I just thought I would post to see if others have had the same experience as me. My (ex) favorite juice vendor(that shall not be named) had amazing tasting juice. However, it would gunk up my tanks and drippers in a few days, some of them in less than that.
I switched to DIY a few weeks ago. I noticed a much more clean/crisp taste to my liquids instantly. I luckily found an ADV before I even began DIY, so I cranked out 200 ml of liquid from the get-go. Anyway, I have been lazy with rewicking my goblin RTA for the past week and there has been almost no gunk on my coil! Also, the coil still produces great flavor, just a bit muted compared to first few days. This makes me wonder what in the world I have been vaping all this time? I have gone from changing wicks every other day to every couple weeks.
Thank you DIY for saving my lungs from the who knows what.
Probably added sweetener
Coloring as well I might imagine. It is amazing, I can't even vape the brands I started out vaping due to their chemical harshness.
Commercial juices are typically over flavored, over sweetened and occasionally colored. They're trying to sell based on a first impression, worst example I can think of would be Vapin-Plus Peach, it smells pleasantly like peach candy/brandy and the first hit tastes fine, but it only takes about three or four drags before the flavoring starts to accumulate in the coil and your palette, making it taste like chemical waste... Three or four drags... Of course if you are a heavy smoker just taking a break or getting into vaping you probably won't notice that its way over flavored and that you're probably actually burning some of the additives after running a tank's worth.
The less flavoring the better. When you mix your own you may find flavors that are perfectly vapable at 2% or less, and often the sweetness of PG and VG are sufficient. Really this is the best way to go considering that burning massive flavoring residue could potentially be as bad as smoking and it accumulates pretty fast.
Most of my mixes are between 4% and 12% total flavoring, but essential flavors, tobaccos and a few others are overwhelming at anything over about 2%.
You want to take clean juice to the extreme? Try 2% each TFA Mandarin and 2% FA Coconut, or try 1% TFA Flue Cured Tobacco with 4% Inawera Blueberry, or go all the way and vape 0.25% TFA Caramel Cappuccino, (watch out, even 1% TFA CC is awful, its extremely strong.) I like a higher PG in my tanks, which is part of why I can use less flavoring since VG can mute flavors and seems to contribute to coil fouling as well.
0.25% TFA CC and a ton of sweetener is fantastic but fuck does it screw up coils.
Amen brother(or sister). I will have to give your recommendations a try. The interesting thing is my mix is at 20-22% flavoring and still not gunking up my coils in the slightest. It is amazing how many factors there are with only 5-6 ingredients.
Well, kind of unfortunately, flavorings aren't consistent in "flavor content". Since they're molecules suspended in some kind of solution like PG, PGA or water or something odd like triacetyn, the amount of "non vaporizable" material is often uncertain. For example; Flavor West has a bunch of flavors that need to be used in the 15-20% range to get the best out of them, but I might find a similar flavor from Flavor Art that only needs about 5-10% to get a similar flavor profile... So, am I actually using more flavoring at 20% with FW, or is that flavor just 95% PG instead of 70% like the other more potent flavor? Stuff like vanillin & EM, (crystals that don't actually vaporize so they accumulate,) and essential oils definitely leave a residue, but since I have no idea what all substances they use for most flavors its possible that some are almost entirely vaporizable and leave little to no gunk. Yeah, there are sooo many factors it was overwhelming at first. I've been doing this for over a year and a half and this week I finally got an Almond Amaretto juice that isn't sickening. It was my white whale. The first flavor I tried to make, but no matter what % I tried it tasted toxic... Turns out it has a very narrow range, (typical of stronger flavors,) and needs quite a bit of steeping to taste like anything but kerosene and vomit... I tried looking for a recipe online but no one seemed to have hit it, and the German spreadsheet listed it as one user recommending 7%, which was too much. But flavors are subjective, so even if I do find a well regarded recipe usually I still need to tweak it for it to be good to me...