How to Clean Your eGo-T

Your eGo-T electronic cigarette requires regular maintenance in order to keep it functioning at its best. Follow these simple tips to keep your atomiser and your battery happy and long-lasting.

Atomiser Care

There will come a time when you feel that your atomiser is not performing like it used to. It may be producing less vapour, or be difficult to draw on, or give you vapour with a slightly “off” taste.

The most likely reason is that it has become gunked up with e-liquid. Here are the troubleshooting steps to get it back to normal.

• Blow out the atomiser

“Blowing out” the atomiser is your first port of call. In many cases this is all that’s required to restore its functionality.

First, get some tissues or paper towels handy. Separate your atomiser from the cartridge and battery. Seal your lips around the thinner end of the atomiser, the end that connects to the cartridge. Blow as hard as you can, and catch the e-juice that drips out the other end with the tissue paper.

You will hear the sound of the e-juice being forced out while you do this, similar to the dregs of a drink being sucked up through a straw. The more e-juice is trapped inside the atomiser, the louder this sound will be. You may need to blow out a few times in order to clear all the e-liquid that you can with this method.

With each blow, the accumulated e-juice will be forced and you’ll see it stain the tissue. Some will come out of the internal coil but cling to the insides of the chamber where you can see it, so in between each blow you should twist a small section of tissue paper into a thin wad and swab this around the insides of the chamber. A cotton ear cleaning bud also works well for this.

TIP: It’s worth noting that while vaping accelerates the process, atomisers can also become clogged up if they’re left attached to a cartridge of e-liquid for more than a few hours. I’ve cleaned mine, left it attached to the cartridge overnight, and it’s been gunky again the next morning. So now what I usually do is blow it out each night, and stand it cartridge-side down on tissue paper to fully drain out overnight.

• Dry burn the atomiser

If you’ve blown out your atomiser and it is still difficult to vape with, the next step is to “dry burn” it.

Screw your atomiser into the battery (leave the cartridge off) and switch it on. Hold down the activation button and blow into the atomiser chamber as it is heating. The e-liquid trapped in the heating coil will billow out as vapour. You’ll know when the heating coil is clear when vapour stops coming out, and when you see the atomiser wick glowing red while you’re holding the activation button.

You should apply this method very carefully, because it’s easy to destroy the heating coil through overheating (“burning out”). Never hold down the activation button for more than 3-4 seconds while you’re dry burning. Take 5 second breaks between each dry burn to let the atomiser cool down.

TIP: Don’t try dry burning without first blowing out the atomiser. You want to get as much e-juice out of the heating coil as possible before you go after the residue with dry burning.

• Boil the atomiser

If blowing out and dry burning don’t quite give you the results you’re after, then congratulations – you’ve probably been vaping frequently for long enough to have made the lifestyle change from being a smoker! It takes a fair bit of use to get an atomiser to the stage where the e-juice gunk needs to be boiled away, but this cleaning method is very effective and can make a well-loved atomiser almost like new.

It’s also quite simple – just put your atomiser in a pot of water and boil it on the stove for 5 minutes. If you have more than one atomiser it’s good to do them in a batch, to save time. But leave at least one spare, because they need time to dry out before they can be used again.

Once the boiling is done, and the atomiser is cool enough to handle, hold it under cold running water for a couple of minutes, cartridge-side up. Then blow out as much of the water as you can, using the blowing out method described in the first troubleshooting step.

Finally, leave the atomiser standing cartridge-side up on some paper towels to fully dry out. The minimum drying-out period is 12 hours (18 hours is better), so it’s good to do this in the evening so your atomisers can dry overnight.

TIP: Don’t try to vape before your atomiser is fully dry – the heating coil won’t work properly if it’s damp, so you’ll just end up wasting e-juice.

Battery Care

Though your atomiser takes the brunt of wear and tear when it comes to vaping, it doesn’t do to forget about your hardworking battery. The good news is that batteries are much simpler to take care of.

Just keep an eye on the end that screws into the atomiser. Over time you will notice that the nice shiny metal becomes discoloured with e-juice that has seeped through from the atomiser. Fortunately, it’s easy to wipe this away with a tissue.

So that’s it for battery care – just give them the occasional polish and keep them charged, and they should keep going for up to and over 6 months.