This thing is amazing. Got the EQ/Solo bundle in today. The EQ works as good as any plug in convection vape I've ever tried. Extremely even heating using the big bowl packed mostly full. All I have is some garbage CBD bud and D8 distillate to try in it right now but I can tell the vapor from good bud is gong to be amazing. Very impressed, will definitely be recommending this thing to anybody I know looking to get in to vapes. Doesn't take nearly as long to reach working temp as a lot of reviews I read/watched made it sound like it would. From room temp to blowing clouds in just a couple minutes of warming up.
Glad to hear you're enjoying it!
I assume you're still using the stock bowl, which partially explains a bit of the differences between your experience and what you've heard. Usually people encouraging long preheats are using modded parts like the ddave where the herb sits closer to the ceramic heating element and the heat radiating from a heat-soaked bowl actually contributes to the vaporization. With the stock bowl (AFAIK) even with a long preheat, the heat that the herb sees from the bowl itself is pretty negligible. As often as I question why arizer put the load so far away from the heater in their stock design, it does manage to (mostly) ensure that your herb will be exclusively heating through convection, at the cost of speedy/thick extractions.
A couple tricks to keep in mind that could potentially elevate your experience with this unit even further (Especially if you go down the rabbit hole of modded bowls/wands):
1) When cold starting the unit, remove the wand and run the fan on setting 1 or 2 throughout the first couple minutes of heating. The added airflow from the fan helps things like the heater cover and bowl heat up more quickly since the heat is able to be distributed by the air, rather than just stagnating around the ceramic heating element. Turn the fan off and reinsert the wand after the unit reads at the target temp for some time (2-3 minutes).
2) Cap your basket screens. If you have some flat pipe screens lying around, you can cut them to fit into the metal lip around the basket screens, which prevents herb from getting sucked up into the screens and further away from the heating element. The flat screen this turns the basket into is also a lot easier to scrape off between bowls. Take care when cutting the screen though, you'll want as close to a perfect circle as you can manage. It helps to draw a circle on paper with the right diameter then cut the screen on the paper.
3) Raise the temp before using. Between bowls, raise the temp about 10-15 deg (F), lowering it as you load the next bowl. The ExQ's heating element is a bit lacking in thermal potential (how much heat it can provide to the bowl before being "overwhelmed" and not fully recovering in temperature before the next hit), and so starting a bowl with a bit of extra heat can help this issue a bit. This also leads into my next point:
4) Temp cycling. The ExQ has a weird (and slightly annoying) feature where it "masks" the current temperature on the display. If you take a few hits in a row off the unit, then press either temp adjust key about 5-6+ seconds into your next hit, you'll notice the reported temp takes a nosedive, potentially down as much as 20 degrees. You can mitigate this, however, by just pressing the up button then the down button (or vice versa) every few seconds during and after hits once you've taken a few in a row. This doesn't seem to make a drastic difference in vapor production, but at the very least this will ensure there's more heat in the bowl generally.
A couple of these tips might seem pretty odd, so it's important to understand the main shortcoming with this unit so that these become more clear: the temperature sensor.
While the temperature sensor itself isn't problematic, it's position is. Because the temp sensor is embedded in the ceramic heater, it responds only to changes
in the heater temperature. This may not sound problematic at first, but remember that it's not just the heater itself that's causing the vaporization, but rather the combination of the heater
and the residual heat from the glass airpath.
To give a practical example, say you forgot your mittens on a cold winter day, so you have to use a hand warmer. Once you activate the hand warmer, it heats up pretty quickly, but you have to hold it in your hands for a few minutes before your hands actually warm up. In this analogy, the hand warmer is the ceramic heater, while your hands are the glass airpath. The hand warmer heats almost instantly, and if you were reading the temps from within the hand warmer, it would be "at temp" almost instantly. But ofc, we know it still takes some time for the warmer to actually heat up your hands (takes time for the ceramic heater to heat up the glass around it).
Let's say that, somehow, you then need to use both the hand warmer and your hands to heat up something (and let's assume that somehow 50% of the heat is coming off your hands): Once you start heating that thing, your hands will drop in temperature significantly, since there's nothing directly heating them back up (disregarding body heat for now). The hand warmer can't even start warming your hands back up, since its heat is
also being drawn away by something else. Finally, if you monitored the temp of both the warmer and the hands during this interaction, the warmer would only slightly drop in temperature as it warms the other object, but the hands would drop significantly in temp. The same thing occurs during a draw with the ExQ: At first, both the ceramic heating element
AND the glass airpath are adding heat into the bowl, but only the ceramic is actively heated. As the draw continues, both the ceramic and glass begin to see a temperature drop. Since the ceramic is monitored with the thermometer, the heating element will activate once the thermometer sees this drop and the ceramic will be (mostly) held at a consistent temperature. However, the glass airpath is exclusively heated
passively by the heating element, and during a draw most/all of the heat from the ceramic element is going into the bowl rather than radiating into the airway. Thus, with each successive hit, the glass airway is able to provide less and less heat to the bowl, resulting in lower bowl temps with successive hits, until eventually all of the heat the bowl sees is coming from the ceramic element.
Now, this isn't some kind of glaring technical flaw. In fact, it's mainly mods that get affected, as the modded bowls get a lot more benefit from the extra heat from preheated glass than the stock setup would. The big things that get negatively affected by the unit behaving this way are microdosing, chain hitting, and low-temping. If you're using the unit at moderate/high temps, with big loads, and taking decent pauses between hits, more than likely the unit will play nicely without keeping a lot of this other stuff in mind. Microdosing is mainly an issue since the stock design of this vape works best when the load (in this case, the bud in the bowl) is large enough to retain a bit of heat between hits, chain hitting is problematic for the obvious heat-soaking reasons above, and low-temping isn't ideal both from the unit having a bit of delay in heating the load to "full" vaping temps and from being unable to chain hits without dropping the temperature. The tricks that I detailed above help with one or all of these use cases and aren't really necessary unless you fall into one of those groups.
Jeez, I ended up typing a novel without realizing
It sounds like you'll definitely enjoy this unit though. It's incredibly versatile, especially for the price point, and with a bit of tweaking and understanding how the unit works you can adapt it to all kinds of use cases. If you ever start looking into microdosing or just get curious about modding, definitely look into the ddave mods (or now I guess even the connoisseur bowl from arizer). While my dissertation above makes it sound like you have to have a PhD in Thermodynamics to use any modded parts without throwing the heater core down to -17000K, I assure you the learning curve isn't anywhere near as steep (Honestly, for the first year or so I had the modded parts, I did
none of the above and still got satisfactory results).
TL;DR Damn good vape, and if you understand its problems you can work around them for awesome results. Advice like long preheats and adjusted temps before/during sessions is mainly for people using mods, since they can be more fickle generally. Due to the heater's shortcomings, microdosers/chainhitters/low-tempers will need to get their hands dirty for decent results, but it's certainly possible.
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