Single-use e-cigarettes contain batteries that last hundreds of cycles despite being discarded

Lee Duna@lemmy.nz to Technology@lemmy.world – 667 points –
Single-use e-cigarettes contain batteries that last hundreds of cycles despite being discarded
techxplore.com
119

of course they are. it's why I always encourage people not to buy them. they're awful for the environment, they're wasteful and they are lower quality than you'd get with most standard rechargeable e-cigarette kits.

I don't vape, but I can't imagine they're cheaper than re-usable vaping devices in the long run either.

oh my goodness yes. I couldn't imagine buying a disposable every time I ran out.

that would possibly be just as expensive as smoking regular cigarettes.

I just use a little pod system that has replaceable coil heads. it was maybe 60 total because I bought two batteries. but I've not needed a replacement battery for my personal vape yet. Just have been replacing (or reusing) my coil heads.

I do vape. The long-term reusable vapes are a LOT more expensive than the disposable ones. My current setup cost 100 USD before batteries or coils.

No, I mean long-term as in costs. Over a year or two, won't you be saving money?

$9 for the device - Vuse is the brand
Approx $7 per "cartridge"

$14 (on average) for a "Breeze Pro" disposable vape.

So it's cheaper, but about the same as regular cigarettes. Even worse, quality control on the cartridges is shoddy at best and I wind up moving the coil from a decent cartridge to one that failed less than 1/4 way through. At this point it's rare to have a coil last as long as it should.

Best way to save money is to quit. Dropped alcohol last year and THC before Thanksgiving.
Nicotine is next on the list, here's hoping for a cheaper new year.

Nicotine is one of the hardest addictions to get over. Nicotine is as addictive as heroin or cocaine. I wish you good luck, but don't blame yourself if you can't quit.

I quit in 2000 and I think the only way I was able to quit was because I worked in a place where everyone smoked, so I got a ton of second-hand smoke. I doubt I would have been able to do it otherwise and it was still one of the harder things I'd have to do.

Nicotine isn't the only addictive substance in cigarettes. As someone who has quit both cigs and vaping, it was by far easiest to quit vaping. It absolutely sucked - but nothing compared to going off tobacco. I still get massive cravings if I smell someone smoking nearby.

Nicotine is one of the hardest addictions to get over. Nicotine is as addictive as heroin or cocaine. I wish you good luck, but don't blame yourself if you can't quit.

I quit in 2000 and I think the only way I was able to quit was because I worked in a place where everyone smoked, so I got a ton of second-hand smoke. I doubt I would have been able to do it otherwise and it was still one of the harder things I'd have to do.

Lol comparing it to heroin.

It's not the substance itself that is addictive, it's cultural aspects and ease of access. When you can throw a stone in any direction and hit a store that sells tobacco, it's going to be harder to quit. Even if you are far away from a store, if your near any significant group of people you can find someone who will give you a cigarette.

Now if I wanted heroin it would probably take me a week to bounce messages around some of my more downtrodden acquaintances before I found a dealer. And you won't find anyone who is going to share their heroin with you. If you knew the hoops people would jump through and fire they would walk across to obtain heroin, you wouldn't compare that to cigarettes. Hardly anyone would do all that shit just for a smoke.

It's compared to heroin in terms of how addictive it is. And considering people have spent their entire lives trying to quit and failed, that seems right to me.

I bet you think I made that up, don't you? I did not.

https://www.google.com/search?q=nicotine+as+addictive+as+heroin

It just isn't as addictive. Period. They are comparing something with ubiquitous access to something extremely difficult to source. If people had source tobacco like they source heroin, no one would smoke.

There are almost no withdrawal symptoms from quitting smoking. I dare you to use H for a month and then quit cold turkey. I will smoke for a month and do the same... we can compare notes about how addictive they are after the experiment.

(My tinfoil hat is these points about addictiveness and nicotine relapse is just pushed by big tobacco to make it seem harder to quit than it actually is)

It just isn’t as addictive. Period.

Based on what evidence?

There are almost no withdrawal symptoms from quitting smoking.

Weird, because I sure had them. Like several days of shaking and nausea.

I dare you to use H for a month and then quit cold turkey.

