Dry herb vaporizers are simple and straightforward to use devices – all you need to do is pack the chamber, set the temperature, and vape! However, many factors can greatly affect the quality of the vapor and some of them can be easy to overlook.
Today we’ll explore some of those factors, and hopefully, will shorten your learning curve, so that you can start getting a great experience out of your dry herb vaporizer right out of the box!
Let’s first take a quick overview of the basic steps, involved in using a dry herb vaporizer properly! They are:
Grind Your Herb ->Load the Herb in the Chamber ->Set the Temperature and Vape!
The best way to learn the actual mechanics of removing the mouthpiece, loading the herb and setting the temperature is to either take a quick glance at the user manual for your particular device or through simple trial and error – most dry herb vaporizers have a very intuitive and fool-proof design and interface.
All 3 steps obviously carry many different factors that will ultimately affect the quality of the vaping experience.
Let’s take a look at some of those factors:
The Dryness of The Material
The choice of herb material will ultimately come down to experimentation and personal preference. Most enthusiasts will tell you that your herb should be as dry as possible, but some sources do claim that the best flavor is achieved with herb that contains some moisture and is not dry enough to be easily crushed by your fingers.
Most often, however, bone-dry material is recommended. If your herb is not completely dry, you can easily dry it out by spreading it out on a piece of paper and letting it sit for an hour. Grinding it up beforehand (which you’ll have to eventually do anyway) will speed up the drying process greatly.
Proper Grind Size
The proper grind depends mostly on the type of your device. Conduction Vaporizers benefit from a very fine grind. Unfortunately, there is some trial and error involved in ensuring that the powder isn’t too fine, in which case some of it may pass through the screen and into your mouth while inhaling. This issue can be mitigated by taking slower and longer draws.
CONVECTION VAPORIZERS can work well with a medium grind or even no grind at all. A finer grind will usually produce a stronger, harsher, and shorter session, because of the increased surface area of the herb material.
HYBRID VAPORIZERS are somewhere in between and do require some experimentation to determine the perfect grind.
Proper Chamber Packing
This is again, dependent on your chamber type. Just like the grind size, packing influences the flavor, strength, and session duration, so there’s no set rule and there’s again a degree of experimentation necessary to determine what you like best. But here are some general rules.:
For CONDUCTION VAPORIZERS, you generally want tight packing, but not too tight – we don’t want to block the airflow.
For CONVECTION VAPORIZERS, pack lightly, don’t fill to the top, and don’t compress.
The coarser your grind, the more you can pack without blocking airflow.
Proper Temperature
Lower temperatures produce the most pleasant flavor, while higher temperatures produce the most mental and physical effects, but at the cost of a harsher vapor. If you’re a beginner it’s best to start out with a moderate temperature, somewhere between 350(176) – 390(200). Temperature is also important if you buy a quality combo vape like our Contak dry herb and concentrate vaporizer. Because it vapes two different products, temp control is vital.
This will usually produce the best balance between harshness, flavor, and mental and physical effects. Higher temperatures can lead to a very harsh vapor, especially if you aren’t yet used to drawing correctly.
AND LASTLY, HERE ARE A FEW RANDOM TIPS YOU CAN USE AND EXPERIMENT WITH:
* ‘Burn-off’ your chamber before you use your device for the first time. This simply involves turning on your vaporizer for a few minutes without putting anything in the chamber. This drives off any smells ‘stuck’ in the vaporizer from the manufacturing process.
* Wait about a minute after the vaporizer has reached its temperature before you start vaping – for many devices this will help the material reach a more uniform temperature.
* Clean the chamber regularly with a cotton swab, dipped in pure isopropyl alcohol – this is the easiest way to get rid of residue which negatively affects the taste of the vapor. Be careful to not let any alcohol drip into the electronics.
* Take long, slow hits – try drawing for as long as 10 seconds. The length of the draws can affect the CBD and THC content of the vapor ( source ) This is very device-dependent, but long draws usually produce the best balance between flavor, THC & terpene content and harshness.
