Breitbart – by JON DAVID KAHNATLANTA – “It wasn’t a boom, it wasn’t a pop…it was a Kaboom. It sounded like a bomb. My walls rattled. It shook the house up. I screamed. It was a real freak out moment.” These are the words of a Grant Park woman who is claiming that an electronic cigarette she purchased with the intention of getting healthy, exploded, shooting flames across her living room, charring a sofa and a rug.
Elizabeth Wilkowski used the rag in the picture above to protect her hand when she removed the E-cigarette from her computer’s USB port where it had been charging.
“If I hadn’t had been home, I would have lost my dogs, I would have lost my cats, I would have lost my house,” Wilkowski told a reporter.
But those words did not move a local retailer, Doris Holmes, who just opened her own e-cigarette shop. Holmes downplayed the events, “Anything that’s electronic and plugs into electricity, you have the potential for it catching on fire. I don’t leave my dishwasher running when I leave my home.”
According to E-cigarette trade association figures there are roughly 3.5 million of the devices in use.
I’m a nearly year long user and we have heard of this happening out there and its probably companies buying too much stock it becomes old enough to beset with age issues for the battery or Chinese companies selling the older less safer stock on the cheap which suits companies giving it away. It seems to hit those caught out by the “free” offers where you take a pack for “free” and don’t realise you have just signed up to 30$ a month for $2 worth of cartridges.
I buy mine direct from the Chinese companies through Ahappydeal, when you see the prices for the items in China and then see some of those webverts selling you at the crazy prices of $70 or more for a starter kit which has cost $2 or $3 each and you know there is a rip off going on.
Some USB chargers are very poor, the USB charger in the video is of a quite old type and designed not for the Ego 510 manual battery but for the automatic pencil thin battery of kits that look like real cigarettes and use a slightly different type of battery. Some Chinese suppliers chuck these chargers in instead of the proper 510 chargers which start low then cycle the recharging up over a period of time.
Looking at the size of that battery, its a standard 300/650Mah battery which is pretty out of date with 900/1600’s being the common stock at the moment.
Without overdischarge protection and mega cheap n nasty battery in there past its best days, I can guess pretty much she drained the battery to nil, chucked it on the charger plugged it in and watched it go boom, Lithium batteries must never be discharged to zero as they can explode when too harshly charged.
I only use passthrough type battery units as they are designed to be continually charged if need be and even if the battery stops charging it can still be used as a USB powered unit, I use my Ego batteries for about six months at most and replace them when they start to take longer times to recharge, I then take the unit head off and keep the casing and button control for spares after snipping the battery wires off and dispose of battery.
I am very pleased with electronic cigarettes, 41 years a smoker, from the moment I woke up to the moment I slept I had a smoke on the go then one day I bought some of the cheap and nasty type cartridge ones which were OK but didn’t hit the spot, I then found Ahappydeal and ordered some tanks and batteries from them and some menthol and fruit fluids from various places and I just stopped smoking, no cravings, no horrible side effects or grumpiness and am now working my nicotine levels down from the highest and am at the midway point soon to go to the lowest point from which I will go to zero and just stop.
Hi AG
I use a E-Cig also. I think it’s call “No Flame”. My mother in-law bought it for me. She signed up for the start up kit also, and they started charging her by the month. As soon as she realized it she called then and canceled it. I use them around the house or traveling where I can’t smoke. They are okay, but nothing like a real smoke. Although, I did buy one once while traveling called “Blue something”, Now, I really liked the flavor of that, it was so smooth and just plain good. As a matter of fact, I am going to look on the web and see if I can find the company. I really liked them, even better than a “Good old Smoke” haha Other than that I buy 5lb bag of tobacco and roll me own. Saves me a couple thousand a year, doing it that way. Man, you sure know a lot about those e-cigs.
Hi,
I’m thinking of going into retailing these on markets and mail order as they are so cheap direct from the factory (//gahappydeal.com/wholesale/electronic-cigarette.html) but shipping takes a while.
I would recommend a tank and a decent 1100+ battery as the cigarette looking ones are quite weak and their heating coils are very low power but the bigger clearomisers and the dual and triple coiled tanks produce as much vapour as a cigarette does smoke and you get the “hit”.
VG (Vegtable Glycol) makes for a thicker liquid needing a more powerful kit to get best “hit” from it, Propyl Glycol or PG is a lighter one and allows more flavour and hit, you can try a starter at say 18mg strength nicotine and go up as far as 36 or 12, 6 or zero downwards.
In the UK and the US is a company called Totally Wicked (http://www.totallywicked-eliquid.com/) who do some brilliant liquids to fill your tanks and been spot on, because of the impending EU legislation that might ban e-cigs I bought a special rebuildable tank which I can replace the wick with candlewick and the coil using the right resistance fuse wire so they might ban it but I’ll still be steaming away 🙂
I loved hand rolled ciggies but tobacco here is heinously priced now, a packet of cigarettes creeping closer to the £10 mark for 20 and loose tobacco is equally as expensive whilst e-cigs generate less taxes at the mo so less money to buy missiles and guns etc I say hehe
i am totally in the dark
I don’t understand e sigs
I am aware of them from day one.