I was on various opioids for over a year due to my trigeminal neuralgia. They didn't work, but my neurologist tried one after another. So in a way, I was using thing nearly as strong as heroin with a similar profile for a lot longer. Quitting them had similar side effects, but it wasn't as hard. Something tells me you don't have personal experience with this and are just guessing.

(My tinfoil hat is these points about addictiveness and nicotine relapse is just pushed by big tobacco to make it seem harder to quit than it actually is)

Or maybe it's very, very hard to quit since, again, some people try over and over again their entire lives and fail. I'm sure you're aware of that, so I'm not sure why you're pretending you aren't.

Ask anyone who has tried both. Ask all of the people who tried smoking in their teens and didn't continue.

I had a minor headache for a couple days, and that's about it other than cravings. I have yet to meet anyone whose quit who had significant withdrawal symptoms, and some of them have smoked for decades.

Comparing a clinical doses of opoids is not the same at all as street heroin where no one is controlling the dose. Your doctor will keep your dose standardized, when you do heroin you will eventually get bags that are way stronger, your tolerance will increase to a level that a doctor wouldn't prescribe to someone unless they were on hospice. Once you have that tolerance, quitting is incredibly excruciating, you will be sicker than you ever have been in your life. Maybe after a week you will stop being sick, and if your lucky after 2 weeks the extreme depression might ease a bit.

It's just not a good comparison. Ubiquitous access vs extremely difficult access is the only reason people compare them. The substances themselves are not even in the same ballpark in terms of physical addictiveness.

Your doctor will keep your dose standardized,

Yeah, my doctor switched me to a different dosage and even a different type of opioid on the regular.

It's almost as if you don't know me.

And you have not actually negated the many articles which say the opposite of your evidence-free claim.

Yes, in the long term you are saving money but if you have 20 bucks but not 100, what vape are you buying? That's the point I'm making.

Honestly, even for twenty bucks, you can probably get a cheap rechargeable vape kit.

You can definitely get a shitty one that will have you back on the disposables within a few weeks until you save enough for a good system. Source: been there done that lol

You just don't vape then

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Personally, I can't keep a vape in one working piece for two years. Either the battery box fries, I shatter the tank, the USB port gets destroyed, or something else goes wrong. I'm very clumsy.

I have a box of backup parts and pieces at home because of this.

Goodness. I used the same SMPL+goblin tank for like five years straight. It’s still in great working order, I just got lazy and don’t wanna deal with wrapping my own coils anymore.

If you really want long term savings... how about ditch your nicotine habit? That's what - $1,500 per year? $100,000 over your lifetime?

Oh, and medical bills on top of that. Hard to estimate that, but it could be more.

I can think of something better to spend $100,000 on. Slot machines at a Casino would be a better option for example.

It's not habit, it's an addiction. Telling people to just quit smoking or vaping as if it's that easy is ridiculous. People spend their whole lives trying to give up nicotine.

I spend maybe $60 a year on vaping and I do it a lot. Key is though, mix your own juice and build your own coils.

A premade coil costs a few bucks. Replacing the cotton and wire in a diy coil is maybe a nickel. A bottle of premade juice is $20 these days where I am. Mixing my own costs at most, a dollar and that's if I use more expensive flavor additives.

I won't pretend it's good for you, but if you're gonna do it, no sense in half assing it and spending way more than you need. Plus it's fun to experiment with new custom flavors.

Juice is sooooo easy to make too.

Where do you get flavors nowadays? I have a ton on backup from years back but when I looked online, prices at my normal places seem insane. I mainly need cap sweet strawberry and vanilla custard v2 (the one without diacetyl or whatever)

I've had good luck with nicotine giant, but pretty much everywhere has stock issues. They definitely carry both of those flavors but no stock at the moment.

That's absolutely flat out wrong and honestly concerning.

For a start nicotine addiction (vaping) has not been proven to have any long term health strain on the medical system. To say having a gambling problem is better is just crazy.

You realise the difference between nicotine addiction and gambling addiction right?

