Kangertech Tanks - Point To Ponder

[DougP]

Guess I am the leader of posting debatable and controversial threads so here’s another one..

I am the proud owner of 3 Sub Tank Mini’s.

These mod kits come with the optional OCC factory supplied coils.

Now here’s the thing..

You buy the coils in packs of 5 (be it 1.2, 1.5 or 0.5 ohm coils). When you open these packs you will (almost guaranteed) find at least 2 coils that are faulty. By faulty I mean once you start using them they give dry hits or leak like hell. As for people saying just poke holes into juice holes.. Yeah right.. 8 out of 10 times it’s a sure way to create a nicely flooding coil.

Now before I get a flood of people asking me if I have primed coil correctly before using them by putting drops on wick and doing some small mouth hits first.. The answer is yes, yes and yes again.

Now here is where it gets interesting. I have trolled numerous forums including eciggsa, vapehaven, vape underground and other forums in the USA and Canada. If you search for all threads relating to the Kangertech tanks and problems with dry hits/flooding on OCC coils you will literally find hundreds of posts on this and an overwhelming number of people posting the same general response of … “Throw away the coil and try another one”. We had same problem. You will also see that on average people are posting that in a pack of 5 coils they have on average 2 dud coils per pack.

What’s pretty clear here is the almost defacto response of : don’t bother throw it away and move on..

Now let’s take this a bit further..

Take a person using this mod that does not revert to building their own coils and faithfully goes out and buys his/her pack of 5 coils. On average you pay R50 per coil. So if every time this person buys a pack of coils and throws out 2 coils that would be R100. This now means this person has 3 coils left. If a coil on average lasts a week this person will need to buy their next pack 3 week into month and the cycle repeat its self. On this assumption this person would be literally tossing out:

R100 per month X 12 months = R 1200 a year on bud coils.

If you were to look down at your right hand right now and open it you will see that it’s empty. You could have been holding a brand new Mod in that hand with that money you have thrown away. Imagine a IPV4 or XCub or a new Sub Box Mini.

The question up the line is:

How do you claim back for this? Firstly you have no way of proving the coil was faulty when you bought it. The poor vendor definitely can’t afford to merely hand out new coils for free to everybody that brings them back as I assume he has no recourse. So the mind-set is merely: throw away and buy another one or build your own coils.

Based on this if we did a simple number crunch:

2 faulty coils per person times 2000 packs of coils sold a month by all vendors in South Africa.. (very conservative) then you have R 400 000 thrown away by consumers every month and R 4.8 million a year.

This means Kangertech (based on above conservative calculation) would be making R 4.8 mill on sales from something that is faulty and cannot be used. Image if you were to calculate this globally..

So next time we shrug your shoulders and toss that new burnt coil in the bin maybe we should think about what we are losing out on (look down at hand again) and what the manufacturer is gaining.

 

[Coco]

By faulty I mean once you start using them they give dry hits or leak like hell. As for people saying just poke holes into juice holes.. Yeah right.. 8 out of 10 times it’s a sure way to create a nicely flooding coil..

Having just spend 30 minutes trolling for "Subtank leaking posts", this made me smile. Nano is fine, neither of my 2 Minis are, leaking like crazy via the airholes. Nanos give me a more muted flavour, so I prefer the Minis. Rock, meet hard place. Nope, no RBA, just stock coils.

If/when they get this sorted...

 

[DougP]

Smile ... Why...

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[DougP]

@ coco
For interest how many faulty coils have u had

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[Nick]

Strange I have subtank no leaks and I must have been lucky with the coil... on the other hand I have an aspire triton which is leaking like an iceberg struck ship.. it's soon to be returned...

 

[Coco]

@ coco
For interest how many faulty coils have u had

O, boy, too many... I even had the bright idea of trying out the OCC Ni coils - had a 40% working hitrate on those.

 

[MJ INC]

O, boy, too many... I even had the bright idea of trying out the OCC Ni coils - had a 40% working hitrate on those.

Wow you seem to have a lot of bad luck with coils. Who do you buy from and are the coils 100% genuine? I know there's a shed load of third party Chinese sellers shipping out counterfeit mods, tanks and coils.

 

[Silver]

Guess I am the leader of posting debatable and controversial threads so here’s another one..

I am the proud owner of 3 Sub Tank Mini’s.

These mod kits come with the optional OCC factory supplied coils.

