It seems to me that a lot of people on this subreddit are very concerned with sanitation. I personally, am barely concerned. Let me tell you why.
First, let me make some qualifications here. If you sell your juice online or in a B&M, this post does not apply for you. Consumers have the right to demand highly sanitized juice because they pay so much and want a feeling of security (and in some cases a feeling of higher QC).
Second, I also want to distinguish between sanitation in regards to cleanliness and disinfection, and general quality control and precision. When I say "Sanitation is over-rated", I'm not saying "just use one syringe for all your concentrates". Thats more a matter of contamination and quality control than sanitation. Same goes with reusing plastic bottles and things of that nature. I care about how my juice tastes and the things that affect that, not so much the microbes and dust particles possible affecting my juice.
Thirdly, I am also not talking about safety. Some people might think when I say sanitation I mean "don't wear gloves" or "there's no point in storing my nicotine properly". I'm not saying that at all. I dont wear much safety gear but when working with high concentrations of nicotine, its very important (I use 24mg so i'm a little more lax on the gear).
Anyways, on to my main point: Laboratory-grade sanitation practices are completely unnecessary.
Some people may flinch at this and think "What is he saying? That juice made in a dirty shack by some untrained kid is ok?", and in some sense I am. There are certain practices that should be followed, all equipment should cleaned before use, juice mixers should wash hands frequently and wear proper clothing, juice components should all be stored in a cool dry place. But you don't need to take these to the overkill. You don't need heavy duty UV sterilization followed by alcohol baths. You don't need to mix in a sealed chamber. You don't need a heavy duty clean room. You don't need any of the super-expensive, over the top, lab grade equipment that all the pros use. And here's why:
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E-juice is not consumed in one clean area and is frequently aerated. As i go about my day, i vape (and consequently open my bottle) all over the place. I vape on the often dirty OSU campus, I vape on the streets of columbus, I often vape near road-work of some sort, I vape in traffic surrounded by exhaust fumes. I vape pretty much everywhere, and pretty much every airborne contaminant you can imagine ends up in contact with my juice. And thats why i'm okay with mixing in the attic of my house. Because even though its not a clean room, its not filled with smog, pollen, trash odor, etc. (For you people who voop, this argument is even stronger.)
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Most e-juice contains PG, which is a natural anti-bacterial. Vaping a stomach flu would be pretty shitty but its almost impossible. Not only is ejuice a poor environment for bacteria growth, but it contains a natural sterilizer This means that while your juice is patiently steeping in your sock drawer, it's also patiently killing off all the microbes that is may have been exposed to.
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Most people vape at near or over 400 degrees Fahrenheit. Most bacteria die when exposed to 70C for 15 seconds, but 200C for a few seconds should zap any bugs the PG somehow missed.
Now that all the bacteria is dealt with, and the air quality/particulates are as well, whats to worry about anymore? I'm not sure honestly which is why I'm ok with rinsing out a glass bottle with hot water and then letting it dry as my cleaning method. Sure maybe a few microbes are gonna end up on my bottle, but they're just gonna die anyway.
If people have other opinions, I would love to hear them as I'm mostly self-educated in this area and its possible I'm missing some key factor that invalidates what i'm saying here. If not:
TL;DR Don't mix on raw meat and you'll be fine!
hahaha OMG I have had these exact thoughts for ages and figured "I don't want to make people twitch when they read it"
I wonder how many people are going to twitch when they ready THIS lol. though many of them will totally agree as well.
all that said, still gonna be mixing in a lab grade clean room for my company New Day Alchemy which launches next month because...nobody wants DrCrimmy's Crappy Cravings juice lol.
Need a tester? ;)
well...I wouldn't mind a written review XD
Go Blue. Buckeyes suck(not really, they actually have a really good team and coaching staff, and are definitely contenders for the national title. Until they lose to Harbaugh, that is.)
Also, I think the clean room standards should be expected more for particulate than bacteria, but a lot of the basic vape bitches out there don't realize there's particulate in the air we breath that could be harmful when heated to 400F and inhaled(or that different areas have different particles in the air, and that people grow a tolerance to these particles by living in these areas). So they go for the shit they "understand," bacteria.
All great points, and I'd go one further and add that nicotine isn't nearly as dangerous as people make it out to be - the current toxicity numbers are flawed and based on hearsay from the 1850's.
Every pair of gloves a vendor stuffs into a box of 100mg goes into a drawer so I can use them when I have something legitimately dangerous I'm working with.
