An economic plight has hit all of us, and Vapers everywhere are worried. Fear not, for we have the answers. Read on for our amazing tips to make sure your vape expenses are low, without compromising the quality of your vaping lifestyle!

Index

  1. Make your own E-liquid
  2. Take good care of your cotton
  3. Make your own Coils – Save over £100 per year
  4. Buy in bulk
  5. Buy a long lifespan Mod and Atomizer
  6. Enter FREE competitions
  7. Get creative

Make your own E-liquid

Buying pre-made E-liquid and short fills take up a huge portion of the common Vaper’s yearly spend. Crafting your own E-liquid by hand will in all likely-hood cut those costs to fractions of what they were before! This method of money-saving is fun, useful, and will allow you to blend your own flavour mixes so that you can vape a perfectly customized flavour tailored specifically to your own taste.

The basic idea is: if you buy all of the ingredients (Flavouring, Propylene Glycol, Vegetable Glycerine, and Nicotine) and components separately and then mix it all together yourself, you will avoid paying vape companies for the recipes, designs and hard work of bottling the stuff, whilst honing your own DIY E-liquid skills.

Note that using less flavouring & nicotine will reduce the overall cost of your e-liquid, as they are commonly more expensive components than vegetable glycerine and propylene glycol.

To get started you will need to pick one of two routes:

Option 1 (our recommendation for the new comers):

Buy a DIY E-Liquid Starter Kit and follow the instructions. This option has all the information & tools with it, and is an excellent way to get started no matter what your knowledge or experience level is. Find DIY E-liquid Starter kits here!

Option 2: Gather all of the ingredients separately and mix it with your own rules.

You will need:

Before we run through how to make your own e-liquid, you may want to browse through our guides section which contains many high quality articles on everything involved in DIY Eliquid. Be aware that nicotine requires safety precautions when handling, such as safety gloves, eye protection, and a careful attitude towards it.

As an example, you can follow along as we make a bottle of e-liquid. It will be a 60ml bottle of 3mg, 20% flavour, 60VG/40PG E-Liquid.

For this mix you will need:

Step by Step walkthrough to mix the E-liquid:

  • Step 1: Gather all your ingredients, listed above
  • Step 2: Clean your work surfaces, as you would do in a kitchen.
  • Step 3: Place your empty 60ml bottle with the cap and nib removed
  • Step 4: Wear gloves, and squeeze/pour in the full 10ml 18mg 100% VG nicotine shot
  • Step 5: Use your syringe to add 26ml of Vegetable Glycerine
  • Step 6: Use your syringe to add 12ml of Propylene Glycol
  • Step 7: Use your syringe to add 12ml of flavour concentrate
  • Step 8: Seal the bottle, just push the nib back in and screw on the cap
  • Step 9: Shake the bottle thoroughly and leave it for 5 minutes
  • Step 10: Shake it again, thoroughly, and it’s ready to vape

If you want more VG then you should replace the 100% PG nicotine shot with a 100% VG nicotine shot. If you desire less VG then you should keep the PG nicotine and replace some VG with PG, as long as the recipe adds up to 60ml and there isn’t more nicotine or flavour than is sensible then you’re golden!

Diluting the flavour or cutting your nicotine down (making E-liquid with a lower percentage of flavour/nicotine in it) will cut down costs, because flavour and nicotine are the two most expensive components in the cost of manufacturing E-liquid.

For any changes you make to a recipe you should check the maths out with our free to use, no signup, state of the art DIY E-Liquid Calculator.

Take good care of your cotton

Vaper’s will sometimes notice a burning taste or smell coming from their atomizer, this is because the cotton has been either over used, naturally lost it’s absorption ability, or badly treated. This is bad news for most Vapers because the stock coils you buy for regular tanks can be fairly costly, up to £4 per unit in some cases. To make sure you get the most out of each and every coil wick you should always:

Vape E-liquids that are lighter in colour, and free of sweeteners. There’s nothing wrong with vaping dark or sweetener heavy liquids, but they will reduce the lifespan of your cotton and coil. Many E-liquids that are dark in colour, or very sweet are commonly referred to as ‘coil killers’. Because vaping is essentially just applying heat to liquid, and when the e-liquid in question is sweetened or contains caramel colours the heating may ‘caramelize’ or otherwise stain and build up some gunk on your cotton’s surface. These stains and sweeteners on the cotton can quickly deteriorate the quality and potential lifespan of your cotton. So the lesson to be learned is to use clear or lightly coloured, unsweetened e-liquids to prevent this.

Prime your coil. Meaning you should apply some e-liquid directly onto the cotton inside the coil before installing it in your tank, and applying any heat or power to it. Priming gives the coil a jump start on saturating before you begin to apply power, which prevents the cotton from burning right after your first drag. This in turn will ensure, when primed thoroughly, there are no dry spots that can be singed early on, which makes the cotton stay healthy for longer.

Lower your wattage. Firing your atomizer’s coil at a wattage that is too high, or even just in the higher end of the recommended range of power, will lead to a shorter total life span of the coil. Less power will do less damage over time. Giving up power changes the experience, and there isn’t a magic number for power vs longevity, you just need to experiment with it and work out what feels best.

