Electronic Cigarettes – Trimming Around The Complicated Terms
I've been blogging about ecigarettes for a while now and I've had the chance to talk to a lot of great people. One of the things I see frequently is people who want to know more about the technicalities of their e-cigarette. Technical areas like voltage and amperage often confuse people. To be honest, I tend to get confused by them myself. I'm not an engineer, so I fully expect people who are to correct me in the comments (and I encourage that).
The Technical Jargon
While not limited to these terms, the most common words tossed out there with regards to e-cigarettes are:
- Wattage
- Amperage
- Voltage
- mAh
Some Things may not Match
Capacity (often identifed by mAh) is the first topic I want to cover. I know it's out of order, it should have been the first bullet. Anyway, mAh, which is shorthand for milliamp hours doesn't quite relate like the other terms. The other terms like voltage and resistance work together to determine how much power an e-cigarette outputs. However, mAh doesn't dictate the power output at all.
mAh is a measurement of battery capacity, not energy output. In the most basic terms it is an indicator of how long one could expect the battery to last. In very broad terms, the higher the mAh, the longer your e-cigarette will work for you.
mAh ratings are applicable to the other terms in one respect. More power used in terms of wattage means more strain on the battery. Therefore, high power loads will result in shorter life. This means you will need a higher mAh rated battery.
It's all About the Wattage
Each of the remaining terms relate to one another in a very direct way. We are talking about wattage, the sum of the other factors combined. The driving force behind vapor is wattage. Wattage is a measure of how much heat gets applied to the liquid forming vapor.
The first piece of the wattage puzzle is voltage. Voltage is a measure of the raw output from your electronic cigarette battery. Ohms is the measure of resistance. This measurement identifies how easily current can pass through your e-cigarettes atomizer.
For some reason, the industry sort of decided to focus on the individual attributes of each part of the e-cigarette rather than the whole. This is probably an artifact from the early days of electronic cigarettes where there wasn't a lot of choice in the market. The original electronic cigarettes only really came in one type. There was no selection of different voltages or resistances available as there are today.
Eventually someone figured out that by mucking about with the type and length of wire in the atomizer you could lower the resistance of the atomizer. A lower resistance atomizer produces more and warmer vapor. Similarly, some pioneers started experimenting with higher output batteries. Increasing the voltage also increased the vapor production.
Either way you slice it, you get the same thing. More vapor.
Voltage and resistance go hand and hand to dictate the output of a device in watts. The formula used to arrive at watts from voltage and resistance is known as Ohm's law.
That may be an over simplification. There are, in fact, four different factors that determine the wattage of a device. Fortunately, you only need to know two of the four components to calculate watts. Like voltage and resistance for example (how convenient!). Some smart people can calculate this stuff in their heads. But not me, I prefer to use an Ohm's law calculator. There are many available on the internet.
If you're not big on math, you just have to know one thing. The amount of power you apply to your heating coil determines how much vapor you're getting from your e-cigarette.
You can either decrease the resistance or increase the wattage. Either way, you get the same result. Higher wattage.
Don't go Crazy
You can't apply an unlimited amount of wattage and expect more steam than a locomotive. There are limitations here. First is the e-liquid itself. After a certain point the liquid will start to burn (specifically the flavoring will start to caramelize on the heating coils.) This will vary depending on the liquid, some burn easily while others seem to go on forever. It also comes down to a matter of personal preference for vapor temperature as well.
The other limiting factor is the amperage. The amount of power running from your battery to your atomizer is amperage. The circuits in your e-cigarette as well as the battery cell itself can only take so much amperage. Exceeding that limit will cause your e-cigarette to shut down to protect itself (and you). If that protection fails, the battery will be damaged or even cause damage itself.
2.5 ams is the most common setting for protection circuits. Dual coil cartomizers are popular. They run around 1.5 ohms, which would let you run them at around 3.7v before having to worry about exceeding a 2.5 amp limit. This gives you around 9 watts of power.
Actually, dual coils are probably a bad example. They don't operate quite like other devices. They have two heating coils wired together. The coils in a dual coil carto are twice the resistance as the rating. Each cartomizer features two 3.0 ohm heating elements. Because of this odd configuration, dual coils are still amperage limited but work very well at higher voltages than single coil devices. My ProVari advanced personal vaporizer features a 3.5 amp circuit instead of a 2.5 amp version. This lets me run dual coils at up to 5 volts. Which is quite nice.