How to Clean Your Vape Tank (The Beginner's Guide)

You can’t overstate the importance of a clean device, especially your vape's tank.

You may be encountered the experience of a dirty vape tank before. Fear not, young vaper! This is a problem we all eventually face, no matter the device, no matter the cost. The issue isn’t your vaporizer. No, it’s that you aren’t keeping your vaporizer clean. Regular and thorough cleaning is quite possibly the single most important factor in maintaining a device that lasts a long time and continues to work as well as it did the day you brought it home.

A clean vape is a happy vape; regular cleaning will make sure that every hit tastes great, and doesn’t have any funky off-taste from old e-liquid residue. Plus, it’ll ensure that the systems inside your device aren’t being clogged up with that very same residue, preventing you from getting the big flavorful hits you want. 

To make sure you’re getting the most of your new vape, here’s our newvaper’s guide on how to clean your vape tank.

All the Parts and Pieces

In order to understand each part of the cleaning process, you’ll first need to understand how your vaporizer is put together. Smaller pen-vapes all generally have the same three components.

The tank is the chamber that houses e-liquid you’ve loaded into the

The coil is the piece that heats up to vaporize (or atomize) the e-liquid. It’s almost always built right under the tank.

The battery is, as you can probably guess, the power supply.

A box mod, however, is a bulkier model that will have a much stronger power source and a more robust tank system, featuring removable caps and tips that can be individually cleaned to keep your device that much fresher. However, a box mod still follows the same basic anatomy: tank, coil, and battery.

Clean Often, Clean Thoroughly

Quite literally every time you change the e-liquid in your tank, you’ll want to clean it out. At the very least, you’ll want to rinse it out with warm water. Beyond that, cleaning our device each week will keep it in tip-top shape and extend its product life.

If you use it very regularly, you might find yourself needing to clean your vape multiple times per week. If you notice any performance issues, you should check for residues and clean your device. This way, your prized vape will be operating at its best potential all the time. Otherwise it'll get gunked up with old vape juice residue.

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How to Clean Your Vaporizer Tank

Anytime you purchase a new e-liquid, you're going to want to get the full power of its flavor the first time you load up your tank. But it’s a common mistake to load your tank without cleaning the residue from your previous e-liquid. If you don't clean out the old remnants, you'll end up getting an awkward flavor combo that you’ll be wishing you’d never experienced. And as you may have already experienced, it can take more than just a glass of water or two to get that weird aftertaste out of your mouth.

If you want to avoid any weird flavors and tastes, you’ve got to clean your tank on a regular basis. Rinsing, as mentioned above, is fine for week-to-week maintenance. But every month or so, you’ll want to use isopropyl alcohol to deep clean out your tank.

The Quick Rinse Technique

When you don't want to take the time to do a full deep cleaning, here's another method. 

To give your vape a quick rinse, fill up a bowl with some warm water. 

Simply remove the tank from your device and remove any e-liquid still hanging around in there. 

Take apart all of the pieces (your drip cap, etc) and put them into the bowl of water. 

If there is sticky residue on any of the pieces, you can use a washcloth to scrub them off. A little bit of dish soap is OK to use, too. 

Rinse the pieces off one more time, then let them air dry. It shouldn’t take long, just inspect them every 15 minutes or so to make sure they’re good and dry. Then you can put your device back together and load it up.

The Deep Clean

When it’s time to clean your tank with alcohol, don’t just grab a bottle of vodka off the shelf. Although your buddy from the office just swears that’ll work, the best thing to use isopropyl alcohol (rubbing alcohol). You can pick it up at almost any drug store for a few bucks, so it’s even cheaper than the stuff you drink, too! Don’t bother wasting drinking alcohol on your vape. Get the 90%+ purity isopropyl and follow these steps, similar to above:

Take apart the tank and remove any liquid, as you would do for a quick rinse. 

Dampen a paper towel with the alcohol and vigorously scrub the residue away. If it’s been a while since you’ve cleaned the vape and the residue is hardened and difficult to remove, submerge the pieces in isopropyl and soak them overnight. 

Come back the following day and scrub them down; it should be a breeze to remove that stubborn residue now. 

Rinse the pieces very thoroughly under warm water, then let them air dry for a while. If you don’t get them nice and rinsed and fully dry, you might get a little unpleasant alcohol taste on your first couple of hits, so be diligent.

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What About the Coils?

Coils, unlike the tank, are expendable and will need replacing. If you try to clean them, you’re more likely to damage them or cause them to burn out than you are to successfully de-gunk them and get more lifespan out of them. It’s just one of the realities of vaping.

If your coil is getting gunked up, and you’re getting unpleasant hits even after a thorough cleaning, it’s probably time to change it. To make things as simple as possible for yourself, just order a few replacement coils ahead of time. That way, when yours burns out or starts going bad, you have a supply on hand and can replace it in a snap. It’s easy, too; just unscrew the tank assembly, screw in the new coil where the old one was, and reassemble.

Some Extra Advice

So far you’ve learned what you need to know to effectively clean your vaporizer. Still, there are some best practices that you can apply to make your vaping experience the best it can be all the time, even between cleanings. These are tips that’ll save you time and will make sure you’re getting the most out of this great hobby.

First, you always have to keep some liquid in the tank. Don’t vape ‘till the last drop before refilling; when your tank is getting low, and you’re not going to change your flavor, it’s time to refill. Look to do this when the chamber is down to around 10% full. On the flip side, don’t overfill the chamber either; depending on how your device is built, this can result in a number of negative effects. As a rule of thumb, keep your tank 60-70% full at most, and don’t let it drop below 10% full.

Also, keep your juice out of direct sunlight as much as possible. Too much exposure to extreme heat or cold will degrade the quality of the product. No matter how much you clean your vape, you’re not going to enjoy using it if the e-liquid has gone bad.

This is pretty much all you need to know about how to clean a vape tank and maintaining your device. Stick to these tips and you’ll love your vape more than you ever thought you could.

How do you clean your vape tanks? Do you have any special tips or tricks? Share them in the comments below.