So You Got A Vape For Christmas, Now What?

Ah yes, the post-christmas catch up, where you take stock of all the weird tat your estranged relatives have given you to prove how little they know about you. It’s also the time of year where you can investigate the 3-4 actually good presents you actually got (mainly the ones you picked for yourself).

If you’re here then it’s likely that you managed to score yourself a brand new vape. While vapes are fantastic pieces of kit, there is a certain learning curve to figuring them out. Vapes have a whole lexicon of niche terms, names, jargon, buzzwords, geegaws, and dark oaths surrounding them. This can all be a bit imposing for new vapers, we know this, once we were in your shoes (also, hello, we’re a window into your future, take that as you will).

To help you past this initial, faintly baffling phase, we have compiled the most common vaping terms into this handy primer. Read this and your beginner’s confusion will rapidly evaporate, only to be replaced with intermediate confusion (gotta love that Dunning-Kruger Effect, amiright?).

Convection and Conduction

This is probably the first term you’ll run into in the vape scene. It sounds daunting and faintly scientific. Don’t worry, all it really does is describe how your vape heats your dry product. Conduction vaporizers evaporate the active ingredients in your dry product by allowing hot air to flow across it. This method of heating leads to denser, tastier vapor, but at the cost of time. Time, and money, convection vapes tend to be somewhat more expensive than conduction.

Conduction vapes directly heat your dry product, working a lot like a kitchen stove. This means that you get your vapor FAST, but you have to be careful: pushing this too hard can lead to burnt dry product and bad tastes. Conduction is frequently found in compact, portable vapes.

Dry Product and Concentrates

Vapes use one of two materials: dry product or concentrate. Dry product is something we’re all familiar with, all you need to know is that you should grind it before you put it into your vape so more surface area is exposed to the heating system. Concentrates on the other hand require a specialized device different from a dry vaporizer. Something like the Linx Hypnos uses specialized coil-based heating system that instantly vaporizes the concentrate.



Desktop and Portable

There are two main types of vape body: desktop and portable.
Portable vapes are the more widely known of the two. They are built to be compact, light, and easy to use. Desktop vapes on the other hand are all about sustained vaping and power, they tend to be much bigger so they can cram in every little bit of power that they can.