All that being said, I have to say that I'd rather be annoyed by people pushing too hard in the area of sanitation than hear news reports of people stretching the boundaries too far in the other direction.
thats true as well. I'm not sure what exactly would happen if i poured 100mg/ml conc on my arm, but i'm not keen on finding out. But you're probably right that unless you're drinking out of the bottle, you probably won't get more than a bad headache.
I was splitting a litre of 100mg using a funnel and gloves, and not thinking scratched my neck.
I'm alive to talk abot it. It was traumatic. First the thoughts of, "Did I just do that?". Then you start to worry about what will happen. Is that warmth in your neck because of that satisfactory scratch, or is the nicotine invading your blood stream and heading for your brain? If it is invading your brain, is that why your heart rate went up? Or is it panic over what may happen? Will my wife look over in five minutes and find my dead, nicotine ravaged body lying on the floor, with a half litre of the remaining nicotine next to me, like a bad crime scene? Will my life insuarnce pay out on acts of stupidity?
Then I realized I was fine. Didn't even give me a buzz.
I got a ton it on my hands, nothing happened. I even got called out by DrMcLovens claiming that I'm putting the entire DIY community in danger by not using gloves. Not for telling others not to use them, but because I could end up on the five o clock news. Lol. But yea, some people are a little ridiculous. The only thing that would really be important, is eye protection.... and I don't even wear safety goggles when pouring bleach in the washer. sarcasm
I'm not disagreeing with you, but you're likely to get more than a bad headache. When I was a teen I stupidly chain smoked a bunch of cigarettes and I still remember that feeling of nic overdose...it was one of the worst feelings ever and I prayed and prayed for it to stop. Gloves while mixing the nic is the only real safety precaution I take.
I did that once in college. It was like a very violent combination of all the negative effects of being really drunk with a healthy hangover at the same time. I had a crazy headache with insane spins and dizziness, puking every 10 minutes that offered no relief at all (in fact, I think it just made the other physical effects worse). I was also sweating buckets - like, more than I've ever sweat in my life. I left a soggy imprint of my entire body on my bed. Physically, it's the worst I ever recall feeling in my life.
I think of it like mixing drinks, I don't walk into a bar and demand that all their alcohol is kept and stored in a clean room and delivered to me from that room.
As long as the workspace itself is kept clean and sanitary I'm fine with that.
While I don't advocate a sterile environment, your analogy does not hold true. The toxicity level of elements is drastically higher for ingestion vs inhalation. Ingestion toxicity is measured in grams and inhalation is measured in milligrams. So a .5g contamination of a foodstuff is relatively safe, while a .5g contamination of an inhalant would be toxic.
I spoke to a chemist friend of mine when I was building my setup, and he said for e juice purposes, gloves and eye protection should be plenty.He was more concerned about the cleanliness of the area, i.e. don't mix in a dusty/musty basement.
I've only been vaping for about a year but there are a lot of things I find amusing or confusing about this community. Safety first, of course, but I feel that another example of excessive paranoia is the use of demineralized water for everything. It might have been a big topic of discussion years ago but these days no one ever talks about why and I've never bothered to look it up.
I assume that chlorine is one reason you shouldn't dilute your juice with tap water and that makes sense. But as for cleaning bottles and tanks with demineralized water? Come on. Your shit isn't going to get a build up of calcium, it's not going to rust and with proper drying you're not going to cause a short through the use of tap water. Someone care to enlighten me what the actual risk is?
I use hot water straight from the tap (which can sometimes be worse in a bacterial sense, mine is a tank system, instant hot water would seem more sanitary) but as long as it's dry, there's nothing for bacteria to feed on (they're like us in a way, need moisture, food and a nominal temperature range to survive), but after the 10th-15th wash, I find I sometimes get a little bit of stubborn residue that won't go away.
all I do is get some rubbing alcohol and put it on there with a cotton swab, rub it around a bit and then rinse with more hot water, that's just to make me feel at ease that my equipment is in top condition for performance, and most likely cleaner than when it came off the factory line.
I believe 60°C gets rid of the vast majority of bacteria, so tap water that is really hot should be safe. Boiling it should get rid of anything even remotely harmful. But I'm far more concerned with the possible long term effects of inhaling +10ml of PG/VG+flavors every day than minuscule amounts of contaminants, not to mention having a battery fail on me during a brain lapse. THAT still scares me and is probably a far greater threat to anyone involved in this no matter how experienced they are.