How the hell can a smoker
have an e sig………..
I have not taken the time to look this up
i am sure, someone reading this site can inform me
Nicotine is a poison if ingested directly but in a cigarette the nicotine is carried into the lungs by the smoke whereas the e-cig carries it into the lungs by steam as its medium thus cutting out some 4,000 dodgy chemicals and substances that the smoke also carries.
Won’t mislead anyone in saying that nicotine is good for you but would say e-cigs are definitely less harmful to humans than the burning types and my doctor is actually amazed that my once chronic asthma has all but disappeared since moving over so that’s a bonus 🙂
thanks to you Angry Grandparent
for this clarity…when i was early teens, i tried some cigarettes……….i got no where with them………a few puffs inhaled and I was a coughing wreck……so I did not make for a good smoker, although back then it was the “thing to do?…
Actually, nicotine IS good for you, but all the assorted crap in commercial cigarettes is what gets you.
Hasn’t it struck you as strange that the govt is so rabid about no smoking? There are so many hazards that the govt approves and promotes, yet cigarettes are bad?
After you get past the title, check this article, about halfway down & to the end:
http://www.sott.net/signs/anti-anti-smoking.htm
Smoking is certainly not for everyone, and no one should be smoking the tailor-mades at all. Buy some natural or organic tobacco, tubes, a machine, and make your own. I do, and it costs, (after investing in $40 machine), about $9 a carton vs now about $80 commercial in my state.
$80 a carton, see this is where the coming crisis is going to hit Americans hard where generations have grown up with cheap petrol, smokes and alcohol. I actually liked my spearmint oil I use as I love spearmint and I think if they sold spearmint flavoured ciggies out there I would be back smoking again lol
Whats the situation over there on the home grown front as the UK allows for tobacco growing for personal use only without a licence and if you think about it tobacco will soon outstrip prices over so called illegal drugs at this rate.
I personally think smoking has become the bad boys for all our ills and takes the body blows for car/aviation pollution, the latter the more serious as kerosene in the lungs is very hazardous and the continued pumping of oil pollutants is likely far more carcinogenic than the humble ciggie because the 1950’s exposes the beginning of the myth with the 1960’s with the peak of smoking per population and yet were our hospitals filled with gasping sufferers? Theres a fleet of cargo carriers, 16 of them in this class and between them they pollute more in a year than any European countrys car pollution and so we all take one for the team.
Personal growing is generally OK, but, as might be expected, it’s a little different in tobacco growing states.
Does it not again come down to this freedom thing? Its ludicrous you cannot grow your own tobacco for your own use but a lot of countries out there won’t let you 🙁
Oh yeah… You have a sorta freedom, if you can afford the rent. And *everything* is a rental. Which keeps you on the treadmill, and all it’s attendant additional ‘necessities’ to sustain your time on the treadmill.
The business models today seem to be based on either a withholding back of something that’s a free by-product of some other process, or turning out inferior products that must be prematurely replaced, or an obstruction by the government that causes you to buy something you could otherwise procure yourself..
…but I’m moving far afield of the topic…..
I am pretty sure that we can grow our own tobacco for personal use.
That is a knockoff of a Joyetech Ego 650mah. Do your research, don’t buy knockoffs!!
I beat the crap outta joyetechs, they have short circuit protection, and are built correctly. They aren’t completely bulletproof, but are the best non-bang for your buck lol.
hahaha
The problem there my friend is that Shinzen Joye Tech produce materials for their own products but also items for generic production which end up as “knockoffs”. It seems the Chinese much like the Indians do a fair bit of back door inter company trading as its easier if your next door neighbour is making a control board you require and you make a cap end they use in their design and this is how genuine parts get around over there and its almost impossible to monitor by government auditors too.
I’ve seen some of the Vespa operations going on in Vietnam and India where they sand cast in the back alleys, have the whole family polishing and fettling cast copies whilst someone down the lane collects old sidepanels and makes them look like new with just a hammer, an old tin and some solder and so these parts end up being put on rebuilt classic Vespa’s and they sell them here in the UK for thousands, usually the first pothole or wet winter will let you know of your folly as it sheds its handmade parts or the filler used to hold the frames together dissolve but until it happens you couldn’t tell if that was a dud them buggers being so clever, they really are spot on in polishing a turd.
I have an intrinsic distrust of anything new these days created for human consumption. Knowing the myriad ways our so-called ‘government’ is attempting to kill us, I’ll NOT be putting myself in the lab rat role anytime soon. I’ll stick with the Marlboros.
The devil you know, and all that.
You’re probably on to something, #1
It’s that highly suspicious nature of mine again, Smilardog.
I would say that your freedom to choose to do so and how so to yourself is nothing to do with the government, bloody do-gooders but over here the tobacco tax paid in entirety with change the whole health and NHS bill and we had a first class health service, now no one smokes much and our health service is one of the worst going and is almost bankrupt but smokers are treated like dirt in the UK