Getting a Burnt Taste When Vaping? Prevent Coil Gunk Now

Out of all the annoyances that can ruin the vaping experience, coil gunk is probably the most common one. The fact that coil gunk is so common is due to two factors inherent in the modern vaping experience: the type of vape juice that modern vapers use and the amount of e-liquid that most vapers consume each day.

In this article, you’re going learn what coil gunk is and find out why it’s causing a burnt taste when you vape. You’re also going to discover what you can do to prevent coil gunk or at least minimize the impact that it has on your vaping experience.

What Is Coil Gunk?

Coil gunk is residue from sucralose, a sweetener that’s widely used to improve the flavor of e-liquid. Sucralose has become so widelwy used in the vaping industry over the past several years that virtually every major e-liquid brand now includes it.

Sucralose makes any e-liquid taste nearly as sweet as candy, but it doesn’t vaporize cleanly like the other ingredients in vape juice; it leaves residue behind. The residue sticks to the vaping device’s atomizer coil. As you continue to vape, the residue becomes a thick layer of black gunk.

When the layer of gunk on an atomizer coil becomes thick enough, it actually begins to burn as you vape. At first, it results in a slightly burned flavor.

When the layer of coil gunk becomes even thicker, it can even prevent fresh e-liquid from reaching the atomizer coil. At that point, vaping can become almost as irritating to the throat as a dry hit.

The only way to fix a coil with a thick layer of gunk is to replace it.

The more e-liquid you use, the more residue your vape juice will leave on your atomizer coil. That’s why coil gunk is a more common problem than ever even though vape juice makers have been adding sweeteners to e-liquids for years.

Thanks to modern innovations like mesh coils, people use more e-liquid today than ever before. If you use a sweetened e-liquid with a powerful vaping setup, you can expect that you’ll need to replace your coil every day or two.

So, what can you do about coil gunk? The first solution is the simplest, although you might not like it very much.

Stop Using Sweetened E-Liquids

Although flavoring agents themselves can also leave residue on an atomizer coil, sucralose is by far the top cause of coil gunk. Therefore, the best way to stop coil gunk and extend the life if your coils is to simply stop using sweetened e-liquids.

If you switch from sweetened e-liquid to unsweetened e-liquid, you can expect to increase your coil life from a few days to as long as a few weeks per coil. Considering that replacement coils tend to cost a few dollars each, extending your coil life can potentially save you an enormous sum of money.

The potential problem, though, is that you might not actually want to use unsweetened e-liquid. If most vapers wanted unsweetened e-liquids, every major e-liquid brand wouldn’t be sweetening its products.

Let’s suppose that you want to do something about coil gunk without changing the e-liquid that you use. What other options do you have?

Try Cleaning Your Gunky Coils

If you’re happy using sweetened e-liquid and don’t want to change what you’re doing, you can try cleaning your used coils to make them last longer.

Sucralose is soluble in water and alcohol, so you can remove some or all of the gunk from your coils by putting the coils in a bath of vodka or hot water and agitating them periodically over the course of several hours.

You’ll know that the bath is removing the coil gunk because you’ll see little black bits floating in your cleaning liquid after a while.

If you used vodka to clean your coils, rinse them in the sink after cleaning them overnight. If you used water, simply remove the coils and leave them on a paper towel.

After about a day, the coils should be dry enough to use. Prime them with e-liquid before using them.

Cleaning your coils in a vodka or water bath may allow you to use them multiple times before you finally discard them. If you really want to give your coils a thorough cleaning, though, try using an ultrasonic jewelry cleaner instead.

Using only water, an ultrasonic cleaner provides gentle high-frequency agitation that can power through coil gunk and leave your coils looking almost like new. Some people who use ultrasonic cleaners to clean their coils find that they can reuse their coils for months.

Start Building Your Own Coils

If you need to replace your coil every day and find that simply cleaning your coils isn’t a good enough solution, the next best option is to begin building your own coils instead.

You’ll get the best performance with an RDA, but not everyone enjoys dripping. Using a dripping atomizer means that you’ll need to carry a bottle of e-liquid everywhere. Vaping in the car with an RDA is almost impossible, and getting e-liquid on your hand when your RDA leaks isn’t fun.

If you don’t want to deal with the inconvenience of using an RDA, rebuildable tanks are also available.

When you build your own coils, you’ll have the enjoyment of using a fresh coil whenever you want. In addition, using a rebuildable atomizer is extremely affordable because wire and cotton are both cheap when you buy them in bulk. Instead of costing a few dollars, each new coil will only cost a few cents.

Coil building does have a drawback, though, in that it requires time. Replacing a pre-built coil in a tank only takes a few seconds, but building a coil from scratch takes several minutes.

Some people enjoy building coils because they like tinkering with electronics. Others, however, find it unpleasant to do the same task day after day. You’ll only know which side of the fence you fall on if you try it for yourself.