Changing Your Cotton: How Often and When

Every vaping professional will tell you that you need to change the cotton on your rebuildable coil when you get a burnt taste. But is that the only reason to change it? How often should you actually do it? Is there even a set rule? What factors come into play? Let's try to shed a bit of light on this wonderfully fiddly world of fluids…

A bit about cotton and its history

According to our friend Wikipedia, 

The wild cotton plant ("perennial cotton") lives for around ten years and can grow up to ten metres tall.

Under cultivation, its height is kept to one or two metres to make harvesting easier, and it's generally grown as an annual plant. At flowering time, large white or yellow five-petalled flowers appear, with no particular scent. Thick, rigid-walled seed pods then develop. When these open, they release seeds and tufts of cotton covered in a soft, silky white fibre that can measure between two and five centimetres long, depending on the variety. These fibres are extracted and used, among other things, to produce fabrics.

In our world, when micro-coil builds first appeared around 2013, we moved on from cotton wool pads to cotton specifically designed for vaping. And yes, manufacturers didn't rush to bring out vape-specific cotton straight away – they wanted to be sure the micro-coil trend wasn't about to fizzle out overnight! So we had to wait a little while before special carded vape cotton finally appeared: an untreated cotton, though with quite a few impurities and an odd lingering taste, followed by Japanese cotton, the French-made Fiber Freaks (no longer around), and the famous Cotton Bacon, made in the USA.

It's worth noting that Fiber Freaks, despite its English-sounding name, is actually a French brand, and has since been replaced by Fiber N'cotton, which is also well-regarded and popular among connoisseurs.

These days, though, we've got plenty of brands to choose from: Muji, Bacon, Hook, Kendo, Kylin, King, and so on. Every vaper will have their own preference, and I haven't really noticed any real difference in taste or liquid absorption between them – it's more just a feeling for one type of fibre over another. 

Texture matters to me personally – I like cotton that feels like those big coloured cotton wool balls you find in jars in the bathroom, which is why I prefer USA Cotton Bacon over fibre-style options like Japanese cotton or the old Fiber Freaks.

A coil ready to use

But let's get back to our atomisers, and specifically our coils. You're probably wondering, first of all, which cotton to choose? Honestly, I'd say it doesn't really matter – they all work and allow the e-liquid to wick up through the coil's loops, whether spaced or tightly wound. The capillary action is pretty much identical across the board.

A coil that's reached the end of its life

How do you know when it's time to change your cotton?

Several factors come together to give us that answer. 

First of all, the type of e-liquid you're using.

The sweeter it is, or the more heavily flavoured and high-VG, the more quickly you'll need to change the cotton. The cotton absorbs all the components, and every single time you press the switch, you're asking it to feed the coil. Dozens, sometimes hundreds of times a day… Can you imagine? Poor cotton! And what about VG in all this? It's thick stuff, naturally – it is glycerine, after all – and the cotton has to absorb it and wick it up, which isn't exactly easy. On top of that, sugar will start to crystallise on the coil and within the fibres.

Two coils that have reached the end of their life

The other trigger that tells us it's time to change the cotton is a change in the taste of the e-liquid. A burnt caramel taste is easy enough to spot, but it can sometimes be more subtle, with just a partial shift in flavour. It's down to you to judge – sometimes we tell ourselves it's not a big deal, that it'll pass, simply because we don't fancy the faff of sorting it out. Either way, there'll come a point where you can't even take a single puff without an awful taste hitting you, so at that stage there's no question left to ask – it's time to get on with it!

A coil that needs cleaning and a wick that needs changing. Notice the flavour residue on the wick

The last thing to watch out for is leaking from the atomiser, or weeping from the airflow holes. Indeed, once the atomiser starts getting sticky – which happens to me fairly regularly with the Wasp Nano – it means the cotton is saturated and can no longer absorb all the liquid. We also quite often get liquid coming out through the airflow, meaning we're forever reaching for a paper towel so as not to end up with sticky hands. 

In cases like these, all you need to do is replace the cotton, while also checking the state of your coil, which may well be gunked up.

Don't overdo the "dry burn" when cleaning your coils

Finally, when it comes to replacing and cleaning, you can also refresh your coil by doing a dry burn – a technique that involves heating the bare Kanthal for a few seconds to remove any crystallised juice residue. This is fine to do every now and then, but at some point you'll still need to replace the coil itself. There's no fixed rule for how often to change the Kanthal – it's up to you to check its condition each time you fit fresh cotton. As a rough guide, once a month or once every two months would be reasonable. 

Discover all our cotton and fibre at Le Petit Vapoteur

Daniel&Pascal