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Everything About Dry Herb Vaporizer You Should Know
To get the best vaping experience from dry herbs might be a challenge if you don’t have the right equipment for that purpose. The older traditional methods were good enough for those generations, but the modern dry herb vaporizer trumps them in efficiency and ease. Most importantly, it provides a means to enjoy your cannabis without smoke.
Dry Herb Vaporizers: What Are They?
Dry herb vaporizers are simple but sophisticated devices used to heat and vaporize dry herbs and to concentrate the desired compounds without burning them. Also called dry herb vape pens, dry herb vaporizers are specifically used to heat and vaporize dry herbs only, instead of wax concentrates as other vapes are used for.
Vaporizers are different in shape and size, but they are mostly cylindrical or oval and square. You can even get one custom-made. They range from small fist-sizes to larger flask-sized vaporizers. Modern dry herb vaporizers are electric or gas-powered and are equipped with batteries to store electric charge.
Parts of a Dry Herb Vaporizer
Generally, all herb vaporizers come with these parts:
- A power cable for charging
- A heating pot or chamber made of metal or ceramic material
- The electric chamber housing batteries and electrical units. Some vaporizers have a temperature control function.
- An electric heating element
- Mouthpiece with filter
Depending on your needs, others include:
- Dry herb grinder
- Dry herb storage pack (airtight to avoid contamination and water absorption)
- Tools like a funnel for loading and a tiny poker for tamping the dry herb in.
How The Vaporizer Works
A dry herb vaporizer works by heating dry herbs and vaporizing the contents. Heating can be done in one of two way. A vaporizer heats the dry herb either by conduction or by convection, depending on the heating mechanism it is designed with.
In heating by conduction, a coil is heated and, in turn, used to heat the dry herb inside the heating chamber. The coil touches the herbs and combusts them.
In convection, the dry herb is not combusted. Rather, the heating chamber heats up which heats the air and then transfers the heat to the dry herb. The herbs are not in direct contact with a hot coil.
Once heating is achieved by either means, a vapor (cloud) is formed and then filtered through to the mouthpiece where you can inhale.
Most users prefer vaporizers that heat by convection to those that heat by conduction. This is because conduction may overheat all or parts of the herb and produce a converse result –burnt vapor taste and drier cloud quality.
Another reason for the preference of convection vaporizers to conduction vaporizers is that combustion may reduce the volume of cloud that you get.
Advantages of Dry Herb Vaporizers
A dry herb vaporizer can give you the best all-round experience compared to other smoking equipment. It offers three outstanding benefits:
Best vaping experience
Since the herbs are vaporized instead of roasted, the cloud feels milder and therefore better tasting. The milder cloud does not stimulate throat irritation so that you can vape for a long time without issues. Using a vaporizer requires discretion. In public, you can have a pull and not have the usual strong cannabis smell and vapor cloud.
Health benefits
Vaporizers are popular today because they remove the need to burn herbs (smoking). Smoking deposits harmful chemicals such as carbon monoxide and tar in the lungs, but vaporizers only extract the important constituents of dry herbs in a vapor cloud without depositing tar and other harmful chemicals.
Highly Portable Vaporizers
Your vaporizer can fit into your hand, bag, pocket, and on your desk. You can easily fill the heating chamber and carry more dry herbs in the compact storage case as you go. There are available vaporizer cases on the market that are designed for easy packaging and transportation.
Types of Dry Herb Vaporizers
There are many dry herb vaporizers to choose from. They are classified according to their size: they are portable (hand-held) vaporizers and tabletop/desktop vaporizers.
Portable vaporizers
These vaporizers are small and average-sized, usually battery-powered, use convection heating method, and are temperature-controlled. They are designed to deliver vapor cloud at regulated rates, and portable vaporizers come with different heating chamber sizes.
Desktop vaporizers
These larger vaporizers are for use on flat permanent surfaces and not for carrying around. They have a larger heating chamber and operate off electric-power, sometimes via a plug-in cord.
The Best Way to Use Your Vaporizer
- Make sure the herb is well ground. Using a grinder, reduce the whole herb to a constant homogenous size. Remove lumps and impurities. Well-ground herbs give the best experience.
- Load the heating pot carefully. Use the scoop or funnel or some other improvised equipment to carefully load the chamber with herbs. Tap down to fill it, but don’t overfill because it needs air to pass through. Close the chamber properly when done.
- Start the heater. Vaporizers can take some seconds or even a full minute to heat up. You can adjust the temperature if your vaporizer has one.
- Sit back and enjoy your pulls. Pull slowly and enjoy each pull.
- Turn the heater off when you are done and allow a few minutes for cooling before you refill.
How to Maintain Your Vaporizer
Your vaporizer is designed to work for a long time without developing faults. However, you should practice regular maintenance to keep it in good shape for a long time and for health benefits. The following tips are important:
Avoid mechanical damage
Most vaporizers have a strong casing, but repeated falls or hits may damage inner parts. Check for damages regularly.
Clean your vaporizer as often as you need to
If you do not use it for some time, ensure you clean the chamber before loading herbs in.
Clean the vaporizer properly
To clean the vaporizer, disassemble its parts, then use a tiny soft brush to carefully brush the chamber. You may use alcohol swabs to wipe the inside regularly. You should also clean the filter and mouthpiece regularly to unclog them. Disinfect the mouthpiece and filter using alcohol swabs but allow it to dry completely before use.
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