Down under we all have hot water tanks and they are perfectly sanitary so long as the min temp is set high enough, forgotten the numbers but factory default setting will not provide an environment where bacteria will grow. Some people like to drop it low to save on electricity bills, the only warning I've heard is in regard to legionellas growing which can be a nasty bug..
> which can sometimes be worse in a bacterial sense, mine is a tank system, instant hot water would seem more sanitary)
If you have ever seen inside an older hot water tank, you will never use it again to even boil pasta. They get gross over time. Its not likely to make you sick, but its still gross.
Because this is Reddit, any overzealous nutcase can swing the whole herd to feeling they are wrong. OMG you are doing it wrong! and basically 80% of the people here don't have enough backbone to call them out. Why do you think we have all the introverted, socially awkward posts.
I also vape on the filthy streets of Columbus!
I think this post is entirely wrong /u/Eizooz. Rules and regulations are in place for ANY AND ALL CONSUMABLE PRODUCTS that require a food-grade or pharmaceutical-grade mixing environment.
eLiquids are drugs, not food, thus fall under the category for pharmaceutical production standard, which supercede the lower food-grade standard - simple SS countertops, workflow L--->R, cleaning procedures, no hepa;s required, general cleanliness procedures and common sense.
eLiquid is NOT food. eLiquid is consumed directly via inhalation into your blood stream.
eLiquid is not bacteriocidal. eLiquid is BACTERIOSTATIC - only preventing the further growth of NEW bacteria. If the organism can get in there in the first place, the solution containing PG or VG sill not necessarily kill it. In fact, VG is used as a CELLULAR FEED in many bioreactor process. How do I know? This used to be my past job in biotechnology industry before starting Nude Nicotine.
Tl:dr - eLiquid is a PHARMACEUTICAL GRADE product and must be held to standards in which any medicine is produced - minimum sterility requirements, HEPA filtration to control airborne contaminants (not just surface contaminants by wiping) - along with a host of additional human-protocols to protect the product from contamination by human factors - body suits for dust protection, respirators for airborne contaminants, etc...
While you do bring up a good point about the user "dirtiness," from a liability standpoint from the manufacturer this is entirely wrong. The product must maintain complete and total integrity from day 1 of formulation, and the contamination after a seal is broken is the customers's responsibility. While the bit of dirt or dust won't do much damage at all to the average healthy human, not all of us are in perfect shape. the ONE customer who has a foul experience will bring the business down.
Please take my words with a grain of salt. I am by no means slandering your original post, rather bringing attention to the necessity of the PHARMACEUTICAL standard over the food grade in this industry.
Vape safe friends<3
Jake
I like what you had to say, but your TLDR was longer than your original comment.
I think you missed the point of this post, which was about diy, not commercial endeavors. He (and I) accede that if you are selling your product, affecting hundreds of thousands or lives and receiving compensation, you need to step up your game and provide sanitary facilities. For quality control, health and liability reasons.
But do you expect that all of your customers have stainless countertops and impeccable workflow and sanitation mixing up a 10ml nana cream clone at home? :)
Actually what you are saying makes pretty good sense. Use a little common sense and you should be good to go. I don't mix in a clean room or ware all the plastic gloves or eye protectors but then I'm using a pre-mixed 3mg mixing base and I mix on my desk in my room. I store everything except my mixing base in a wood box I bought just for this purpose that has a wood lid. I keep my mixing base in my freezer and take it out and let it come up to room temperature before I use it.
I just treat it the same way i would if the health inspector was in a restaurant kitchen ,that i was working in, looking around. Clean area, nothing open or out i dont need, gloves. I wash my hands a lot when im mixing as well and dry with paper towels and toss them. I dont really see the big deal for me and the few people i mix for have seen my work area and are ok with it.
I just wash my hands, clear a space on my desk, lay down some paper towel and mix in front of my pc. all of my equipment is washed at the end of the session and I replace it when it starts to stick (the plunger in the syringe doesn't like being washed all the time.)
breathing in what could possibly be a stray pubic hair is the least of my concerns, especially when I'm outside vaping in all the other possible pollutants that could be in the air.
