When you initially make the switch from smoking to vaping, it’s easy to overdo it a bit at first. There are several reasons for that.
- The best disposable vapes can last thousands of puffs and don’t really have any mechanism to let you know how much nicotine you’ve consumed.
- Vaping tastes much better than smoking, so it’s simply more enjoyable.
- Vaping also doesn’t cause the side effects – like throat soreness – that let you know you’ve had enough when you’re a cigarette smoker.
- A vape doesn’t regulate your usage like a cigarette, which eventually burns out. When a cigarette is finished, you have to make a conscious decision to light another one. Vaping doesn’t have that type of self-limiting property.
Along with all of those other factors, it’s just enjoyable to watch the clouds roll across the room when you vape. Some people end up vaping almost non-stop without ever really pausing to think about how much nicotine they’re consuming. So, in this article, we’re going to help you understand your nicotine usage a little better.
This guide will discuss how much nicotine is in a disposable vape. Do you use a refillable vape? Read our companion guide to understanding how much nicotine is in vape juice.
How much nicotine is in a vape, and how can you tell how much nicotine you’re actually consuming? In this guide, we’ll explain everything you need to know.
Calculating How Much Nicotine Is in a Vape
To determine how much nicotine is in a vape, multiply its e-liquid content by its nicotine strength.
If you want to know how much nicotine is in a vape in total, that’s the easiest part because it’s a matter of simple multiplication. All you need to do is multiply the nicotine strength of the vape – which is usually 50 mg/ml – by the total amount of e-liquid in that vape. Let’s use the Geek Bar Pulse as an example. This device has a strength of 50 mg/ml, and it contains 16 ml of vape juice. Therefore, it contains 800 mg of nicotine in all. It’s easy, right?
Haven’t heard of the Geek Bar Pulse yet? Read our expert review to learn more.
Of course, determining how much nicotine is in a vape might only be part of what brought you here. If you’re concerned that you might be using too much nicotine, what you really want to know is how much nicotine you’re using per day. We’ll help you figure that out as well.
How Much Nicotine Are You Using Per Day?
To determine how much nicotine you use per day, divide your vape’s total nicotine content by the number of days it lasts.
If you’d like to know how much nicotine you’re using per day, it’s a pretty simple calculation. To find this out, you need to know how long your preferred disposable vape lasts given your personal usage patterns. Just keep track of how many days each device lasts before running out of vape juice. Divide the device’s total nicotine content by the number of days that you're able to use it, and you’ll know how much nicotine you use per day.
Does this calculation result in a number that seems a little large? Don’t forget that not all of the nicotine in a vape is actually bioavailable. That’s also true of cigarettes. A cigarette contains a fairly large amount of nicotine, but only a portion of it is actually absorbed into your bloodstream.
If you’re a chain vaper, that’s a different story – but we’ll get there shortly.
How Much Nicotine Is in One Puff of Vape?
To determine how much nicotine is in one puff of vape, divide the device’s total nicotine content by its puff count.
You might have found your way to this article because you want to break things down to the finest detail possible. You know how much total nicotine is in a vape – but how about a single puff?
Calculating how much nicotine is in one puff of vape isn’t quite so easy because in order to do that, you need to know how many puffs are in that vape. Determining how long a disposable vape lasts is so complex that it warrants its own article.
Let’s return to our example of the Geek Bar Pulse, though, with the assumption that you’ll get all of the advertised 15,000 puffs out of the device. If that’s the case, you can divide to find the answer. Divide 800 mg of nicotine by 15,000 puffs, and you’ll find that each puff contains about 0.053 of a milligram of nicotine. In case you’re wondering, that’s 53 micrograms.
Of course, you may not actually get the advertised number of puffs out of a disposable vape – but that’s a different story. Click the link above to learn more about that. You can always tally your puffs manually if you like. That would be a lot of work, but it would allow you to calculate how much nicotine you’re inhaling per puff more precisely.
How to Control Your Nicotine Intake with a Disposable Vape
If you follow the usage pattern of a smoker, the amount of nicotine that you consume per day by vaping will probably be the right amount for you.
At the beginning of this article, we discussed the chain vaping pattern that some people fall into when they first discover how much more enjoyable vaping is compared to smoking. If you vape constantly without ever putting your device down, you may be concerned that you’re consuming more nicotine than you need. Perhaps that’s what drove you to research how much nicotine is in a vape in the first place.
A modern disposable vape is designed to deliver nicotine as efficiently as a tobacco cigarette – so if you’re chain vaping, there’s a good chance that you’re consuming more nicotine than you really need. How can you avoid doing that? The answer is actually fairly simple – you just need to mimic the patterns that you used as a smoker.
Suppose that you were a pack-a-day smoker before you switched to vaping. You know that there are 20 cigarettes in a pack, and you also know that there are about 10 puffs in a cigarette on average. So, all that you need to do is divide your vaping into 20 sessions per day with about 10 puffs per session. If you do that, you can be very confident that you aren’t overusing nicotine. A pleasant side effect is that your vapes will also last much longer, which means that you’ll save a lot of money.
If you try to limit yourself to 200 puffs per day and have trouble managing your cravings, don’t get too frustrated with yourself; it might take a little time to dial things back if you’re a chain vaper. You might find it helpful to track how many times you puff on your device each day and dial it back slowly.
Are You Using More Nicotine than You Need?
If you’d like to reduce your nicotine intake, vaping makes it easy. You can reduce your nicotine consumption by switching to a lower nicotine strength, cutting your number of puffs per day or both.
Reading this article, you’ve learned everything that you’ve ever wanted to know about how much nicotine is in a vape. Maybe you’ve even decided that you might like to reduce your nicotine usage a bit. If that’s the case, we have a few final tips that you might find helpful.
- Low-nicotine vapes do exist, but their nicotine strengths are usually about half of the strength you’re using now. That’s a pretty big difference. You might not want to jump directly from your current device to a lower-nicotine option because you’ll just end up vaping twice as much and spending twice as much in the process. Try to get your number of puffs per day as low as possible before switching to a lower nicotine strength.
- If you switch to a low-nicotine vape successfully and want to reduce your nicotine intake even further, you’ll want to switch to a refillable device like one of the best pod vapes. A refillable vape gives you the ability to use any bottled vape juice you want, and that gives you a lot more flexibility when it comes to choosing your nicotine strength. Bottled vape juice is available in strengths as low as 3 mg/ml. As you work your way down through lower nicotine strengths, continue trying to reduce your number of puffs per day. That way, it’ll be less jarring when you jump down to a lower strength.
- If you want to become entirely nicotine free, you have plenty of options. You can continue vaping just for the enjoyment of it, or you can stop vaping if you prefer – the choice is yours. If you want to explore the wide world of nicotine-free vaping, you can find plenty of bottled e-liquids that don’t contain nicotine. There are also several nicotine-free disposable vapes available, with the Flonq Max Smart being one popular option.