Wattage, Voltage, and Ohms: A Guide for Vapers

Wattage, voltage, and ohms are all words that we often hear in vaping, but they are also words that many vapers still don’t understand or know exactly what they refer to. While you don’t necessarily need to know the science behind how wattage, voltage, and ohms are related, and in truth, they are not necessary to start vaping, we figured it would be important to clear the confusion up once and for all. 

Table of Contents:

1. The Basics
2. Ohms: Why They Matter
3. What are Voltage and Wattage and How Do They Affect the Vaping Experience?
4. Conclusion

The Basics

Before we start explaining the concepts, we want to make it clear that all you need to know to start vaping is the basics. In short, if you already bought a vape starter kit, which most likely came with a device and coils, all you need to do is check the coils which will give you the wattage range you need to use (for example, engraved in the coil you will find the range as 20W-45W although the numbers can vary). It will also have the ohms which will be written as ohm or Ω and will range from 1.0ohm to 0.1ohm. 

The ohm is one of the most important factors when it comes to your vape experience, but generally, coils with low ohms (0.9 or less) mean you’ll create more clouds. Coils with higher ohms (1.0 or more) mean fewer clouds, but there is more to it than that as you’ll see in the next section. 

Ohms: Why They Matter

Ohms are a unit of electrical resistance. In other words, ohms determine how much electricity flows. The lower the ohm resistance, the more electricity flows. The higher the ohm resistance, the less electricity that flows. 

So when coils have low resistance (0.9 to 0.1), you’ll find that your vape creates more clouds, is hotter, the coil becomes hotter, and it’s more flavorful. 

When coils have higher resistance (1.0 or higher), you will have: fewer clouds, a cooler vape, the coil becomes less hot, and you have less intense flavor.

Both low and high coil resistances have their pros and cons. For example, low-resistance coils tend to use more battery, use more vape juice, and need to be replaced more often. 

High-resistance coils, on the other hand, use less battery life, last longer, and use less vape juice. 

But ohms are not the only factor that can change your vaping experience, it’s also affected by the voltage and the wattage, which we will explore in the next section. 

What are Voltage and Wattage and How Do They Affect the Vaping Experience?

In box mods, there are usually many settings you can choose from, but the most popular ones are variable wattage and variable voltage. These two settings determine how much power goes to the coil, effectively making it hotter or cooler. With these settings, you basically raise the vaping temperature which affects the vaping experience. 

The higher the voltage and wattage, the more clouds you’ll make, the more intense the flavor, and the hotter the vape will be. But these two settings work completely differently, and in fact they are two different things entirely. 

In vaping, voltage is the amount of power going through a vape device. In box mods, the variable voltage setting allows you to manually control the amount of power that goes to a coil. When this setting is used, the voltage interacts with the coil, which has a set resistance, changing the amount of power (or voltage) into the actual power that the device creates, which is the wattage. 

With the variable wattage setting, you simply set the power you want the device to output. This setting will automatically change the voltage (or the amount of power going through a vape device) so it results in the desired wattage after the voltage interacts with the coil. 

So in other words, variable voltage is like manual mode. You control the watts generated by the device by taking into account the resistance of the coil and how much voltage you want to apply. 

While variable wattage is automatic, it adjusts the voltage on the fly and takes into account the resistance, or ohms of the coil, to give you the wattage you choose. 

When higher voltage and wattage settings interact with lower resistance coils, the clouds become even bigger, the flavor becomes more intense, and the vape gets even hotter. 

When lower voltage and wattage settings interact with higher resistance coils, the clouds become even smaller, the flavor even less intense, and the vape weaker and cooler. 

Conclusion 

While these concepts can be difficult to grasp at first, we hope we did a good job of explaining the relationship between ohms, voltage, and wattage and how they can affect your vaping experience. Remember, though, that you won’t need to have a complete understanding of what they are and how they interact with each other since nowadays most box mods use variable wattage settings, so there is no need for calculations and the wattage range for optimal use is written on the coils the device uses.