Now here’s the thing..

You buy the coils in packs of 5 (be it 1.2, 1.5 or 0.5 ohm coils). When you open these packs you will (almost guaranteed) find at least 2 coils that are faulty. By faulty I mean once you start using them they give dry hits or leak like hell. As for people saying just poke holes into juice holes.. Yeah right.. 8 out of 10 times it’s a sure way to create a nicely flooding coil.

Now before I get a flood of people asking me if I have primed coil correctly before using them by putting drops on wick and doing some small mouth hits first.. The answer is yes, yes and yes again.

Now here is where it gets interesting. I have trolled numerous forums including eciggsa, vapehaven, vape underground and other forums in the USA and Canada. If you search for all threads relating to the Kangertech tanks and problems with dry hits/flooding on OCC coils you will literally find hundreds of posts on this and an overwhelming number of people posting the same general response of … “Throw away the coil and try another one”. We had same problem. You will also see that on average people are posting that in a pack of 5 coils they have on average 2 dud coils per pack.

What’s pretty clear here is the almost defacto response of : don’t bother throw it away and move on..

Now let’s take this a bit further..

Take a person using this mod that does not revert to building their own coils and faithfully goes out and buys his/her pack of 5 coils. On average you pay R50 per coil. So if every time this person buys a pack of coils and throws out 2 coils that would be R100. This now means this person has 3 coils left. If a coil on average lasts a week this person will need to buy their next pack 3 week into month and the cycle repeat its self. On this assumption this person would be literally tossing out:

R100 per month X 12 months = R 1200 a year on bud coils.

If you were to look down at your right hand right now and open it you will see that it’s empty. You could have been holding a brand new Mod in that hand with that money you have thrown away. Imagine a IPV4 or XCub or a new Sub Box Mini.

The question up the line is:

How do you claim back for this? Firstly you have no way of proving the coil was faulty when you bought it. The poor vendor definitely can’t afford to merely hand out new coils for free to everybody that brings them back as I assume he has no recourse. So the mind-set is merely: throw away and buy another one or build your own coils.

Based on this if we did a simple number crunch:

2 faulty coils per person times 2000 packs of coils sold a month by all vendors in South Africa.. (very conservative) then you have R 400 000 thrown away by consumers every month and R 4.8 million a year.

This means Kangertech (based on above conservative calculation) would be making R 4.8 mill on sales from something that is faulty and cannot be used. Image if you were to calculate this globally..

So next time we shrug your shoulders and toss that new burnt coil in the bin maybe we should think about what we are losing out on (look down at hand again) and what the manufacturer is gaining.

@DougP, you are right that dud coils are a major problem

I dont have much experience with the subtank mini coils but have gone through plenty basic (1.8 ohm) "old Evod" single coils. I still use them today. In one pack of 5 coils I had, ALL of them were faulty. Some measured 3 ohms on the ohm meter! I must say i have been lucky more recently, maybe 1 dud in 10. But there are still duds.

It never ceases to amaze me how they can have such bad quality control. I guess that it has to do with the speed at which they make these things and that people are prepared to pay for the odd dud.

Thats one of the reasons I mainly vape on custom coils.

 

[DougP]

@MJ this is not a thread to even try and point fingers at vendors in any way. Just to put your mind at ease.
I buy from reputable vendors who I assume get stock from reputable wholesalers.

I actually created this thread to see for myself just how many people on here actually have got a dud coil/coils.

In defence of both vendors and consumers I don't think any of us actually know if we are going to have a dud coil or not.

I honestly don't know if the manufacturers know.. I assume there is a mechanical production line churning out thousands of coils. How they would quality check each coil I don't know. It's also difficult because you can't test first to quality check it..






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[MJ INC]

@MJ this is not a thread to even try and point fingers at vendors in any way. Just to put your mind at ease.
I buy from reputable vendors who I assume get stock from reputable wholesalers.

I actually created this thread to see for myself just how many people on here actually have got a dud coil/coils.

In defence of both vendors and consumers I don't think any of us actually know if we are going to have a dud coil or not.

I honestly don't know if the manufacturers know.. I assume there is a mechanical production line churning out thousands of coils. How they would quality check each coil I don't know. It's also difficult because you can't test first to quality check it..






