I just started mixing my own juice a few days ago. I saw a TFA recipe on here that I wanted to try. 15% Ripe Strawberry. That's it. I have a Sub Tank Mini and I wanted the resulting juice to wick well. I mixed it 80/20 VG/PG and it was still much thicker than most max VG juices I have bought. So I decided to try adding some distilled water. 10% for the first run.
Terrible. Pretty much unvapable. Extremely harsh throat hit. I threw the batch out. This time I tried 70/30 with 2% DW. It was better but still too harsh to vape consistently. I'm worried that anything thicker will have trouble wicking. Any tips for making my juice thinner while maintaining a high-VG content? The threads I've found searching this sub say 5-15% water but that seems incredibly high to me. Before I started doing DIY I bought a 90/10 juice from Ruthless. It was much much thinner than any 90/10 mix I've made and it's not harsh at all.
I'm using VG based nicotine from Nude Nicotine. The test results they sent me showed 99.97% pure nicotine. I'm using 100mg/ml nicotine. My PG and VG are from Nude Nicotine as well.
EDIT: I forgot to mention I'm using 3mg/ml nic.
EDIT #2: I just want to thank everybody for all the help you've given me. I was worried this thread would be dead after a few hours, but I keep seeing helpful responses. So thank you all so much. The information I've received has been incredibly useful. My next flavor order should arrive tomorrow (4/20) so I'll make a few different batches then and let you all know how it went.
I also have a subtank mini and it vapes my 100% VG juice from Vape Kitchen just fine.
Really? May I ask what coil and wattage? I have some 80% vg juice in mine now and I tend to get dry hits more often then not on the prebuilt .5 ohm coil head @ 20w, and max airflow. What am I doing wrong?
I'm currently using the temp sensing coils on my rdna 40 vaporshark, so I don't want to lead you in the wrong direction on wattage because I honestly don't remember. I would just start at the bottom of the wattage range that's printed on the coil, be it it the 1.2 or .5 ohm, and work my way up. I also have just a little bit of the airflow choked off of wide open. It helps wick because it creates a stronger vacuum when you take a draw, pulling more juice to the coil
Get a better sub tank. My HerkAles vapes 90% VG juice just fine for me to chain vape with their 0.6 ohm prebuilt coils @ 75 watts.
10% is a lot with water. You only want like 1 drop per ml. Also try like 10% of strawberry ripe. It's pretty potent.
Still, 2% for a 5ml batch is only like 0.1ml of water. And I really like the flavor of the strawberry at 15%. Having more flavoring wouldn't affect throat hit, right? It's in PG but I include the flavoring in my PG calculation so it still works out correctly.
A lot of flavors contain a small amount of alcohol. Adding a high % of a flavor that uses alcohol as an ingredient will give you a pretty good amount of throat hit. If that's the case, leave the cap off of your juice for a few hours to let some of the alcohol evaporate away. Be careful though, it can also mute some flavors this way too so experiment.
Like /u/Butterd_Toost said, maybe 1 drop per mL is what you want to aim for. What mod are you using? Maybe your voltage/wattage is set too high? If you are burning faster than you are wicking, then you will have a harsh hit. Maybe try mixing at 70/30 and then adding the 1 drop per mL?
Edit: make sure you did not burn your cotton (or w/e you use for wick) as well. It will leave a harsh taste, and wont wick properly.
My mod isn't set very high. I've been using the sub tank for nearly 3 months. I also work at a B&M. I can troubleshoot a sub tank. The problem is not my mod. My cotton is clean, no burning. I'm unfortunately very familiar with the taste of burnt cotton.
I'm already adding significantly less than 1 drop per ml. More water is just going to make it more harsh right?
I have not personally used water in my mixes, but eliminating the already discussed factors, maybe the nicotine test was not accurate, or it needs a very good shake since it is VG based, the nicotine could have gone bad, or maybe a bum batch of flavor. My guess would fall towards the nicotine though. Try shaking the ever living crap out of it to mix it up well.
Assuming you use a decent subtank, you shouldn't need ANY distilled water in a 30/70 or even 20/80 mix.
There's absolutely 0 reason to ever use more than 2-3% DW.
