TL;DR: Is there a formula you can use to mix together 2 liquids with different nicotine concentrations at a specific ratio in order to get a specific target nicotine concentration in your final mixture?
I've been doing diy for a little bit now. I mix by weight, and I'm pretty comfortable with mixing raw ingredients together using the steam engine calculator.
But because I have some knowledge of mixing, a friend of mine asked my opinion on something a little different and I'm having a hard time working the math out in my head.
He usually vapes a commercially made 3mg 70vg/30pg freebase liquid in his subohm devices. He recently bought their 35mg salt liquid of the same flavor (also 70/30) to use in his new mtl tank. However, he didn't like how much of a buzz he was getting and wanted to lessen that. I suggested simply mixing his 3mg freebase with his 35mg salt at a 1:1 ratio to have something in the middle, thinking (35+3)/2 would give him 19mg. He said that was better, still a little too much. I told him I figured he could try the same thing again by mixing his new ~19mg mixture at a 1:1 ratio with his regular 3mg juice and theoretically end up with ~11mg? ((19+3)/2=11).
Obviously the chemical makeup of freebase liquid and nicsalt liquid are different so maybe it's hard to predict exactly what he's got.
But the whole thing got me thinking, is there some kind of formula you could use to figure out what ratio of 2 different nicotine concentrations you'd need to achieve a specific mg/ml target? Instead of just incrementally mixing 1:1, then (1:1):1 then ((1:1):1):1? It's been almost 15 years since I learned about logarithmic functions in high school math, so trying to figure this out has my head spinning.
Anyone got any input?
EDIT: added a TL;DR, and a word
Say you have 100ml of 3mg per ml and 25 ml of 35mg/ml
In total we have 300mg (100x3)+ 875mg (25x35)= 1175 mg of nicotine in 125ml of liquid = 9.4 mg/ml.
Say we want 200ml of 12 mg/ml.
So we have an equation A x 35 + (1 - A) x 3 = 12 and we want to solve A.
35 x A + 3 - 3 x A = 12 so 32A = 9 or A = 9/32 or 0.28125.
So let’s check that, 0.28125 x 200 x 35 + (1 - 0.28125) x 200 x 3 = 1968.7 + 431.25 = 2400 mg of nicotine
So you’d want 28% of the 35 mg and 72% of the 3 to make 12 mg/ml.
Yes, but I'd have to fiddle with pencil and paper (which I don't have on hand right now) cause I don't know it off the top of my head.
The easiest thing to do is if your friend were to pick up a bottle of 0mg/ml to mix with the salt-nic eliquid. Much, much easier to figure out.
Nicotine is nicotine, doesn't matter if it's freebase or salts. The way it affects the body will and can be different but the percentage / weight / volume, whatever , is always the same between the two
Agreed. I guess I should've clarified better. That is something I brought up. We can change his nicotine concentration by diluting and all that. But if he gets it dialed to say a 12mg range final product and likes that...then he goes and buys a 12mg straght salt liquid or a 12mg straight freebase liquid it's probably not gonna vape exactly the same as his mixture he made.
Honestly I would never vape freebase at 12mg
I don't like self harm. Jokes
Freebase is much ligher per-molecule than the salts. Like citrate is 4x heavier than the freebase.
You can't just compare them in mg/ml and expect to know anything.
Try a nicotine shot calculator - I've been using this one: https://liquidnicotinewholesalers.com/nicotine-shot-calculator
I regularly buy 6mg freebase liquid on sale, and add the correct amount of 100mg nic salt to bring up to 45 (11.7ml per 30ml total). You can plug in your friends numbers (3mg liquid, 35mg 'nicotine',) and choose the final mg and amount to make.
For example, if he wants to make 30mls of 12mg liquid, he'd use 7.7ml of the 35mg and 22.3ml of the 3mg. Note for this calculator, the "Amount of nicotine to add" is counted as part of the "Volume of Liquid", not in addition to it.
I'm just putting this out there:
Could we please stop using the term "freebase?" I swear it will be the next thing on the news that some 15 yo was "freebasing" nicotine.
Though it is probably the correct chemical term, it really doesn't help with the way that vaping is portrayed to the general public.
What other term do you suggest?