Without a doubt, disposable vapes are the hottest vaping products in the world right now. They’re so popular, in fact, that you’re almost certain to buy a disposable vape if you’re a smoker and are interested in making the switch to vaping today. There’s no way that you can possibly avoid disposable vapes – top vape shops like Cloud City are absolutely full of them.
One of the challenges that you’ll face when you buy disposable vapes for the first time, though, is understanding how many of the devices you should buy and how long you can expect them to last. You can plainly see that each package has a number of puffs printed on it, but what do those numbers actually mean? How many cigarettes are in a disposable vape?
Reading this article, you’re going to get a better idea of how many disposable vapes you need to buy in order to make sure that you won’t run out unexpectedly. You’ll also gain a better understanding of how long disposable vapes last and what you’re actually looking at when you compare the different puff counts.
The puff count is the first thing that you’re going to see on the packages when you compare the various types of disposable vapes, so let’s start there.
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What Does a Disposable Vape’s Puff Count Mean?
As you probably already guessed, the puff count on a disposable vape is an indication of the approximate number of puffs that you’ll get out of the device before it dies or runs out of e-liquid. What you may not know, though, is that the actual number of puffs you’ll get out of a device can be extremely variable. You should definitely consider the number an “up to” figure rather than a promise or guarantee.
Manufacturers use puff counts to give you a means of direct comparison when you’re trying to choose which product to buy. You can generally assume that a device with a higher puff count has more e-liquid – and thus more total nicotine – than a device with a lower puff count. On the other hand, a device with a lower puff count will probably be smaller, sleeker and more portable.
Although puff counts are generally fairly reliable as a way to compare devices, one important thing for you to remember as a consumer is that there’s no central authority regulating the claims that manufacturers make about their products. Some manufacturers may overstate the capabilities of their disposable vapes, so it’s worthwhile to know exactly how much e-liquid a device contains.
If two disposable vapes have the same amount of e-liquid – and one has a higher puff count than the other – you can conclude that the device with a higher puff count either produces smaller vapor clouds or isn’t actually going to give you that number of puffs. With experience, you’ll learn which manufacturers are most reliable.
You Can Influence the Number of Puffs That You Get with a Disposable Vape
The next thing you need to understand about using a disposable vape is that you can influence the puff count depending on how you use the device. When a manufacturer says that a disposable vape will deliver up to a certain number of puffs, it’s based on the assumption that you’ll be taking short puffs – perhaps as little as a second per puff. If you take longer puffs – like two-second puffs, for instance – you can expect your device to deliver fewer than the stated number of puffs.
You can also decrease a disposable vape’s puff count by “chain vaping” and not allowing your device to cool down between puffs. A hot atomizer coil produces bigger vapor clouds, which will drain the device’s e-liquid supply more quickly. In addition, excess heat also increases the rate at which a battery loses its charge.
How Much Nicotine Is in a Disposable Vape?
Now that you have a better understanding of a disposable vape’s puff count, let’s talk about something that’s much easier to understand: the nicotine content. This is a matter of simple multiplication – all that you need to do is multiply the nicotine strength by the volume of e-liquid. For example, suppose that you have a disposable vape with a nicotine strength of 50 mg/ml and 2 mg of e-liquid. In that case, the total nicotine content of the device is 100 mg.
So, in terms of nicotine content and puff counts, how do disposable vapes compare to tobacco cigarettes?
How Many Cigarettes Are in a Disposable Vape?
First, let’s compare disposable vapes and cigarettes on the basis of their puff counts. How many puffs do you get out of a cigarette before putting it out? If you’re still a smoker, the easiest way to answer that question is by counting. If you’ve already quit smoking and switched to vaping, though, the answer is that a cigarette usually delivers around 8-12 puffs.
To keep things simple, we’ll use 10 puffs as an average because it’s a round number that’s easy to understand. In that sense, a disposable vape that delivers 600 puffs is the equivalent of about 60 cigarettes or three packs. Therefore, if you’re a pack-a-day smoker, you can expect the device to last about three days before it requires replacement.
Comparing disposable vapes to tobacco cigarettes in terms of their nicotine content isn’t quite as easy. When you vape or smoke a cigarette, some of the nicotine is going to escape your body as smoke or vapor – and some of it will be metabolized – before it reaches your bloodstream.
An average cigarette has somewhere in the range of 10 mg of nicotine, but only a portion of that – something like 2 mg – will reach your bloodstream. It’s difficult to say how much nicotine will reach your bloodstream from vaping, but you can definitely assume that e-liquid isn’t 100-percent bioavailable.
Let’s suppose that our hypothetical 600-puff disposable vape has a total nicotine content of 200 mg. In that sense, if the nicotine absorption is similar to that of a cigarette, the device might be about equal to one pack of cigarettes rather than three.
In reality, you’ll probably find that the cigarette equivalency of a disposable vape is actually somewhere between those two extremes.
If you want to maximize how long a disposable vape lasts, the important thing to remember is that you should always try to vape in the same way that you would smoke. That means puffing on your device only as long as it takes to feel satisfied and then stopping for a while. Unless you’re an extremely frequent smoker, you probably pause for an hour or so between cigarettes. If you do the same thing with a disposable vape, you’ll get the most usage out of the device that you possibly can.
