Here's the thing.
You'll flame me. You'll say TL;DR...
But there's a number of points I need to get off my chest...
I love
vaping, by the way. I still have the occasional analog (crazy term but still). I've recently got into sub-ohm
vaping because:
1. My ....ty ego batts and clearomisers were just, well, crap.
2. I 'accidentally' bought a Kanger Subox Mini
So as you see, I never planned for subohm, I just got a box mod as basically a better
vaping device, as someone who might upgrade from a Ford Focus to a BMW 3 series.
Then problems started occurring, which made me realize that for all the bad longevity of the ego, they were, at least, maintenance-free. Now I was trying to fix leaks, taking pieces apart, re-wicking coils. I needed to set aside a mini workshop in my home just for the maintenance. To the forums, I thought. Surely no-one else has to put in this much effort just to vape, right?
Wrong. You all do, but more surprisingly, you all seem to love it. Rather like if you drive a car, as most of us do, but have little technical knowledge about it, and how we occasionally venture to a car forum. You'll often hear people saying "oh it's the rear axle manifold, but it's easy to do yourself. You just blah, blah, blah". Fine if you have the time, an empty garage, etc, etc. Fine if you love fixing up cars, right.
But with smoking, I never 'loved' smoking, not the concept at least. I just had to smoke. I didn't go around with paraphanlia dedicated to smoking, prosletyzing ways of keeping tobacco fresher or going to smoking conventions. I just smoked. Now of course 'some' smokers are like this, but the majority aren't.
Vaping, sadly, is a steep learning curve for the non-initiated, and whereas I expect most of you to disagree with me, I feel there is a silent majority who may stumble across boards like this, read diagrams of how to convert pi's theorum of fibonacci numbers so you get the right balance between 'balancing your ohms' and causing the device to blow a hole in your face (more on that in a bit), that I bet most people who have lives, but who happen to smoke in them, just think, "erm... okay. I think I'll stick with smoking then".
When I tell friends that I've managed to give up, but talk about RBAs and introducing liquid into Japanese Cotton through a dropper, they glaze over and say "wow, you must really love vaping then". Thing is I don't. I wanted something to replace regular cigarettes, not a 24/7 craft hobby.
My fear is, even though most of you will vehemently defend your love of tinkering, eternally pursuing that perfect 'hit', I am right in saying that a lot of people will just find it too much effort, that even a working piece of kit will fail after a few weeks unless you learn about maintenance, cleaning and a lot of stuff I could do without.
Then there's the whole safety thing...
I preached for months to friends (and even strangers) that were smokers and non-smokers alike, telling them there was this new thing that allowed you to feel like you were smoking but was PERFECTLY SAFE. There were a lot of nay-sayers, let me tell you, but I won through for the most part in that I argued that however bad these eliquids could be, could they really be worse than the contents of a real cigarette (or analog, w/e)?
Unfortunately it was never the liquid we should have feared. It was the hardware.
The fundamental problem with all e-cigarettes, the ones that 'do the job' correctly, the flaw that will always be the thorn in it's size.
...is China.
You may call me racist, I have nothing against the Chinese. But let's put the cards on the table. They aren't known globally for their standards. You read stories every day about people dying over there, or being horrifically injured by machinery that has failed or gone awry due to their poor (or non-existant) safety standards.
All the box mods, it appears, without exception (please someone tell me I'm wrong. PLEASE!) are made in China.
So then I was on another forum, or maybe it was this one, I don't know, and someone posted a list of e-cigarette accidents...
Now bear in mind this isn't like "singed an eyebrow" type ..... This is like scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, scrolling through events and then realizing you are still in April 2016, casually looking at the scroll bar on the right, not being able to see it, then seeing a pixel-wide line, still close to the top of the screen.
But not all these incidents are bad, right? For this list to be so long. Right?
Kinda. It reads sorta like.
1. 3rd degree burns on leg, scarred for life
2. 3rd degree burns on arm, scarred for life
3. Entire front teeth blown out, scarred for life.
Ah but that's not too bad right
4. Child loses eye while staff DEMONSTRATE an ecig to him at a mall.
HE'S NOT EVEN BOUGHT THE ....ING THING YET!
Aha, but before you rebut, I already know what you're going to say. It will echo the comments that usually follow news stories like this.
"Ah yeah but I bet he was using a calibrated mechanical with a dripper with a non-compatible 510 without calculating his ohm resistance using pythagoras' equation of Lancelot's Diversion and failed to think about the solar flare activity that day. ....ing noob."
Yeah he probably was. ....ing noob is right. In fact is there another hobby that people can just wander into, with so many self-proclaimed experts, that can be so cruel to the uninitiated? Failing DIY base-jumping, that is?
The point I'm trying to make is if vaping now is so fraught with potential danger, and it's necessary to have a certain amount (oh, who are we kidding, quite a reasonable amount) of knowledge about the subject, what not to do, etc, then how can it hope to attract smokers that weren't tobacco-fetishists, you know, the normal, everyday people who just happened to smoke.
I mean I used to enjoy smoking most when I was drunk. Now I can't dare vape if I'm drunk. What if I need to change a coil mid-way? Well not too much, as I have that 'reasonable' degree of knowledge. But what about first-timers? Maybe those bomb disposal outfits that armies have should come with?
But the worst thing has to be the elitism I've found amongst the most hard-core vapers on forums. They will offer no sympathy to the uninitiated, and resent people who just want to get on with things without any effort (you know, like regular smoking) and try to either tell them they should invest more of their time to achieve what used to be so simple, and then shunning said questioner if they point out that they don't have the time, the willpower, etc.
Oh yeah, when I bought my Subox, the site in question said on the order page "this doesn't come with a battery... it needs THIS battery... would you like to buy THIS battery from us as well as the boxmod?"
I said "sure, why not". It came. I charged it. I used it. Then there was a product recall about two weeks later. "Buy this one from us" they now said. "okay, I said".
They sent me an E Fest 18650. You know, the kind that are now generally known as being slightly more stable than carrying around a pack of C4 in a bag full of hammers...
So yeah, had to become an expert in batteries now too. Just so I could scour forums, spend hours on search engines trying to find which battery wouldn't take a limb from me, or knock a six inch hole into my neighbor's house. No really. I'm loving this new hobby.
In fact I'm looking forward to the next part. Maybe my tanks are leaking because they're plastic? .... it, lemme learn glass blowing and I'll make my own Pyrex ones. Ultimately there'll be no time for anything but this, I may as well quit my job.
Or, as new initiates will find, simply go back to smoking...
