If you’re ready to make the switch from smoking to vaping and are thinking about choosing a vape pen as your first vaping device, congratulations. You’re already a step ahead of most new vapers. Most of the people who switch to vaping get their first devices from their local convenience stores and supermarkets, and that’s not the best way to introduce yourself to everything that vaping has to offer.
A refillable vape pen is a much better introduction to vaping than a convenience store e-cigarette for four very important reasons.
- It’s a less expensive way to vape. An e-cigarette with pre-filled pods is a proprietary product that only works with the pods made for that device. When an e-cigarette only works with proprietary pods, the maker can charge as much as it wants for those pods. It’s much cheaper to buy bottled vape juice and fill your own pods.
- It allows you to explore a much wider variety of flavors. There are hundreds of e-liquids on the market today. Why would you want to limit yourself to the handful of flavors available for one proprietary e-cigarette brand?
- Vape pens offer drastically better battery life than beginner-oriented e-cigarettes. If you’re going to buy an e-cigarette from a convenience store, you might as well buy two because at least one of them is always going to be on the charger. It’s much less stressful to know that your vaping device has enough battery life to last throughout the day.
- Vape pens can produce much larger clouds than convenience store pod systems. That means they’re significantly more satisfying to use, and it also means that their flavor quality is much higher. The flavor is important in vaping. It’s great to know that you can get your nicotine without inhaling smoke – but exploring the wide world of e-liquid flavors is the thing that’ll keep you interested over the long term.
With those things in mind, there is no question that your first e-cigarette should be a vape pen. Reading this article, you’re going to learn why a vape pen is the best type of vaping device for quitting smoking. You’re also going to learn what features you should look for when buying your first vape pen. Let’s dig in!
What Is a Vape Pen?
A vape pen is a long, narrow vaping device that’s shaped much like a pen. The fact that vape pens are larger than tobacco cigarettes is what separates them from cigarette-shaped “cigalikes,” and the fact that they’re larger also allows them to have superior vapor production and battery life compared to smaller vaping devices.
Vape pens are ideal for quitting smoking because they’re markedly superior to the e-cigarettes at convenience stores. When you’re trying to quit smoking, you don’t want to use a vaping device that spends more time on the charger than it does being used. You also don’t want to buy pre-filled pods that are nearly as expensive as packs of cigarettes. A vape pen gives you satisfying vapor clouds and all-day battery life. It’ll also give you substantial savings compared to smoking. Most importantly, using a refillable vape pen means that you can try every e-liquid flavor on the market. When you buy a pre-filled e-cigarette from a convenience store, on the other hand, the only flavors that you can choose are tobacco and menthol. It’s a very limiting experience.
What Features Should a Vape Pen Have?
One of the greatest things about buying a vaping device these days is that basically everything on the market is worth using. You don’t have to worry about buying a new vape pen only to find out that it’s absolute garbage. The industry’s product manufacturers have been refining their designs for so long that you can expect to have a good experience with any vape pen. There are certain features that a vape pen should have, though, in order to give you the best possible chance of switching successfully from smoking to vaping.
- The vape pen should have a simple design. It should be easy to fill; the pod or tank should have a wide enough opening that it’ll work with any bottle of e-liquid without causing a mess. It should either have a single button for activating the device and changing power levels, or it should activate automatically when you puff on it.
- The vape pen should work well with nicotine salt e-liquid because nicotine salt is almost always the right choice for new vapers. To tell whether a device will give you a good experience with nicotine salt e-liquid, look at the atomizer coil’s wick openings. If you can see the white wick through the openings, you’re probably going to like that device. If the openings look like tiny pinpricks, you might want to skip it.
- The vape pen should have a small mouthpiece that’s comparable in size to the filter of a cigarette. That’s how you know the device is designed for mouth-to-lung inhaling. A vape pen with a wide mouthpiece is designed for direct-to-lung inhaling, and although many experienced vapers do prefer that inhaling style, it’s not what you’re likely to prefer when you’re trying to quit smoking.
- The vape pen should deliver excellent performance. It should produce large vapor clouds for a device of its size because cloud size is what correlates with bold, enjoyable flavors. It should also offer decent battery life because you don’t want to own a vape pen that spends more time charging than it does in your hand.
- The vape pen should have positive reviews from customers. There are some things about a vape pen that you can tell simply by looking at it. You can tell from looking, for instance, whether a vape pen has a design that you like. You can only ascertain things like cloud production and flavor quality, though, from personal experience. Customer reviews are invaluable to help you learn more about those aspects of a vape pen before buying it.