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The pod style devices are cheaper than the older style cloud chuckers and most of those now are refillable and not the juul style ones. I'm seeing good ones for $30-$50. The non removable battery gives them less longevity although they're still significantly more environmentally friendly than disposables. I used a fog machine to quit smoking and I've kept using them, but I definitely get why new vapers are largely going with the USB sticks now.

Not really anymore for the ones with built-in batteries like the disposables. Similar to disposibles they are typical 20W or less. You can get many of them for under $30, including the UWELL Caliburn line which is a quality product line. The G Coil packs are between $10 and $20 depending and last a week or more per coil of which there are 5. If you chain them, you're probably looking at between 2 and 3 days per coil.

The mods that require rechargeables like 18650 and other similar form factors sit between $50 and $70 for reputable brands, though for the ~200W mods it can be around $100 if you include their branded tanks.

I'd bet your mod is at least a 100W+, probably over 150W depending on when you bought them (they are cheaper now than a few years, which were cheaper than a 10 years before that).

The tanks are pretty cheap now too, even those multi-coil rebuildables. If you don't rebuild your tank and use pre-built coils it is going to be a little more expensive. Those tanks for pre-builts tend to be a bit cheaper as well, like ~$30 for non-pods. Pod tanks tend to be around $10 - $15.

I remember 80W mods going for between $100 and $300 back in 2011 depending if it was considered a "clone" or not.

I went from a caliburn to a geekvape aegis and the coils are cheaper and they last me WEEKS instead of days now! So now I’m a shill for that. Also it’s like 35USD.

Quick edit: my SMPL clone was like 25USD and last like five years before I got lazy and stopped wanting to deal with building coils hahaha. It still works great!

Lawl my geekvape aegis was like 35USD and five coils are under 15USD. The coils last 2-3 weeks or more. The battery lasts FOREVER before needing a recharge.

I make my own juice so that’s free.

It was even cheaper using a SMPL mech mod and wrapping my own coils, but I got lazy. Now my 16+ 18650s go to my hobbyist flashlights.

I don’t know what your setup is, but you prolly overpaid

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They are not. In many cases they’re the same price or slightly less. If you want a long term refillable, rechargeable vape that comes with spare coils, and is a similar profile to a small disposable, it’s about $40. A similar disposable is about $35.

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A few of us electronics hobbyists have been collecting them (when found discarded on the street) to harvest the battery for re-use in other projects.

.

Yes they're nasty, but I pick them up with a dog poo bag and clean them before cracking them open to get the battery.

I was just thinking about this the other day. Any ideas for projects to use them with?

Turn them into a power bank, among other things.

futuristic caltrops

I am dying... 🤣

Also they all have to be 0.1 v from each other otherwise the "whole thing goes south" sounds scary and is now kind of making me rethink my plan of putting up collection boxes outside of high schools and building a battery for my house out of them.

Once it's balanced and wired it's impossible to be imbalanced again though. The risk is only during initial assembly and you accidentally includes an empty cells among fully charged cells.

building a battery for my house

Uh yeah that's totally different league than building a power bank though.

this is only true if they're 1s. but all bets are off if you have cell groups. God forbid you use them to make anything remotely useful like an ebike battery or home power storage.

I guess that's the silver lining, free batteries for anyone willing to deal with a dirty object.

They're also a prime starting supply for lithium battery recycling plants so they can get things figured out before they have to deal with car packs at volume.

You can also use them as mini fog machines if you hook up a small pump. I build dioramas and have been experimenting with them.

I have a small collection from friends that use the disposables. What do you use them for? I had the idea to make keychain flash lights or a battery conversion of some kind.

At the moment I have several strings of LED Christmas lights on various houseplants that are powered by salvaged batteries.

Also a dollar store magnetic "spotlight" that I modified and have mounted to the chest freezer in the basement so I can see what's in there.

That reminds me of this monstrosity https://www.walmart.com/ip/Neutrogena-Light-Therapy-Acne-Treatment-Face-Mask-1-ct/168984043

You have to buy new "activators" every 30 uses as a way of increasing profits... You know rather than just letting users replace the batteries.

This seems easy to hack. Just dig into it and hook it up to a wall wort with the applicable resistor, then sell the monstrosity on eBay for 2x the cost.

