Mods and safety: am I being excessively cautious?

If you don’t want to know anything about safety or you can’t wrap your head around it all, by all means, get a very good quality charger (as well as a good quality mod) and good quality batteries with spare sets and charge all your batteries in the external charger.

Oh! I definitely want to know what’s the safest way of doing it., all things considered, that’s why i’m reading these posts pretty closely and digesting the info. Some of the advice is contradictory isn’t it? And that’s why I like closely-reasoned posts like yours. That enables me to make sense of the contradictions, and pull out the stuff that’s most relevant to me

Ofc,anybody who wants to be completely safe should switch off their power supply , and go back to a more primitive way of living, shouldn’t they? Electricity is dangerous stuff, and vaping gear gets way more than it’s fair share of bad press in that regard. I’m not about to get paranoid about it!

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PS as regards electrical safety, I’m living a place with a dodgy wiring job, a boiler that actually leaks into the circuitry at intervals, and a negligent landlady who won’t fix a damned thing until it actually ceases to be functional at all. I’ve already had one pretty dramatic kaboom" which she did her level best to blame on me, as she begrudgingly replaced the ancient-to-the-point-of antique socket that caused it.
So , what the heck, i jusrt have to live with a bit of danger there, but I’d very much like to ensure that next “kaboom” is no more my fault than the last one was! :rofl:

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Re: 4 battery charger. I typically vape on multiple mods in a given day. I might take one to work, then have another I use at home. At the end of the night I will put all 4 batteries in the charger.

I vape on both regulated mods and unregulated mech mods.

But I think there is a common misunderstanding about mechs. Or at least parallel mechs.

They don’t automatically hit harder than a regulated mod. It all depends on how you build your coils. I typically build around .28 using some pre-made Claptons. That’s only 63 watts with fully charged batteries in a parallel (or single battery) mech mod.

I actually like a warmer vape - so with that build I will stick it in my VV mod and crank the voltage up to 5 or 6 volts. It actually won’t hit hard enough on a parallel mech- at least for me.

I do have a serial mod as well - that .28 build works out to 252 watts and 30 amps. So I think sometimes people are maybe thinking of serial mods when they think “hit hard.”

Now - if I want my parallel mechs to hit warm and hard - I can build at about .10 - when I am not too lazy to wind my own coils.

I think re: knowing ohms law - I suck at math, but I totally get the concept and I keep an Ohm’s Law app on my phone.

I recently had a build that was reading way too high. Had I not known what it should read, I would not have realized that the RDA had a loose post. Ohms law also helps me understand why I use Sony VTC6 batteries for some builds and VTC5A’s for others.

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Regarding battery safety, I really enjoy what Battery Mooch produces. Here is his Youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCePHh3NMvu3rW2LFJeOWo-Q
He presents everything in terms of assumption of risk and what can be done to minimize risk. I see this as the most realistic approach.

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That is … NOT … I repeat: NOT … how you calculate battery draw on a regulated mod!

Ohms law is used to calculate amp draw on a mechanical or unregulated mod, but regulated mods work differently, and you have to use a different calculation to calculate the battery draw on them.
The actual calculation is:

Amps (per battery) = Watts (per battery) / Voltage (low) / Efficiency

Where Watts per battery is simply the maximum watts of your mod, or the absolutely highest wattage setting you will ever use, divided by the number of batteries in your mod.

Voltage (low) is the cut-off value of the mod, i.e. the minimum voltage of the battery where the mod will still fire, typically 3.2 volts but it varies from mod to mod.

And Efficiency is how efficient the DC/DC converter of the mod is, i.e. how much energy is wasted in the power conversion. Most of the time we don’t know this number, but 90% is the number usually assumed.

The resistance of the coil has absolutely no influence on the battery draw on a regulated mod, only on a unregulated

I will strongly suggest that you watch this video by Battery Mooch, where he explains it much better than I can.

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Remember to clean your battery terminals by submerging them in warm soapy water!

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as long as the converter is well designed.
I could see some skimping on passives making it less the case than people would think. I tend to be happier when it is in boost mode or close to bypass for just this reason.