Maintain Your Vape: Guide to Clean Your Vape

Vape pens themselves are becoming more flexible and robust with their capabilities.

That is true as long as you know how to clean your vape. Eventually, you'll start to get weaker pulls and a muted flavor as your vape gets dirty. The first things that will fail you are the filters and the coils. 

You can save a lot of time and money if you stay on a consistent cleaning routine. Once you have the supplies and proper method down, cleaning your vape becomes less of a hassle. Don't get lazy and resign to buying new vape pens every year, follow this guide on how to clean a vape pen.

How Often Should You Do It?

For an initial couple of months, a fresh out of the box vaporizer will perform flawlessly. The hits will without a doubt feel smooth and delicious. Eventually, when buildup and different particles develop along the pathways, the nature of the vapor will change, at times significantly.

Cleaning your vape doesn't need to be as tedious as you may envision it to be. It ought to be cleaned weekly, if not at least a time or two each month. You should clean it more frequently if you're a regular user.

A pleasant, fresh cleaning will keep your vape working up to its potential, free of developed residue, burnt material, and spit. You'll notice something is wrong when vape density drops, flavors no longer have depth, or drawing takes more effort.

How to Clean Your Vape

Most vape instructions will guide you to submerge your vape tank and atomizer in water for a couple of hours. Some prescribe simply running the parts under warm water. Some even suggest dish soaps, yet that can leave a buildup so it's a risk not worth taking.

A rinse-off is fine for daily maintenance, yet you need more to switch flavors or blends. For example, you've been utilizing a high VG e-juice and you need to disinfect your mouthpiece and glass tank. For that, you'll need alcohol-based solutions, vinegar, or special vape cleaners.

Distilled water and vinegar, rubbing alcohol, and vodka are all preferred cleaning solutions. Hydrogen peroxide can also work, but you can't mix it with anything else or risk a nasty chemical reaction.

Steps to Clean Most Vapes

Some vaporizers have more going on, use different materials, or have special instructions. For the sake of brevity, this guide will cover the common atomizer, battery, and mouthpiece combination.

You start by disassembling all your parts. Carefully detach the tank/atomizer to avoid spilling out e-juices. Remove any loose residue or product. Next, remove the mouthpiece and filter. 

Watch out for any rubber spacers or gaskets, if your vape has them. Check out the state of the vape coils, are they gunked up? Do the coils have any black residue on them?

Remove any wicking and put them to the side. Take inventory of all the parts you have disassembled. This will prevent any major headaches later when you're trying to remember how to put it back together.

Soak and Scrub

If you're going with a water and vinegar mixture, start by heating up a dish or bowl of distilled/filtered water in the microwave. Bring it to almost boiling, then mix in a few tablespoons of vinegar. Place all parts, besides the battery, in the solution and leave it to set for 20 minutes.

Check the progress by taking a plastic utensil and agitating the water a bit. If stuff starts coming off it, then you can move to scrubbing. Find a small pipe cleaner, old toothbrush, cotton swab, or make-up brush.

You can start to gently brush all the surfaces of your tank. If your coil is still viable, make sure to not get that wet! 

Don't forget to go over your filter and mouthpiece. Ideally, you should clean out these two parts on a daily basis, as they accumulate the most residue.

If you soaked your parts in an alcohol, peroxide, or vodka solution, remember to rinse them off well. When you're done, you can wipe everything off.

Minor Details

Soaking your vape parts on a regular basis will prevent things from getting too difficult to reach. The type of vape pen will determine your degree of difficulty. For instance, some pens have dedicated air holes to improve draw.

These air holes may get blocked, so try taking a paperclip and gently pushing it through. Check to see if it worked by blowing hard into the mouthpiece with the vaporizer off. This small detail can make a huge difference in vapor density and overall smoothness of your pull.

Also, double-check your threads. It's very easy for residue from your hands to build up and reduce the seal on connections. Do a quick swab with alcohol each time you clean your vape pen.

Investing in Your Vaporizer

If you follow these tips on how to clean your vape, your parts will last longer. You'll extend the life of the vape pen as a whole, even the battery. It will take less work to reach the same temps and draw out large volumes of vapor. 

We also recommend avoiding going the cheap route on your products. Browse through our store for some ideas on what you may need to improve your quality of vape. Keep an eye on our new vaping deals section for those who like to stock up and save more.