Disposable vapes are some of the hottest vaping products on the market these days. Compared to buying a traditional vape kit, though, buying disposable vapes comes with an added challenge because you need to know how long you can expect the devices to last. If your last disposable vape runs out of vape juice unexpectedly, you might have to resort to buying another vape that isn’t your favorite. If you don’t have a local vape shop, you might even feel tempted to buy a pack of cigarettes while you wait for your shipment of vapes to arrive. You don’t want that to happen, so it’s important to plan correctly. To do that, you need to know how long disposable vapes last.
To understand how long a disposable vape should last, you must first understand what the puff counts on the devices mean. How long, for instance, can you expect a vape with 5,000 puffs to last? That’s where we’ll begin.
How Long Does a 5,000-Puff Vape Really Last?
Many of the best vapes on the market today have the capability of potentially lasting thousands of puffs. It’s important, though, to have realistic expectations because the number of puffs that you’ll get out of a device will depend in large part on how you vape. The reason is because the expected puff counts for disposable vapes are determined using automatic smoking machines that puff on the devices for just one second at a time until they run out of e-liquid. So, based on the amount of e-liquid it contains, a 5,000-puff disposable vape can be expected to last about 5,000 puffs if each puff is exactly one second in length.
If you have some vaping experience, you can immediately see the potential problem here: Few people puff on their vapes for exactly one second at a time. If you time yourself with a stopwatch, you’ll probably find that your average puff is more like two seconds or potentially even longer.
Knowing that the advertised puff counts for disposable vapes are calculated based on a puff length of one second, it’s possible to estimate how long a disposable vape should last based on your own real-world vaping patterns. If your average puff is two seconds in length, you will most likely get around 2,500 puffs from a device that’s advertised to have 5,000 puffs.
Whether a disposable vape gives you 2,500 or 5,000 puffs, though, what does the puff count really mean in terms of how long it’ll last you – particularly compared to cigarettes? That’s what we’ll discuss next.
How Long Do Disposable Vapes Last Compared to Cigarettes?
The question of how long a disposable vape lasts isn’t really best answered in terms of a certain number of puffs. What you really want to know is how many days a device will last before it runs out of e-liquid. That way, you can determine how many devices you need to buy each time you stock up on vapes – and that’s not all. By dividing the cost of a disposable vape by the number of days that you use it, you can determine how much vaping costs you per day. You can also compare the prices of various vaping devices to determine which one is the best deal.
So, how long should a 5,000-puff disposable vape last in terms of days? When you smoke a cigarette, you typically puff on it about 10 times over a span of five minutes before putting it out. Therefore, you’ll get approximately 200 puffs out of a full pack of cigarettes. Does that mean a 5,000-puff disposable vape will last as long as two and a half cartons of cigarettes? That’s unlikely, given the fact that your average puff length will likely be longer than one second. It's definitely fair, though, to expect a 5,000-puff disposable vape to last a fairly long time.
To truly understand how long a disposable vape should last, it can be useful to think of the device in terms of its nicotine content and compare it to cigarettes on that basis. We’ll turn to that topic next.
How Long Do Disposable Vapes Last in Terms of Nicotine Content?
The question of how much nicotine is in a cigarette is not an easy one to answer, and we’ve devoted a full article to that topic elsewhere on this site. The question has no simple answer because cigarette brands differ in their nicotine content. Also, there can be a significant difference between the amount of nicotine in a cigarette and the amount of nicotine that your body actually absorbs when you smoke. The same is true of vaping – not all of the nicotine in the e-liquid will actually end up in your bloodstream – but it’s possible to make some broad generalizations.
- On average, a cigarette contains about 10-12 mg of nicotine. Of that, your body will absorb around 1-1.5 mg. If there are 11 mg of nicotine in a typical cigarette – and your body absorbs 1-1.5 mg when you smoke – that means the bioavailability of the nicotine is around 9-13 percent. Given those numbers, you can expect to absorb around 20-30 mg of nicotine from one pack of cigarettes.
- You can calculate the nicotine content of a disposable vape by multiplying the volume of e-liquid by its nicotine strength. The Innokin INNOBAR V7000, for example, contains 16 ml of e-liquid with a nicotine strength of 50 mg/ml. That’s 800 mg of nicotine in all. Although you can’t necessarily make a direct comparison of the bioavailability of nicotine from smoking vs. vaping, you could expect to absorb around 72-104 mg of nicotine from a disposable vape with a nicotine content of 800 mg if the bioavailability is the same as that of a cigarette.
Based on the above calculations, a disposable vape with 800 mg of nicotine should last about as long as 3-5 packs of cigarettes if the bioavailability of the nicotine is similar.
As you can see, there’s no easy answer to the question of how long a disposable vape should last. If you look at in terms of the nicotine content, the expected life if the device is much shorter than it would be if you were only comparing disposable vapes to cigarettes in terms of how many puffs you get out of them. The true answer is probably somewhere in between those two extremes. Therefore, the really important thing isn’t knowing how long disposable vapes should last – it’s understanding how to make them last longer.
How to Make Disposable Vapes Last as Long as They Can
We’ll conclude this article with a brief overview of the things that you can do to make a disposable vape last as long as it possibly can. As we explained above, you can calculate how much you pay each day to vape by dividing the cost of your favorite vaping device by the number of days you use it. Therefore, the more days that you’re able to get out of a device, the lower your daily vaping expenses will be. So, how do you get more days out of a disposable vape? All that you need to do is follow these simple rules.
- The most important thing is to ensure that you only use your disposable vape when you actually need the nicotine. One of the biggest differences between vaping and smokingis that vaping tastes infinitely better. When you first started smoking, you didn’t enjoy the taste of the smoke – you simply put up with it because you liked the nicotine. Over time, you got used to the flavor and convinced yourself that you liked it. As soon as you switch to vaping and your sense of taste returns, though, you’ll think of things in a whole new light. Vapes are available in so many flavors – and all of them taste so good – that you might find yourself vaping almost constantly after making the switch. Try to avoid that. Remember that a typical smoking session consists of about 10 puffs and do your best to vape in the same way. When you aren’t craving nicotine, put the device down for a while.
- If disposable vapes are available in more than one nicotine strength where you live, make sure that the strength you’re using is right for you. If you constantly feel tempted to smoke a cigarette, you probably should be using a higher nicotine strength if possible.
- Take shorter puffs if you can. Remember that you’ll get more total puffs out of your device if your average puff length is as close to one second as possible.
- When you use your disposable vape, always wait several seconds after each puff before using the device again. If you “chain vape” by taking many puffs in quick succession, your device’s coil will become very hot. It’ll start using more and more e-liquid with each puff, and your device will end up running out of vape juice before it should. Pausing between puffs will prevent this problem from occurring.