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Not trying to point a finger at a vendor as I've seen online Chinese wholesalers selling coils, tanks and mods as originals with the packaging looking identical down to the holograms and the scratch off original marking's. I was hoping it was more a case of fakes rather then a 40% failure rate on a product which is astronomically high

 

[DougP]

Let's be practical here
I build all my own coils and based on experience I kinda know that they should be fine but the real test comes when I fire it up.
In mass production of these coils I think it would be almost impossible to quality check every coil..

My research over the last 2 days has been jaw dropping when you do some numbers based on what you see and realise that we talking millions here in consumer wastage..


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[DougP]

@MJ...
See silver's post above...
5 out of 5 coils..
This is exactly what I wanted to highlight.
5 dud coils 250 rand later and nothing you can do about it cause you have no recourse..
Take it over a year and there you have it.. The equivalent of a brand new xcub or smog mod lying in the trash

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[DougP]

@MJ go troll a bit and you will be shocked to see the numbers
What is really scary is that nobody has done a single thing about it.
What boggles the brain is that the manufactures are making millions and millions in profit selling items that don't work and consumers are collectively paying millions for something that they can't use..
This thread was to show that when you have a dud coil you simply throw it in bin and buy another one.. In the bigger picture you have say like 1 million people doing the same

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[MJ INC]

@MJ go troll a bit and you will be shocked to see the numbers
What is really scary is that nobody has done a single thing about it.
What boggles the brain is that the manufactures are making millions and millions in profit selling items that don't work and consumers are collectively paying millions for something that they can't use..
This thread was to show that when you have a dud coil you simply throw it in bin and buy another one.. In the bigger picture you have say like 1 million people doing the same

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I personally like aspire tanks, they have a great reputation and I've never had a problem with them but if the failure rate is as high as your saying why do people buy them? In any other business a failure rate of 40% would see your company fail

 

[DougP]

MJ I'm not saying anything..
the people on the forums are saying..
My comments on here are purely based on my observations browsing forums and talking to people...
And you gotta look at this in context..it's not a 40% failure rate in their business its a possible 40% failure rate in one small part of the business their massed produced coils..

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[JakesSA]

I deal with this issue quite often lately, and almost invariably the amount of suction applied is not correct for the wattage and/or airflow setting. It is something that became especially prevalent with the new 'sub ohm' atomisers, the large juice inlets and wide airflow being the main culprits.

Keep in mind that these coils work on the concept of negative pressure, which is created when you suck on the atomiser. The difference in pressure between your suction and the amount of air allowed in via the air inlet holes creates this negative pressure which, in turn, sucks liquid from the tank into the coil. At this point negative pressure starts building in the tank section which prevents a flood of liquid spilling into the coil. As soon as you stop sucking the pressure equalises and a certain amount of liquid is sucked back into the tank, usually accompanied by a bubble or two of air into the tank. (Contrary to popular belief no atomiser ever has a state of vacuum much beyond the period where suction is applied.)

A defective tank usually has one of two problems. The tank part allows air in while suction is applied, check the tank's o-rings for evidence of this, or, the chimney or base does not seal properly on the coil. I have never seen an 'out of spec' chimney or base on a subtank and the o-ring seals here come with the coil so they are effectively always new.

Here are my recommendations for a leaky subtank mini, which if I may add, has resolved the problem for many of my clients. These may not apply to the thread op but are relevant to any person new to a sub tank.

Open the leaky attie, remove the coil, rinse the base (and blow out excess water), wipe the coil and blow through it to remove excess e-liquid .. preferably into a basin for easy cleaning.. reassemble.

Open the airflow, set your mod to +-25W for the 0.5 Ohm or +-15W for the 1.2/1.5 Ohm coil.

Press the fire button a split second before you start sucking, allowing the mod to pre-heat the coil slightly before the liquid starts seeping in.

The more closed your air inlets are, the less suction you apply. If you are new to large coil tanks just start of by sucking gently, period. There is a natural tendency to suck harder because of the wider drip tip, don't. Try and keep the inhale even.

Release the fire button a split second before you stop sucking to drain off excess vapour, which otherwise condensates and collects at the bottom of the coil.