I treat it like I would as someone who cooks responsibly in their own kitchen. It's relatively clean, I do my dishes, and I wipe down anywhere I've prepared raw meat or eggs and wipe up anything that spills. But I don't keep my kitchen to health inspector standards. My glassware doesn't go into a sanitizing solution, I don't have "use first" stickers or an elaborate food dating system, etc. I think a good bit of his point is that there is a difference between the standards required for personal use and the standards required for producing for a consumer. The vast majority of people would fail a visit from a health inspector if he held your home kitchen up to the standard of a commercial kitchen.
I've been saying the same thing for a long time. People want their "clean rooms" but seem to have no problem opening their tanks with their dirty hands, taking the cap off of their juice in their dirty homes and vaping in unclean areas. If you are someone who lives in a clean room, then congratulations, but most of us live in the real world where our juice is likely to be far more contaminated by merely opening and using it than it is to be contaminated by the mixers.
This is not to say I want someone mixing my juice in Dr. Crimmy's shack, but I don't think ISO certified clean rooms are necessary at all either.
I agree! I think people have gone a little over board on sanitation, but lets be honest. Every where we go our juices and ourselves become exposed to all different contaminants. I'm more worried about the minimum wage worker dropping my hamburger on the ground and spit on it before serving me because he was pissed he didn't get his lunch break on time.
I think having a clean room (not an ISO clean room) just an organized an generally dust free clean room is just fine for me. But if a bug shows up in my juice I am probably not going to re-order from that company. But I feel all these high stand scientific labs don't really seem needed and is just causing our juice prices to increase.
Liability. With how litigious we are these days, you need to take these kinds of unneeded precautions to reduce your chance of being sued out of business by someone who will claim that they got an illness because their juice wasn't sterilized or something. Lawyers would jump at the chance to do it too. What better way to send your career to the legal cosmos, than championing the anti vaping cause by claiming juice makers are unclean and filthy.
I got a serious question for you all.... Does anyone here make juice in a brand new bottle (glass or plastic) that was purchased from a reputable DIY supplier without first washing or even rinsing it out?
Also, would a rinse with plain tap water actually make things worse? Because of hard water, chlorine, fluoride, etc. being introduced to it?
I use mtbakervapor's bottles without rinsing them out. They get the eyeball test though.
I have washed all my glass bottles from Amazon, because they failed the eyeball test.
The ones I have definitely pass the eye test... Sometimes I wonder if I'm doing more harm than good rinsing them out with tap water... I live in Southern California, and our tap water is horrible. Sure as hell cant drink it, sometimes I wonder if I should even let me dog drink it.
The big deal is this.. Ejuice manufactures want to scare people.. Everybody and their grandma is coming out with "Premium Juice" Just recently one of the "Premium Juice Co" in my area came out with a "Tricks" Flavor.. They have a clean room and all this crazy jazz.. They ask $22 a bottle for this Tricks flavor.. I tasted it...and I compared it to my "Tricks" and it was SPOT ON... Ill give you a hint it was 1 flavor... My friends thought mine had more flavor and I mixed it up in a kitchen!... I HATE people that say that you need a clean room... They say that because most juice manufactures are getting ready for FDA regulation.. If you know how to mix you will find it soo funny when you see people "Breaking bad" to mix Juice.... This is all FOOD GRADE stuff besides nicotine.. You dont need a lab.. For all the juice CO that do it in a LAB all your doing is making it LOOK SOO DANGEROUS... and its really not....My Kitchen sink Juice taste just as good if not better then PREMIUM Juice.. Just without the Price tag! Great post bro..
I just started mixing my own juice, and I just use a sheet of absorbent butcher paper on my kitchen table, nitrile gloves, and clean industrial/food grade syringes that I wash out with hot water immediately after use. Not manufacturing for anything but personal use, so I think my practices are perfectly fine lol. Keep up the good work lol
Bacteria can grow in PG-
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17043822
It's not common, but it can happen. Why Risk it? Being clean and tidy is important, and it looks professional. I agree that people oversell the ultra clean part- but there is 100% a case for being clean, especially if you are a business selling something people ingest.
Right, but that contamination is just as likely to get into your tank when it's sitting around half-filled, or after you open it in public, or on your drip tip after you stuck it in your mouth - then touched it with your hands - then stuck it in your pocket.
If I find a hair in my soup in a restaurant, I'm going to be pissed and disgusted and send it back. If I find a hair in my soup, that I made, in my kitchen - I'm going to pull it out and finish my soup.
I get the point of being clean, but there's no need for ridiculous standards. You don't need to prepare your personal e-juice in a clean room for the same reason you don't have to hold your kitchen to health inspector standards when preparing food for yourself.