I can imagine the company suing

I bought one of those once and when I realized what it was (something disposable that really shouldn’t be) I was quite upset.

It’s 2023 for gods sake we should be able to buy rechargeable teledildonic cock rings at every corner store by now ffs. Alexa, suck my dick.

I used to have a radio that would use the leftover battery from a Polaroid 600 cassette.

Iirc that was some sort of a lipo and it handled the flash and motors, but had more than enough power after the paltry 10 pictures were taken to power an AM/FM radio.

60 dollars for 10 dollars worth of electronics with no moving components... of course they wouldn't let you just keep using it for years

Oh wow it's as of e-cigs is just like cigarettes, but besides cancer and toxic chemicals, they also found a way to add more waste.

I gave up arguing with people like you a long time ago, but I still want you to know actively telling people they're just as bad as cigarettes will keep people on cigarettes, which are 4000x worse than vaping. Your misguided views are extremely harmful.

Nicotine alone is carcinogenic, despite what people like to believe.

[Citation needed]. Both of you.

There's been a study which found carcinogenic compounds in vapour... thing is they overdrove the thing so hard that it was burning the wick, noone would actually take a puff of that. It's the equivalent of setting a toaster to maximum and then saying that bread causes cancer.

There's little evidence of pure nicotine being carcinogenic afaik. Nicotine in tobacco is carcinogenic due to certain reactions with other chemicals in the tobacco plant

I mean, it is, but smoke and, weirdly, polonium are also very large contributors to cancer from tobacco use.

I used to have roommates who vaped from that exact type of single-use device shown in the thumbnail diagram. They asked me to re-charge it, which I did, disassemble it, connect it to my Li-ion charger and it worked again. Apparently it didn't taste good because it was nearly out of juice, but that was when I found out these were perfectly reusable 3.7V batteries in a disposable product.

Isn't there a difference between rechargable and single-use-batteries? I was always under the Impression you should under no circumstances try to recharge single use batteries or they would explode?

These are rechargeable lithium ion batteries. The same standard 18650 that has powered laptops, EVs, and power banks.

They're packaged inside a single use product, but the battery is rechargeable.

Many products actually have charging ports now. All they need to do is allow users to change out the flavor wick and we will come full circle.

Yeah, some extra electronics to handle charging would go a long way.

Buuut, Quality charging controllers cost money the vapes company isn't going to put in, and overly cheap controllers add a bigger fire hazard.

Not an 18650, that’s way too big (18x65mm). Smaller than 14500 (AA) for sure

You'd need quite a number of alkaline batteries to get the necessary watts to drive a vape. Lithium cells aren't just rechargable they are also good at releasing lots of energy in a short amount of time.

There is a difference. Not sure how they ar made, but the chemical composition and possibly the design is different.

Trying to recharge a non rechargeable battery can risky and there is the possibility of leaking or explosion.

In general yes, but that doesn't apply here. Vapes all use rechargeable lithium batteries, even the disposables without a charging port. Other battery chemistries at that size don't put out enough power.

Ah that explains it! I thought they'd built in the cheap non-rechargable ones.

Meanwhile, I’m forced to use shitty paper straws because plastic straws are banned. And yet THIS SHIT is somehow legal??

Myself I buy these disposables from time to time, but always return to small electronics recycle boxes. It's still electronic after all, with a fucking lithium battery in it.

If you ask me - these should be banned. Only refillables should be allowed to exist.

Yall want to ban the whole world and Loicense up everything out there is fascism land huh?

Wait till tis Yorupean finds out earth rocks and salt water is bad for you

Loicense for salt too dangerous

/sforgot the s

Oh no, don’t get me wrong - I’m very much against banning things in general. You should be able to buy plastic straws, disposable vapes, cocaine and a machine gun at your local 7-11.

I’m just surprised that this isn’t something that they haven’t banned yet, despite being a pretty big issue.

What if they just put a deposit on them like we do with cans to promote recycling.

I'm not in favor of banning things, but depending how it is structured I could support structured discouraging.

Deposit systems can only do so much. We have a new plastic bottle deposit system here in the Netherlands, with about a 70 percent return rate. And you can return bottles at every supermarket.

