Top 10 Dry Herb Vaporizer Tips & Tricks Optimize Your Experience With Ease

While it is definitely possible to use a vaporizer with whole flower, you’ll get superior flavor output and vapour production from virtually any vaporizer when you properly grind your flower. I have found very few vaporizers that work better with a coarse grind, a medium to a medium-fine grind is optimal for the vast majority of devices. With a nice consistent medium grind it ensures enough surface area is exposed to the heat so that all of the active ingredients are thoroughly vaporized.

If you use whole flower or too coarse of a grind, you leave a lot of active ingredients hidden inside the larger pieces that won’t be exposed to heat, and therefore will not be vaporized. Alternatively, if you use too fine of a grind, the material won’t sit properly in the vaporizer while you’re inhaling, it will get sucked up into the intake holes or clump together at the top, which leads to poor vaporization and will mean your device to needs to be maintained more often.

Keep in mind that although they are worthwhile investments, you do not need an expensive high-end grinder to achieve an optimal grind, pretty much any grinder will enhance your vape game. You can also achieve a similar result with a pair of scissors, even manually pulling your bud apart by hand can achieve a crude but totally acceptable result.

When it comes to moisture content, it’s a bit of a Goldilocks situation. You don’t want it too moist, you really don’t want it too dry, you want it to be just right. When your flower is too moist, it also tends to be a little bit too sticky, which can make it clump together instead of sitting loosely when it’s being vaporized. Also, when it’s quite moist the first few hits will be spent drying out the moisture content in that flower and not vaporizing. Once the extra moisture is gone, then the active material will have an opportunity to be vaporized properly.

On the other hand, when your material is too dry, it is very difficult to effectively pack it in certain vaporizers, like an Arizer stem for example. The flower needs some moisture, so that the pieces can stick together. When the flower is too dry the vapour produced is way harsher, which I try to avoid. The only advantage of really dry flower is that you will get the most efficient vapour production, since there is no moisture that needs to be evaporated while the flower is being heated, all the heat goes straight into vapour production.

The best way to control the moisture content of your flower is by keeping it in a sealed container like a Jyarz, with a Boveda or Boost humidity pack inside, which will keep your flower at a consistent and optimal humidity level.

If you’re using a purely conduction vaporizer, like a Pax or a DaVinci IQ, you should make sure that you pack the bowl completely full, press it down a little bit, add a little more, and press that down. In a conduction device, the heat will transfer from the heating edge of the bowl to deep within the material and reach the very center. If you have a loose pack, it won’t transfer the heat to the center of the flower, and will lead to wispy results.

For pretty much any other type of device though, I recommend using a full but not tight pack. Fill your bowl more or less to capacity, then lightly tamp it down with either your finger or a tamp tool to create a nice consistent bed for the heat to pass through and also keep the flower in place.There aren’t many devices that work well when they’re not fully loaded, because the material will move around like a tornado while you inhale, and it won’t get properly vaporized.

Some vapes have massive bowls and I often don’t want to load a huge bowl because I like to refresh it often for better flavor. In this type of case, instead of just half-filling the bowl, it’s better to use a tool that will allow you to load it to capacity, but with a reduced bowl size. We stock accessories for this purpose, like the Sneaky Pete Half-Bowl Converter for DynaVaps, or our Crafty+/Mighty+ Glass Bowl Reducers.

This is a critically important factor that causes a lot of new users to have a bad experience. Many people who are new to vaporizers are used to smoking their cannabis, so they’re used to inhaling from a joint, bong, or a glass pipe. How you hit one of those is different from how you should hit a vaporizer, leading to some people sucking hard and furiously on their vape, which isn’t how they’re designed to be used.

I think of hitting a vaporizer like a whisper compared to the scream of hitting a glass pipe. You want a nice slow and consistent inhalation when you’re using a vaporizer, you shouldn’t be ripping it as hard as you can. The heaters in vapes are plenty strong when you use them as intended, but if you inhale too hard you are simply going to pull more heat than the device is designed to produce in such a short time period.

There are a few devices, usually desktop vaporizers that connect to mains power, which you can hit as hard as you like and they will keep up without issue. But even they will work better with a slow and consistent inhalation, so start there before you start going harder.

The second mistake that new users often make is taking short little puffs like you would take from a joint. Instead of many short and spaced out hits, you should take long and slow draws to get the very best results. With a vaporizer it takes some time for the heat to fully infiltrate the flower and convert the active material to vapour, so if you don’t give the warm air enough time to pass through your material, it won’t effectively vaporize.

Also, every time that you hit your device, you are pulling a huge amount of heat from both the bowl and your material, so it takes a bit of time for that heat to build back up. When you hit it with a nice, long and consistent style, the material has enough time to fully reach temperature, and then produce ample amounts of vapour for the remaining duration of your hit.

If you have difficulty taking a long and sustained hit, you can still get great results, just keep your hits slow and consistent in their speed, with as much length as you can manage, and your device will perform just fine.

Stirring your load mid bowl is one of the very best things that you can do to improve the performance of your vaporizer. When you stir your load after a session, it exposes surface area that was previously covered by other pieces of flower. When this fresh surface area is exposed to the heat for the first time it will release active ingredients that were missed during your previous session. If you don’t stir your bowl there will always be some dead spots that simply won’t get properly vaporized, and some other spots may get too much heat, which can lead to some popcorn flavor or even combustion.

It’s always easiest to stir your load while it’s still warm and pliable, rather than letting the load cool down and get a little crunchy and jumpy when you try to stir it. I think stirring it once after your first session is usually sufficient, once the flower starts to dry out it benefits less from stirring. After you stir it, don’t forget to give it a slight tamp to maintain optimal performance.

Your first session from a new vaporizer is rarely the best session that you are going to have. It takes some time, patience, and experimentation to get the optimal results from your device. Even though some vapes can be quite similar, others can be totally different, so you need to be aware that there are different techniques required for different vaporizers. If you compare something very automatic like an Arizer Air MAX to something hands-on like a DynaVap M, they both require a totally different style of use to get good results.

If you think back to the first joint you ever rolled, it was probably pretty gnarly looking. But eventually over time it just sort of clicks and you understand it, then you start rapidly improving your technique. Using a new vaporizer is exactly the same, just apply all of these tips and tricks to your new device, and you will minimize the learning curve on the unit and maximize your enjoyment.

With the experience of using a variety of devices over time, you’ll develop a kind of sixth sense that makes it much quicker and easier to figure out how to best use a new vaporizer. This ain’t exactly accounting homework, this is the most enjoyable homework possible, so take your time, practice diligently, and have fun!