As the vaping community is growing by leaps and bounds with each passing day, there's a need to educate vapers with all things vaping related. As one transcends to the idea of vaping, they may remain uninformed regarding good vaping practices and the hazards involved with them. Like most other things, all batteries out there aren't created equally and therefore choosing a good battery for your e-cigarette(s), portable vaporizer(s), and mechanical MOD)s) really matters.
Battery Composition
Protected batteries:
Protected batteries have a small circuit board that helps stop the charging and discharge of battery under certain circumstances like overcharge, short circuit, over discharge etc and therefore have special chargers which are designed to charge lithium rechargeable batteries.
Unprotected batteries:
Unprotected lithium batteries produce specific volts of power when fully charged. A fully powered produces 4.2 volts of power when fully charged and quickly fall to 3.6 volts output. They output 3.6 volts until they are discharged. At this point, the voltage falls rapidly. If they're discharged below 3 volts, these batteries might get ruined and be no longer usable and therefore the user needs to be careful and prevent this phenomenon from occurring. These batteries require chargers that stop charging the battery once they attain 4.2 volts.
It's advised for vapers to always use protected batteries rather than unprotected batteries. It’s also very important to verify that your charger's capable of handling the batteries before one starts using them. You might end up exploding your battery, causing a fire, or melt firing, if you end up charging the wrong battery with the wrong charger. Surely, nobody wants to be in that situation.
Battery Chemistry
All batteries aren't created equal and therefore knowing your batteries before you purchase is a good practice. The batteries used in e-cigarettes and vape pens for instance use industry defined identification scheme which consists of 3 letters followed by 5 numbers like IMR18650, NCR18650. The first three letters give the basic construction and capabilities of the battery while the number series that follows indicate the batteries physical shape.
- The first letter indicates the chemical make of the battery. “I” indicates the battery as Lithium Ion Class Battery
- The second letter indicates the material of the battery. “M” indicates manganese, “C” indicates Cobalt and “N” indicates nickel.
- With the above classification, “ICR” means Li-Ion-Cobalt-round, IMR means Li-Ion-Manganese-Round and “INR” means Li-Ion-nickel-round
Wattage Output of a Battery
MOD manufacturers label the power in terms of wattage while battery manufacturers do that in terms of amperage and voltage. This is calculated by the maximum continuous discharge rate. Each battery has a number and letter. The letter will be “A” for amps and “c” for Celsius. Most batteries nowadays come specifications in amps and Celsius. One can purchase an ohm’s reader if they don’t have the specifics listed on their batteries and calculate the same.
There are many vapers who follow proper battery safety but there’s also an abundance of people who just go with hearsay and do not follow battery safety by the book and in return face the consequences. This isn’t due to negligence but a lack of knowledge so educating oneself is the key and the best way forward would be to treat this guide as a starting point to understand about vaping batteries.
