So, you got a new vape cart, it’s a good one, you’re halfway through and poof, no vapor, no hit...what the heck?. What happened? Well it’s pretty common in the cannabis vape world to have carts, pods, and even some disposables to get clogged and even burn out atomizers on occasion due to the nature of the oils and how thick they can be, but we’ll just talk about the clogging for now.
If you have a standard CCELL (ceramic cell) type of cartridge that is 510 threaded there are a few ways to unclog them. First the easy method if you have a battery with a preheat function the easiest thing to try is preheating the cart for 10 seconds, and then try another hit. If the cart pulls this might have just been the result of dried oil clogging the intakes to the atomizer. If this doesn’t solve the issue, you can try multiple heating cycles to try and move the oil, but chances are it might be too suck, or not get enough heat to make it move. In this case it’s recommended to use either a hair dryer, and heat the cartridge until the oil moves, or you can put the cart in a plastic bag (please make sure it is water-tight/zip-lock), and put it under warm water or hot water (not boiling water) to make the oil a bit easier to move. Once the oil moves a bit, “visually” clean off the cart and make sure the thread area is dry on the cart itself, re-attach it to the battery and try and take a hit. If the cart hits you should be good to go, just make sure when taking a pull to pull all the vapor out of the cart and mouthpiece. One common way that devices can become clogged is if a big hit is pulled into the atomizer and it is not pulled through completely, thus allowing the vapor to settle and re-harden. Avoid this by taking smaller puffs, and make sure to clear each hit. It is also highly recommended to have a battery with a pre-heat cycle as this is the easiest way to clear most cartridge clogging issues.
If you are using pods, or disposables these devices don’t often have preheat functions, so next we will cover how to handle those. Pods are often specific to each device and there are a bunch of them, but most of them can be fixed using the same methods we used for the 510 carts. Simply remove the pod from the device, place it in a sealed bag, then submerge it into warm or hot water or even running it under warm water is sufficient. DO NOT BOIL THE WATER, that is too hot and will not only damage the device, but will boil out some of the cannabinoids in the pod itself. The same technique can be used for some disposables, but in some cases when a disposable clogs you can simply keep hitting it until it hits again, keep in mind some disposables are also rechargeable so the reason your disposable might be clogging could be due to low power, so try plugging it in and see if that works too.
For the most part the carts we have used have very little clogging as long as they are CCELL or full glass carts. Otherwise bad atomizers will sometimes clog and this could just be a bad cart, or faulty manufacturing. If these methods don’t work to clear your clog, let me know what tricks you use to make your clogged carts pull again, would love to hear about other ways folks get this done.