It's more likely the nicotine you are using or the amount of the flavor that is causing the throat hit if you still have problems with less water.
Going to third or fourth that 10% is really too much for that flavor whether you use water or not. I also use 2 drops per mL from an LDPE e-liquid type bottle. Same with FA Strawberry.
10% water is too much or 10% flavor is too much? And wouldn't a higher ratio of water to VG/PG just mean a harsher hit? Maybe there's something fundamental I'm just not understanding. I thought I'd read/watched all the guides.
I'm certain they meant the flavor percentage. Water is also probably too high, but it definitely wouldn't give you a throat hit like effect. You might want to narrow down other parts of that mix. Nicotine is a big factor in how harsh or burning it feels. Since the subtank feels more like a dripper you should try a small batch without nic, and with the most common suggested amount of (hopefully distilled) water. A small amount of plain vodka is a good substitute for a thinner as well, and adds a small bit of the familiar intentional throat hit nicotine usually provides.
I just read this thread and don't know what the answer is. But I wish you the best of luck!
Haha, thanks. I'm probably going to try to take the flavor amount down because it seems like the general consensus is that at least 1 drop per ml is just fine. So it must be the flavoring. If this doesn't work, I'll get rid of the water and see if it gives me a harsh hit.
This is the first result in searching "strawberry ripe harsh" in the sidebar search. It's the same 15%, max vg: http://www.reddit.com/r/DIY_eJuice/comments/1rbz81/harshness_at_6mg_and_15_flavoring/
It's probably the flavoring.
Editing to add that I've been running Velvet Cloud (pure VG + a little water) juices on my original series Sub Tank Mini with great results.
I just got the revelation this saturday. I was at a local B+M looking for a decent banana flavor from Capella. They didn't have any so the guy let me taste some of his house juices. All of them were 0 nic. I never vaped 0 nic before, 'cause it seemed useless to me me wanting to get off the analoges. The vapes were extremly smooth on all the subtanks he gave me, like zero coughing or throathit. So i bought a bottle of "daphuk" from VapeCraving with 0 nic and put it in my Kanger subtank mini. It was great, no harsh taste, no coughing just joy @30 watts, stock coil 1.2 ohm. Sooo, i mixed in 4mg/ml nic with Nude Nicotine VG nic (100mg/ml). And voilà, a bit of throat hit, but not too much and quite a decent nic buzz in my brains. As a former 1.5 to 2 pack Marlboro Red smoker it seemed useless to me to vape anything lower than 6mg/ml. In the subtanks however I seem not to be able to vape anything too high in nic as i start cough the lungs out of me.
TL/DR: TIL vaping more than 4mg/ml in subtanks make me cough like hell and is too harsh for me.
Not all tanks perform the same. With that said, people seem to get caught up in the first part of a nicotine strength (4mg) and not the second (/mL). Your typical Kanger Subtank is going to feed a lot more juice at once than your standard gas station cartomizer. This is why drippers usually don't go above 6mg/mL because of the volume of juice they go through. In the end, they're probably getting MORE nicotine than the person huffing on 24mg/mL out of a 2.2ohm cartomizer.
15% Strawberry Ripe is ridiculously high (and this is coming from someone that likes a lot of flavoring!) It'll start tasting like flowers in a couple days with that much Strawb Ripe, I guarantee it. If you're just using Strawberry Ripe, 8% is a good place to start, and I wouldn't really go above 10% with it.
I don't like using straight distilled water in juice (but I don't make Max VG either.) 0.9% Saline is smoother and has the additional benefit of making flavors "pop", but you don't want to use very much at all: I generally use 1% at the most (which works out to about 1-2 drops per ml.) You might be able to get away with 2% saline, but keep in mind that saline tends to shorten the life of coils (plus it'll start making the juice taste funky if you use too much.) Maybe try 1-2% saline, and 1-3% distilled water. Also make a few small batches at once (say 5ml each) with various amounts of saline and/or DW, instead of just doing one batch at a time.
