Crazy stuff going on in Volcano Hybrid land. I'm a big S&B fan of their portables and history, but have still made a point of never purchasing a new-to-market vaporizer. The Volcano Hybrid story reinforces my belief that the vaping market is still young and maturing... even the biggest manufacturers now haven't been immune to significant issues in a new vaporizer. May as well as roll the dice when buying new-to-market. It's unfortunate, but if dealing with vape issues is a real problem for anyone, then I'd recommend not buying new-to-market vapes for at least a year or two
.
At least with S&B, I'd expect them to engineer a reasonable fix/replacement for the melting and aluminum particulate issues and owners will get the replacement pieces
. It will be interesting (not for owners) to see how long this will take
. Hopefully not very long...
I find the Volcano Hybrid an interesting vape, but not in my top choices. I'm a fan of convection over hybrid and conduction heating as it has best-in class vapor in my experience. I'm not a fan of bags and don't need a monster-@$$ (
) bowl either. The Volcano Hybrid obviously more efficiently extracts than the older Volcano models which are convection based (you can literally see it in side to side videos comparing bags), but that just means that the convection based heating design of the original Volcanoes was not optimized. OTOH, there are some very well-optimized premium convection heating designed vapes out there.
And in use, premium convection heating designed vapes will generally be as efficient (or more) in extraction efficiency than the Volcano Hybrid. The price of the Volcano Hybrid brings a lot of different quality boutique vape competition. OTOH, while a number of these "other" vapes have even "big" bowls, the Volcano Hybrid has a monster-@$$ bowl
. Bigger bowls bring bigger vapor density. I don't need anything like that and have to take care as even in low temp vaping (320 F) I can make combuster friends cough hard with my "big" bowl vape. But I salute those that do want/enjoy Volcano-size bowls
.
Sorry to hear about those caught out in this. It sucks to see the Volcano Hybrid problems
. I hope it gets fixed quickly, painlessly and smoothly for everyone. Cheers to enjoying the Volcano Hybrid again soon.
Just some thoughts while vaping. YMMV.