Do you vape? If you do, there’s a good chance that you use a pod system. More specifically, if you live in the United States, you probably use a JUUL. Nearly three out of four vaping devices sold in mainstream retail outlets is a JUUL, making it America’s most popular e-cigarette by a large margin.
JUUL is a great introduction to vaping, and if it’s the thing that successfully got you off of cigarettes, chances are that you’re quite happy to be using it. However, JUUL is just one e-cigarette in a much wider world of vaping products. If you never expand your horizons beyond JUUL, you’ll never experience some of the best things that vaping has to offer.
It’s time to try something new. These are the reasons why you should switch to a refillable pod system now. You’re about to change your vaping experience forever.
Flavors Make Vaping Fun
Time and again, surveys have shown that adult vapers depend on flavored e-liquids to keep them interested in vaping and away from cigarettes. Once people realize that they can get their nicotine without tasting harsh smoke – and once they see the incredible flavor variety that’s possible with e-liquid – staying away from cigarettes becomes much easier. Why would you want to inhale cigarette smoke when you can inhale something that tastes so much better?
If you’re a JUUL user, though, you’ve never experienced the flavor variety of e-liquid – nothing even close to it. In the United States, for instance, JUUL is available in just two flavors: tobacco and menthol. JUUL can’t do anything, in other words, but simulate the flavor of a tobacco cigarette – and it’s a pretty poor simulation at that.
Outside the US, there are additional JUUL pod flavors that aren’t available here. It’s still just a handful of flavors, though, and that assortment pales in comparison to the hundreds of different bottled e-liquid flavors available.
It’s difficult to appreciate the variety of bottled e-liquid flavors that are on the market if you’ve never bought bottled vape juice yourself. What you may not realize is that the flavors used in vape juice are the same flavors that the most popular makers of foods, snacks, candies and beverages also use. Why vape a poor approximation of tobacco when you could be vaping an e-liquid that tastes like a doughnut with blueberry frosting? There’s simply no comparison between pre-filled pods and bottled e-liquids when it comes to flavor quality.
Pre-Filled Pods Are the Most Expensive Vaping Products on the Market
One of the things no one tells you about JUUL and other pre-filled pod systems is that pre-filled pods are the most expensive vaping products on the market. A pack of just four JUUL pods retails for about $4.00 per pod – and for some people, a single pod doesn’t even contain enough e-liquid for a full day of vaping. Using a pre-filled pod system could easily cost you just as much as smoking – or even more. That’s the drawback of using a proprietary vaping device; when you can only get your vaping supplies from one company, that company can charge whatever it wants for its products.
If the product in question happens to be the most popular vaping device on the market – well, let’s just say that JUUL is a very profitable company. JUUL pod prices are highly unlikely to drop any time in the near future.
Switching to a refillable pod system can dramatically reduce the amount of money you pay to vape. Instead of buying pre-filled pods and using them once, you’ll buy refillable pods and use them several times before finally throwing them away when the flavor begins to change. If you use an unsweetened e-liquid that’s friendly to coils, you might find that your pods last more than a week each before it’s time to replace them. Sweetened e-liquids will reduce coil life, but you’ll still spend less than you would on pre-filled pods.
The biggest area of potential money savings, though, is e-liquid. When you buy pre-filled pods for your vaping device, you receive less than 1 ml of e-liquid per pod. That’s an incredibly small amount of vape juice. A refillable pod system, on the other hand, uses nicotine salt e-liquid that ships in much larger bottles. In the United States, the most common bottle size for nicotine salt e-liquid is 30 ml. For around the same cost as one pack of JUUL pods, a 30 ml bottle of nicotine salt e-liquid provides the equivalent of about 40 pods.
Over the course of a year, switching from a pre-filled pod system to a refillable pod system can easily save you hundreds of dollars.
Filling Your Own Pods Means You Can Reduce Your Nicotine Intake
One of the biggest drawbacks of using a pre-filled pod system is that you’re limited to the e-liquid nicotine strengths available for that vaping platform. In the case of JUUL, the nicotine strengths available in the United States are a very cigarette-like 5% and a slightly lower 3%.
Reducing your pod strength from 5% to 3% does give you an option to reduce your nicotine intake – but reducing your pod strength won’t reduce your nicotine consumption by much. If you would like to stop using nicotine entirely one day, you’ll find it almost as difficult to discontinue nicotine use with the JUUL as it would be to quit smoking. The point, of course, is to keep you locked in to the JUUL ecosystem and ensure that you never stop buying more pods.
When you buy bottled e-liquid, the situation changes dramatically because makers of vape juice are happy to sell low-strength – and even nicotine-free – versions of their products. While 50 mg and 30 mg are the only two nicotine strengths available for the JUUL, bottled e-liquid is available in progressively lower nicotine strengths that you can use until you’ve taken yourself slowly all the way down to zero. Some popular nicotine strengths for bottled e-liquid include 25, 20, 18, 16, 12, 6, 3 and 0 mg.