One last thing: the term "Max VG" is pretty meaningless. Unless a juice maker is specifically using VG or alcohol-based flavorings, they're probably not going to do much better the 30/70 or 20/80, because the vast majority of flavorings are PG-based to begin with. I've seen a lot of "Max VG" juice that look like it was 40/60 (and tasted like it too.) I think a lot of juice makers just use the term for marketing because it's so vague. I mean, they could make a 30/70 p/v juice because they jammed in 30% PG-based flavoring, call it "max VG" and not technically be lying. The thing is, VG doesn't carry flavor very well, so a lot of companies crank up the flavoring percentage to make up for it; of course, this drives down the total amount of VG and isn't really any different than the fairly standard 30/70 that seems to be so common.
Thank you for the info. I'll definitely cut back on the flavoring. You guys might want to consider editing the TFA Recipes post in the sidebar as it recommends 15% strawberry ripe.
I'll try saline solution as well, but it will have to be at a later time. The only stuff I've seen is around $20 before shipping and I gotta pay bills with the rest of my money
Yeah, a lot of those recipes are pretty high in the flavoring percentages.
For saline, it's cheap and easy to make your own: you just need distilled water and pure salt (with no additives or anti-caking agents.) My local grocery store (Kroger) had Diamond Crystal Kosher Salt and the only ingredient listed is "salt". It cost me about $2 for the box-tube-thing of salt, plus $1 for a gallon of distilled water. I don't remember the exact recipe (it's around here somewhere), but it was as simple as putting some water and salt into a saucepan, letting it come up to a boil, and then taking it off the stove. Once it cools a bit pour it into a container of your choice and it's ready to use; takes all of ten minutes, and you'll have enough pure salt to make literally gallons and gallons of saline (or to cook with, it's pretty nice salt!)
EDIT: for the sake of remembering later (and everyone else, of course), here's the saline recipe I used:
- 1/2 teaspoon Salt (pure salt, no additives or anti-caking agents)
- 8oz. Distilled Water
In a small saucepan, bring water just to a boil and add salt. Stir and remove from heat. Let cool to a handle-able temperature and pour into preferred container. You can just microwave a (measured) cup of water with the salt in it too, the heating is just to make it dissolve faster and it doesn't need to be boiled.
It's not quite as accurate as buying pre-made 0.9%, but it's more than close enough for home DIY use.
how did it go? I am also noticing a harshness, even with only 2% water
I don't use water anymore. I just use VG and a little PG. It's always been harsh with water.
Also, 15% of that strawberry is way too much. For most flavors I never use more than like 9-10% and that's always with other flavors. You kind of have to judge it by how powerful your flavoring is. You can usually tell by smelling it, but you won't know the difference unless you have a few different brands of flavors.
Well your first problem is your using a kangertank. :p ive worked at several vape shops and their coils are complete trash, no wonder it cant wick 80/20. Can someone please give me just ONE good reason to use water in your juice??? Either use more pg if your tank cannot wick properly, or buy a new tank? Why would you ever want to add water or saline it just seems rediculous and lazy to me. It mutes flavor so what is the purpose of this? Also dtrawberry ripe is better as a accent flavor, i couldnt vape it as a stand alone
The Sub Tank is actually pretty great. Great flavor, and it does wick 80/20 juices, they just need to be thinned out a little bit before I'm comfortable firing it at my preferred 26W with the 1.2ohm coils. The coils are hit and miss, but mostly hit. If they have issues wicking, I just put a needle through the cotton and it fixes the problem.
Water doesn't give as bad of a throat hit as PG does, at least for me. I'd rather use a little bit of water than take my juice down to 70/30 for wicking. I don't like a lot of PG.
I really do like the ripe strawberry flavor all by itself. I love strawberry.
>26W with the 1.2ohm coils
Good lord. No wonder you're burning wicks.
water just takes away from the flavor, literally makes it taste watered down IMO. Ive never heard of anyone needing to thin their juice out in real life, just on reddit. Seems extremely unnecessary to me
Well, I could add PG instead of water, but water doesn't give as harsh of a throat hit as PG does. So why not add water instead? My flavoring is pretty strong, so I don't care at all if it's 2% "watered down" because it still tastes great.
Not all tanks can handle high-VG juices. And some of the people using those tanks still don't want a huge throat hit. So water helps fix that issue.