Technology

I was in Italy recently, and I could ONLY buy single use. I fucking hated it as it died in two days making me throw out an otherwise fine device - just because there's no charging port.

Now I have one lasting for almost half a year, and that's only the taste that dissappears - not the battery becoming bad.

Where I live, only single use vapes are legal.

People are lazy and don't want to maintain a vape, which does require some basic maintenance/cleaning.

Disposable e-cigarettes were a direct and immediate response to pod based vapes getting banned. Use to be, you would buy a device and just buy juice pods that were disposable. It still wasn't great for waste, but that policy was a clear step in the wrong direction.

They saved children from using Juuls, just to fill the landfills with lithium batteries.

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

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

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.

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.

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 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.

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?

There are plenty of people out there using equipment with replaceable and rechargable batteries and owned tanks that they refill with their own liquid

Pretty much the least wasteful version of smoking as far as I can tell

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

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.