Let e-liquid soak into the cotton before each puff. If you take a puff you should then allow the cotton some time to absorb the e-liquid before hitting it again in order to prevent dry hits and prematurely burning/singing your cotton. Once it’s burned the taste doesn’t tend to go away without a fight, and will be less able to satisfy you.

Look into building your own coils. If you really want to vape dark, sweetener heavy liquids, or just generally reduce the cost of coils further, then we would recommend buying an RDA or RTA; so that you can more cost effectively change out the cotton in your coils. See more information on this topic below.

Make your own Coils

We have a very insightful Coil building guide: Build a Vape Coil in 7 Easy Steps! There is also an information centre that you will need to read through before getting started.

This common practice originated relatively recently in the vaping world, it’s for people who are ready to take the plunge into manufacturing their own coils, at home. Building coils means bending thin metal wire into a coil shape, installing cotton and saturating that cotton with e-liquid. Coil building is regarded as the peak of vaping knowledge, as it can go very wrong if you go in without the proper knowledge.

This will save lots of money and enhance your vaping experience, without a doubt, this tip will grant you the single biggest budget cut of your vaping career. Amazingly, as well as slashing vaping costs to the bone, DIY Coil Building will also be giving you a FAR superior experience once you know what you’re doing.

Let’s say, your regular coils, in your current tank coils cost £3 each. You go through 1 coil every 10 days, if you’re lucky. That equals out to £108 per year, or £300 for 100 coils. Conversely, building your own coils can net you 100 coils for as little as £5!

Saving you over £100 per year!

This topic is so broad that we feel you would be better suited reading a fully comprehensive, purpose made guide. Once again, we already have the educational aspect covered, with a very insightful Coil building guide: Build a Vape Coil in 7 Easy Steps! There is also an information centre that you will need to read through before getting started.

Breaking down the job at hand, you’ll first need an RBA (Rebuildable Dripping Atomizer). An RBA can fall into two main categories:

Regular e-cigs, tanks, and atomizers do not allow for the user to build and apply their own coils in them, because a special build deck is required in order to install the coil.

You’ll also need some tools and supplies:

Building coils takes preparation, knowledge and precautions, so best not jump in head first. Take your time learning about it.

Buy in Bulk

Buying in bulk wherever you can will usually save money, whether its food, cleaning products, toilet roll etc, the bigger packs you buy, the more money is usually saved. And the same goes for e-liquid, especially DIY E-liquid. If you know what you like, and just want the stability and cost cutting ability of always being stocked up with your favourite E-liquid then you should go big, you can easily buy litres of your favourite concentrates and 5 litre bottles of vegetable glyerince and propylene glycol.

For example, at the time of writing, a 10ml Vapable brand flavour concentrate of Blueberry Muffin costs £1.29 for a 10ml. The price per ml is 12.9 pence. However, a 100ml costs only £9.99. This means by buying a 100ml, instead of a 10ml, you are paying 9.9 pence per ml instead of 12.9! A big saving for simply taking more of a product you’ll likely want more of anyway!

Buy a long lifespan Mod and Atomizer

One cost of vaping that you really don’t want to keep having to shell out for is the purchase of more e-cig mods, and tanks/atomizers. Pick up and a tank and mod combo that will stand the test of time.

Sadly, there are many pieces of hardware out there that just don’t last as long as you should expect. So always buy from reputable sites that have the good brands in stock, such as Geekvape. Geekvape have some very dependable mods that are in the top bracket for how much punishment, wear, and tear they can take before giving in.

For a mod, we’d have to recommend the Geekvape Ageis Legend Mod. It’s built to last, and the manufacturer has nicknamed it “The Indestructible Beast”. For a tank, we’d recommend the HorizonTech Falcon Artisan Tank, it’s dependable, and when it’s paired with a vape band, to protect the bubble glass, it will be in your arsenal for a long time to come.

Enter FREE competitions

There’s no better way to save money than winning some free stuff! Duh!

Vaping companies love giving stuff away, due to the reduced advertising capabilities they have because of various advertising regulations. Therefore, if you sign up to enough email lists from enough vaping companies, there is a strong likely hood that you’ll always been in with a chance of winning something if you stay up to date. Or at least stumbling upon some discount codes.

Get creative

An exploitable issue that many Vaping businesses face is the lack of online reviews for their products. An individual, filling this void, may be able to negotiate some trade deals, swapping vaping products for sponsored reviews. Doing this would most likely require the customer to have an active YouTube channel or blog series, based on vaping or related topics that gives them some credibility to talk about the products.

 

If you’re a current smoker and still haven’t been convinced of the potential savings vaping offers, please take a quick look below at our Savings Calculator. For those that smoke cigarettes and are unsure of the potential savings that vaping can offer.

Thanks for reading our article! I hope you enjoyed reading it as much as I loved writing it. You can find more articles just like this in our guide section, to further incrementally improve your knowledge and have lots of fun along the way. We also run a Facebook group, The Vapable Vapers Group. This is for you to swap ideas about recipes, mixing, and general vaping, or anything else with other like-minded mixers and Vapers that have the same interests as yourself.

Very Handsome Man