Rules of thumb:

Don't use the 1.2/1.5 Ohm at 25W, don't use the 0.5 Ohm coil at 15W.
If you use a more closed airflow setting, don't suck as hard.
Higher wattages require more airflow.
Be careful not to accidentally block the airflow with your fingers.
Keep the liquid level above the coil's juice openings, enough to ensure they are covered even when the mod is tilted when used.
50PG/50VG liquids can exacerbate the problem.
If you burn the wick the life span of the coil gets reduced, break a new coil in gently. With new coils give it a few 'drags' before hitting the fire button to saturate the wick. A 'drop in the top' also works but is less effective, imo. This is even more important now that most coils are fitted with 'organic cotton'.
Once a new coil is performing well, further experiments in higher power/airflow and increased suction can be applied.

Dry hits is something I rarely hear complaints about now with the VOCC coils, unless it's a 1.2/1.5 Ohm being run at high wattages.

From my perspective, from someone who tries to engage with customers about the products they use, dud coils should be few and far between.

 

[DougP]

@jakes..
Very good and informative post..
In your opinion are you advocating that these "dud" coils can then in most cases be traced back to user or equipment problems

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[Coco]

@jakes..
Very good and informative post..
In your opinion are you advocating that these "dud" coils can then in most cases be traced back to user or equipment problems

1. Open OCC coil by breaking little foil
... prime etc.
2. Screw into tank
3. wtf, it doesn't fire?
4. Check on ohm meter
5. Oops, dud.

My experience with Ni coils. At least 1 a pack goes that route. At least another one in a five-pack that doesn't produce anything or close to anything.

0.5, 1.2 & 1.5 coils - much greater success. (No RBA's for me, old age make tiny rebuilts not worth the effort)

As for leaking, can point to all my other tanks & subtanks and show no issues, yet they persist with the STM (not the Nanos with the same coils, those seem to be leak-free in my grubby paws). Yes, people do run these too low, suck too hard, don't prime, don't break them in, etc. But just shouting 'user problem' doesn't (always) ring true.

(And yes, your advice echos what everybody says about the STM, been through again and again and checking if I missed anything - coils and tanks are originals, local vendor with brilliant standing)

 

[DougP]

I did say this would be a controversial post..
Had no and have no intention to start a consumer versus retailer war here

I merely wanted to point out What clearly seems to be a big eye opener..
But I have to side with Coco I do build my own coils and like to see myself as someone who knows something about vaporing. In my case the dud coils I got where definitely manufacturing duds. I inspected them under a magnifying glass and could clearly see problems with wicking.
In one coil the vertical coil was actually bent completely to one side and on another one there was a chunk of wicking completely blocking the center of the vertical coil.

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[ConradS]

I can comment here based on my relative lack of experience, I have only used about 4 or so packs of coils and have never had one not read properly from memory. Occasionally I have had flooding and then perceived leaking due to overpriming on a new coil. Maybe just lucky.


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[SAVapeGear]

I never had a dud coil.Have gone through about 4 packs in the last year.Not one dud in Nickel or Kanthal.

Not with the old type or new type.

I never prime my coils.I just let it stand for about 10 minutes.

I still enjoy the old type coils and just Fluff the coil a little with a needle from the outside.

That have also always worked for me on the old coils.

Start any coil at 15w and work slowely up.

28w is all you need on those coils max.Unless you want to go through them quickly and waste them.

 

[Yiannaki]

Guess I am the leader of posting debatable and controversial threads so here’s another one..

I am the proud owner of 3 Sub Tank Mini’s.

These mod kits come with the optional OCC factory supplied coils.

Now here’s the thing..

You buy the coils in packs of 5 (be it 1.2, 1.5 or 0.5 ohm coils). When you open these packs you will (almost guaranteed) find at least 2 coils that are faulty. By faulty I mean once you start using them they give dry hits or leak like hell. As for people saying just poke holes into juice holes.. Yeah right.. 8 out of 10 times it’s a sure way to create a nicely flooding coil.

Now before I get a flood of people asking me if I have primed coil correctly before using them by putting drops on wick and doing some small mouth hits first.. The answer is yes, yes and yes again.

Now here is where it gets interesting. I have trolled numerous forums including eciggsa, vapehaven, vape underground and other forums in the USA and Canada. If you search for all threads relating to the Kangertech tanks and problems with dry hits/flooding on OCC coils you will literally find hundreds of posts on this and an overwhelming number of people posting the same general response of … “Throw away the coil and try another one”. We had same problem. You will also see that on average people are posting that in a pack of 5 coils they have on average 2 dud coils per pack.

What’s pretty clear here is the almost defacto response of : don’t bother throw it away and move on..

