VAPING

As consumption of cannabis becomes more and more popular, more and safer ways of taking it are developed. Currently vaping is becoming very popular. So what is a vape. The first consideration is what kind of vape do you want? Do you want to toke concentrates or do you like the taste of weed.  There are vapes for each of these methods. From an economic point of view the concentrate cartridge costs around 40€ and will give anything from 100 to 200 ‘drags’ from each cartridge. If you’re vaping weed then obviously it depends on the strain etc. This is one fundamental difference at the moment that the variety of concentrates for the pens are not very extensive yet if it’s a weed vape you can choose your flavour.

So how does a vaporiser work? A vaporizer is a smokeless system that heats up the product (concentrate or weed), but doesn’t cause combustion. It causes the essential oils which contain the active ingredients of the product, to boil until it causes the vapor which you then inhale, but as it doesn’t cause combustion (although see below-conduction vapes) you don’t get all the bad stuff

There is evidence that vaping could have been discovered and used over 2000 years ago. The Egyptians are known to have vaped using hot stones to heat the material. The Indian Shisha is thousands of years old. In the modern world the initial popularity of the vaping method for  cannabis is attributed to a cannabis activist ‘Eagle Bill’, he developed the shake n vape, which required that the apparatus was shaken, as it was heated,  to produce the vapor, hence the name.

There are two ways to transfer heat convection and conduction, conduction transfers heat by contact whereas convection uses a medium to move the heat about. Theoretically convection vaporizers are more efficient, conduction vapes heat unevenly and are relatively inefficient as they are heating continuously and thus use more energy and more weed, they can also cause the weed to combust, defeating the object.

Also, conduction causes several products which can be cancerous as well as causing other medical problems, as using conduction vaping can also cause combustion.  As the cannabis (or tobacco etc.) burn these noxious gases are released into your lungs! Vaporising cannabis is achieved at around 140ºC whereas burning it (smoking) is at around 200ªC and can be as high as 1000ºC, so there can be a lot less harmful substances through vaping.