Picture this: It’s the middle of the night, and you’re ready for a nice, relaxing vape session. You press your vape mod’s fire button – and your vape tank emits a horrible burned flavor. You forgot to refill your tank, and now you’ve burned your last coil. Because it’s so late, there’s no hope of any local vape shop being open. Your vape kit isn’t functioning, and there’s no immediate way to fix it.
What would you do in that situation? Would you buy a cheap e-cigarette from a local 24-hour convenience store? Would you be tempted to buy a pack of cigarettes? If you’ve never thought about this situation before, it’s time to start because no piece of vape gear lasts forever. Every key component of your vape kit is a potential point of failure that, if it stopped working, could prevent you from being able to vape at all. That’s a particularly bad situation when you’re early in your transition from smoking to vaping because any temptation to buy “just one” pack of cigarettes can easily result in a regression all the way back to full-time smoking.
If you’ve made the decision that you’re done with smoking forever and are now a vaper, it’s time for you to start thinking like a vaper. That means making sure that you’re still going to be able to vape even if a key piece of vape gear stops working unexpectedly. When you shop for vape supplies online, make it a point to pick up one or two extra items that you plan to use only in an emergency. Over time, you’ll build up a vaping arsenal that’s immune to those dreaded single points of failure – and when one of your vaping accessories stops working, you’ll always have a replacement available.
These are the most essential vape supplies that you need to own right now.
Rebuildable Atomizer and Coil Building Supplies
When you consider all of the different vape supplies in your arsenal, your vape tank might be the item that’s most likely to fail because it can stop working in two different ways. You can burn out your coil, or you can drop the tank on a hard surface and break the glass. Either way, you can’t vape until you replace the broken part. That’s why your vape tank most likely came with a replacement glass enclosure, and it’s also why you probably buy at least one box of replacement coils every time you stock up on e-liquid. Those replacement parts aren’t going to help you, though, if you’ve already used your tank’s extra glass enclosure or burned your last coil out unexpectedly.
One potential solution that can prevent you from losing your vape tank unexpectedly is ensuring that you buy a new glass enclosure as soon as you use the replacement that came with your tank. It’s also wise to always have at least one unopened box of coils available. What would you do, though, if replacement parts for your favorite vape tank were suddenly sold out at your favorite vape shop?
A rebuildable tank like the Innokin Ares II RTA is one of the most important vaping supplies that you can own – even if you strongly prefer using a tank with pre-built coils – because it ensures that you can always vape even if your vape tank is completely out of commission. With an RTA, a spool of wire, and a bag of cotton – all of which are surprisingly inexpensive – you can build a new coil every day for months. A rebuildable tank is a perfect solution for those late-night equipment failures that would otherwise ruin your vaping experience.
Spare Batteries or a Spare Vape Kit
Did you know that lithium-ion batteries don’t last forever? If you’ve ever owned a notebook computer or mobile phone that you used for several years, you’re probably well aware of that phenomenon already. Eventually, an old battery reaches a point at which it no longer holds a usable charge, and that essentially renders your device useless until you replace the battery. One day, that’s going to happen to the battery in your vape kit. With a vaping device, battery failure typically happens in two different ways.
- The device seems to be fully charged, but you see an error message like “Check Battery” when you try to vape.
- The battery appears to charge when you connect the device to your computer, but the charging cycle never seems to finish.
Both of the above examples are signs that the battery in your vape mod no longer holds a charge. If your mod has a removable battery, you can recycle the battery and replace it with a new one. If your mod has a permanent battery, though, it’s time to replace the entire device. In either case, you’ll have a seriously inconvenient situation on your hands if the equipment failure happens late at night, and no local vape shops are open.
Thankfully, though, the solution to that problem is very simple if you plan ahead. If you use a vaping device with a removable battery, you should always have at least one spare battery available. If you rotate the two batteries – using one while you charge the other – you’ll extend the life of both batteries and will always have a replacement available if one battery fails. It’s highly unlikely that both batteries will fail simultaneously, although it’s never a bad idea to have an extra battery in the storage.
If you prefer to use a vaping device with a built-in battery, then having a spare battery available isn’t an option for you. There is, however, another option that works just as well: You can buy a second vaping device. Thankfully, modern vape kits are so affordable that owning two devices is no trouble at all for most people. If you want, you can extend the life of both devices by using one while you charge the other – or you can just keep your second device in storage in case your first device breaks.
Extra USB Charging Cables
If your vaping device doesn’t charge when you connect it to your computer, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the battery is dead or that the device’s charging port is broken. The problem could actually be as simple as a damaged USB cable.
If you’re the type of person who buys new gadgets constantly, there’s a good chance that you already have plenty of spare USB cables around because almost every rechargeable device comes with one. If you don’t have a spare cable that fits your vaping device, though, it would be a very good idea to buy one.
Just about everyone has at least one computer with a USB port, so USB has emerged as a very convenient standard for keeping battery-powered devices topped up. The one issue with USB charging, though, is that the cables aren’t always very durable. The USB standard was originally designed for peripherals – like keyboards and printers – that would ordinarily be connected to computers and left in place.
With a vaping device, though, that’s not what you’re doing; you’re connecting and disconnecting the device at least once every day. Eventually, that’s going to cause internal damage to the USB cable, and you’ll have trouble charging the device. Preventing that from happening is as simple as keeping at least one extra USB cable in your stash of essential vape supplies.
Emergency E-Liquid
The last item on our list of essential vaping supplies isn’t a hardware component or accessory – but it’s arguably the most important item of vape gear that you could possibly own. Just as a computer can’t do anything without software, your vaping device serves no purpose unless it’s filled with e-liquid. Running out of vape juice will prevent you from vaping just as easily as a broken vape tank or dead battery would – and just like replacement parts for a vape pen or mod, e-liquid isn’t easy to find when it’s late at night and your local vape stores are closed.
When you stock up on vape gear, you probably already buy plenty of extra bottles of vape juice. If you’re like most vapers, though, you probably stock up on e-liquid by buying many bottles of your favorite brand and flavor. The problem with only stocking up on your usual vape juice, though, is that you probably don’t shop for vape gear again until you’re close to running out. If that’s your usual strategy for buying e-liquid, you’ll never really have anything in reserve.
What if you’re on your last bottle of e-liquid, and the bottle’s nozzle pops off when you try to refill your tank? You’ll have a huge mess on your hands, and you’ll also be out of vape juice. The solution for that is to make sure that you always have an emergency reserve available. We suggest buying at least one e-liquid that you’re happy to use if necessary – but you wouldn’t ordinarily use it if you had your usual flavor on hand. A bottle of unflavored e-liquid, for instance, is an inexpensive product that you can keep in reserve in case you run out of vape juice unexpectedly.
