Cleaning and maintaining your vaporizer

Recommended for: beginners / intermediate

Get to know your vape 

So you spent some of your hard-earned cash on a sweet vaporizer. Good call! Like with a new car, it’s gonna take some time to really get to know your device. To stick to the car analogy, you should take your vape for a regular check- and clean up. If you don’t, GUNK - that gooey, waxy residue coming from your vaped plant or concentrate material, your biggest enemy in vape maintenance - will mess up your device in several ways. Gunk can seriously affect your vape’s lifespan and performance, causing heavier draw resistance, less flavour release and less vapour production in general. 

Gunk is your biggest enemy in maintaining your vaporizer.

If you regularly look after your vaporizer, you will get to know your device better and better over time. Take your vape apart. Clean all parts and subparts. Put it back together. Quite often the different parts of your device can also be taken apart individually. It can take a few cleaning sessions to really figure this out. Even the most dedicated vape enthusiasts make new discoveries from time to time. In the end, the more time you spend on cleaning your device, the more you will grow more familiar with all the nooks and crannies of your vaporizer. 

Read the manual and consult online sources on how to clean your vape

There is tons of valuable information readily available if you do the proper research. The manual alone should take you a long way. While it may seem obvious to you, there are plenty of vapers out there that need to hear this. So, just to be sure, I will be as clear as day: read your manual! Don’t just skim through it, properly read the instructions. It will pay off, trust me.

Properly reading your vaporizer manual goes a long way.

Aside from the manual, the glorious world wide web offers tons of support for cleaning and maintaining your vape. There are several cleaning instruction videos per vaporizer, especially for the bigger name vapes. 

Which products do I use for cleaning my vaporizer?

If you love your vaporizer, we strongly advise to always have some cleaning materials lying around. The bare minimum should be some proper alcohol wipes and swabs. Our VapoShop swabs are filled with ISO-alcohol, but it might be a good idea to not have this as your only source of ISO-alcohol, as ISO comes in super handy when it comes to vaporizer maintenance. It dissolves a wide range of compounds. Furthermore, it also evaporates rather swiftly, barely leaves any oil traces and is relatively non-toxic. 

Working with the proper cleaning materials to maintain your vaporizer is crucial.

A lot of your vaporizer parts can benefit from a good overnight alcohol soak. However, it is very important - due to the power of ISO - that you make sure which parts you select for a good soak and which parts you just wipe down and then dry off. Once again: read your manual!! The information you need should be right there. Please also note that some parts are not made to be cleaned with alcohol at all. The manual should tell you which parts are better cleaned with water or other substances, e.g. dishwashing soap. 

Several brands have put out cleaning brushes and tools for their vaporizers, including PAX - for the PAX 2 and PAX 3, Storz & Bickel - for the Volcano, DaVinci, De Verdamper, and more. These tools are not vaporizer specific - at least not in my humble opinion - and can perfectly be used for multiple devices from different manufacturers. But it let it be known that it’s important to not just maintain your vaporizer, but also maintain your vaporizer maintenance tools. Gunk on a brush makes your next cleaning session a lot more labour-intensive.

Replacing spare vaporizer parts

One final subject to tackle is replacing spare parts. While you will become more experienced in maintaining your device the more you do it, there also comes a time when it’s necessary to say goodbye to certain replaceable parts. Do not wait too long when it comes to replacing these parts. They’re called replaceable for a reason…