I don’t think that would work with disposablevapes. Not unless you have really high deposits and strict sales policies. A lot of this stuff also gets imported from China, so that makes it quite impossible to collect deposits on them.

Popularity among 18 year olds of > 50%. Christ. A significant chunk of those will become long term users.

Part of why the single use vapes are popular seems to me to be due to kids using them, they can toss it out so they won't get in trouble for having it, or if they do get it taken away it's just the one disposable instead of a reusable device. They also smell and taste like candy.

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Is this what post-scarcity is going to be like?

When we get desperate enough for scarce resources we’ll start digging in our trash heaps. I’m surprised we haven’t started yet.

Well yeah. As far as I know, there's no such thing as a single-cycle battery for a low-power application.

They're not really particularly low power.

Quick search suggests around 8W power consumption with a 2 ohm heater, which at the approximately 4V of a charged Lithium-Ion battery (V=IR, P=VI) checks out to around a 2A draw.

Similar results suggest the batteries inside are in the neighbourhood of 0.75Ah (3.7V nominal) = 2.8Wh. I don't know how much of that capacity actually gets used during the "lifespan" of the vape, but I'd guess half would be a good estimate. In any case, probably safe to assume you need to pack around 2Wh in at minimum.

A Lithium AA battery (Li-FeS2 chemistry) gives you 3.4Ah @ 1.5V = 5.1Wh, but has a maximum discharge current of 2.5A (only 3.8W). The AAA is only 1.2Ah with 1.5A discharge, but two of them would give you 3.6Wh and 4.5W, closer to the target but still under.

You could probably arrange this in some sort of configuration whereby the batteries charge a capacitor and that runs the heater, at those kind of numbers it'd need to be at most a 2 seconds off for 1 second on deal, but that honestly seems like it should be fine for, y'know, vaping. Might just need to have an on/off switch to avoid draining the batteries when you're not using it.

But I guess we're at the point where manufacturing Li-Po cells happens in such vast quantities that the extra electronics to charge a capacitor from a 1.5V battery probably cost more.

Not that it really matters for the topic of disposables, but enthusiasts would often run two cells in series with sub-ohm coils. Or two cells in parallel to be able to handle the draw of going down to 0.1. Give that to ELI.

There are lithium primary cells that are perfect for low power uses when you need something to last years in between battery changes. They can't supply high current, which is why rechargeable batteries are used in disposable vapes even though it's very wasteful.

They should either ban disposable vapes outright or put a large enough deposit on them that most people will return them for recycling.

oh good, there are single-use e-cigs? what will they think up next? single-use, disposable, electronic pregnancy tests?

thank politicians like Biden, Trump, and Obama for helping to write in laws against health synthetic nicotine not being grown in soil has no pollutants added like lead think artificial vanilla here same thing

better products could have been on the market years ago like better battery usage through education and innovation but instead good scientific research got pushed into the closet with climate science and the like so people like our current politicians could keep their big tobacco bonus checks

and not all companies involved have been up to no good some have tried to do better products and research before getting shut down by policies Obama started and Trump carried on and then Biden now carrying the torch

this was definitely a planned shit storm for profit but hey lets blame the public the government screwed over for this whole mess

not to mention your local vape shop selling products that do not include safety information or where it was manufactured or anything no public service announcements on the wall or talked about nothing just selling untested products with no regard to safety or health

this is way beyond the battery problem the US has really screwed the pooch on this one major health and environmental problem and not entirely because people consume a particular substance just like coffee's push for sustainability and psa and single source and what have you

Please use punctuation. This is incredibly hard to read, especially to those who are dyslexic.

yeah, the same problem exists in the cannabis industry too. the single use vape carts are everywhere and they get chunked into the bins with no regard for recycling or the contamination theyre poor choice will cause. i use vape carts, but i have a rechargeable battery so i only have to worry about the carts themselves.

i used to vape nicotine too, and i would mix my own juices and used rebuildable coil mods too. i knew exactly what was in them, including the precise level of nicotine, so i used it to cessate from 12mg to 1mg and havent had nicotine in years now. its crazy how far away from that the industry has gone, its all disposable carts made by cigarette companies with crazy high concentrations of nicotine now. absolutely disgusting