Now let’s take this a bit further..

Take a person using this mod that does not revert to building their own coils and faithfully goes out and buys his/her pack of 5 coils. On average you pay R50 per coil. So if every time this person buys a pack of coils and throws out 2 coils that would be R100. This now means this person has 3 coils left. If a coil on average lasts a week this person will need to buy their next pack 3 week into month and the cycle repeat its self. On this assumption this person would be literally tossing out:

R100 per month X 12 months = R 1200 a year on bud coils.

If you were to look down at your right hand right now and open it you will see that it’s empty. You could have been holding a brand new Mod in that hand with that money you have thrown away. Imagine a IPV4 or XCub or a new Sub Box Mini.

The question up the line is:

How do you claim back for this? Firstly you have no way of proving the coil was faulty when you bought it. The poor vendor definitely can’t afford to merely hand out new coils for free to everybody that brings them back as I assume he has no recourse. So the mind-set is merely: throw away and buy another one or build your own coils.

Based on this if we did a simple number crunch:

2 faulty coils per person times 2000 packs of coils sold a month by all vendors in South Africa.. (very conservative) then you have R 400 000 thrown away by consumers every month and R 4.8 million a year.

This means Kangertech (based on above conservative calculation) would be making R 4.8 mill on sales from something that is faulty and cannot be used. Image if you were to calculate this globally..

So next time we shrug your shoulders and toss that new burnt coil in the bin maybe we should think about what we are losing out on (look down at hand again) and what the manufacturer is gaining.

I have just caught up on this whole thread!

Firstly... what a super post and well written.

This is definitely an issue that has affected so many of us, and as you said, people just shrug it off and swap out the coil.

My experience with the kangertech subtank coils has been terrible as well!

2 out of 5 kanthal coils have been duds, and I have had even worse experiences with the nickel coils. Having gone through two packs, 6 out of the 10 were duds.

Bottom Line : I will NEVER purchase kangertech coils again. I will always rather rebuild.

The problem lies in the fact that this is not something that everyone can do, nor is it something everyone wants to do. I am sure many would just like to pop in a coil and vape without hassle.

The question is... how can this issue be addressed with Kangertech themselves?

 

[JakesSA]

@jakes..
Very good and informative post..
In your opinion are you advocating that these "dud" coils can then in most cases be traced back to user or equipment problems

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I would say that if the resistance is way off or does not read at all, its a dud and are grounds for a refund. If leaking is a constant issue then one should be looking at the way the coil is used, if reasonable investigation shows that the tank is not at fault.

It is often assumed that because it's a pre-built coil, it should always just .. work .. for everybody .. but if you consider the mechanics at play here that cannot be true. Some folks take to it like a fish to water and practically never have problems, for others it's a constant irritation, for the rest of us it has a learning curve. The alternative is that some people are just more likely to receive dud coils, is it a kind of bad coil luck?

Think about it, these tanks are immensely popular now, ubiquitous almost. How did they become like that, advertising on the TV, Google adwords, sly product placements in high end Hollywood productions? Not that I've seen, which leaves word of mouth mostly, so if leaking and faulty coils were a pervasive issue, would anyone recommend them?

 

[DougP]

At the time of writing this post I had, and still have no intention of creating an issue about this..this has merely been a post of ponder based on chatting to people with sub tanks and hearing the same comment..
Had a dud coil and threw it away and fitted new one..
I guess if every faulty coil had to be closely inspected and tested it could go either way, user problem, defective tank or actual faulty coil..
Because the item of value is so small and one doesn't have the time or experience or even equipment to analyse the problem it's far easier to toss it.
Let's be honest how many of us who have a problem coil will jump in our car and drive back to our vendor for them to look at it. Never mind the people who buy via courier service.
What is just interesting is that when you put a rough monetary value on this based on number of people posting about faulty coils it becomes millions we talking here




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[Coco]

It is often assumed that because it's a pre-built coil, it should always just .. work .. for everybody .. but if you consider the mechanics at play here that cannot be true.

...

Not that I've seen, which leaves word of mouth mostly, so if leaking and faulty coils were a pervasive issue, would anyone recommend them?

Excellent points, 1 thing can never be for everybody.

It is precisely why I steer all newbies away from Kanger STM, despite common 'wisdom', even around here. Make no mistake, when they work, they are some of the best, but when they don't - I don't gamble with the cash of others.