soak the crustified coil and it will live again!