In the previous article I talked a little bit about how electronic cigarettes work. For the most part, they all work exactly the same, however there are just a few very minor differences.

Let’s start with the battery. The battery is located where the nicotine would be on a traditional smoke. It’s the largest part of the electronic cigarette and is used to power the atomizer, which vaporizes the nicotine solution into a vapor that you inhale. Almost every brand utilize rechargeable batteries; I think most of them are lithium-ion although I believe a few are nickel cadmium. Whatever type they are there rechargeable I know that.

Most brands have a small LED at the tip of the battery that lights up when you take a drag. Some brands are marketed as this light is used to distinguish the electronic cigarette from a traditional smoke in the event that someone sees you smoking indoors and tried to stop you. With a blue LED at the tip of the battery, it’s pretty you explaining or not smoking a real cigarette at which point the person should probably leave you alone and let you smoke since electronic cigarettes are not covered by smoking bans.

Some brands use a red orange LED at the tip of the battery and the market needs as stimulating the look of a real cigarette for those that may want to not draw attention to themselves while smoking the device in public.

Either way most of the batteries have a small LED at the tip that lights up when you take a drag.

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The BluCigs starter kit comes with two batteries, which is pretty standard amongst electronic cigarette manufacturers. They do offer you a choice between black and white, and both batteries have a blue LED at the tip.

If you’re unfamiliar with electronic cigarettes, most of them have some sort of LED at the tip of the battery that lights up when you take a drag. Different manufacturers put different color LEDs on their batteries for a variety of reasons which I won’t get into here.

The battery life is pretty standard when compared with other electronic cigarette brands. I’ve found, in my two-year smoking electronic cigarettes, that the average battery life among mini electronic cigarette models is around 4 – 8 hours depending on use. Although there are models out there that last significantly longer than this, they generally require much larger batteries and because of this are about the size of a large cigar. In my experience with BluCigs I found the batteries to last about half a day each, so the two batteries that come with your starter kit should easily get you through a full day.

The good news is that even if you forget to charge a battery overnight, you won’t have to go back to smoking traditional smokes because the BluCigs carrying case will save you. If you wake up in the morning and notice, on your way to work, that you forgot to charge your batteries, just use the remaining juice in one and plug the other into the carrying case and it’ll be ready for use in less than an hour and fully charged in under two.

When it comes to electronic devices you never know what may happen, so it’s always good to know how much replacement parts cost. The BluCigs batteries are about average amongst is different electronic cigarette replacement batteries out there. I found most companies charge about $10 for a battery, so the more expensive companies charging upwards of 25 or $30. BluCigs charges $9.95 for replacement batteries, so you don’t have to worry about breaking the bank when you miss place a battery or drop in a puddle or something like that.

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If you’re considering purchasing your first electronic cigarette, it can be hard to decide which brand to go with because there are quite a few out there and so many options available.

Consider some of these things before you decide to purchase electronic cigarettes:

Price

Price is always one of the biggest concerns for everyone. The good news is that nearly every brand of electronic cigarette offers savings over traditional tobacco cigarettes. Since you’re already spending a good chunk of change on tobacco cigarettes, and you’ll save a significant amount of money switching to nearly any brand of e-cig, I usually recommend purchasing whatever brand is easiest to use and that you’re most likely to stick with and not go back to smoking real cigarettes.

That said, the first thing you’ll need to purchase is a starter kit. Most starter kits range from $40 – $80, although some are still charging over $100. I haven’t tried any brands that I’d recommend over $100…to me, they’re all just overpriced versions of what you can get at $70, and in most cases, the brands charging over $100 for a starter kit are just relying on huge distribution channels to drive their sales and actually have a worse product than the less expensive brands sold exclusively online.

It takes a lot of math to figure out which brand will be the most cost-effective over time, but you can read this article where I reviewed the cost of BluCigs over 1 year in comparison to tobacco cigarettes. In that article, BluCigs ended up coming in about $400 cheaper than traditional smokes.

In summary, price is a bit subjective, because you’ll save a significant amount of money with almost any brand, so it’s perhaps better to pick a brand that you’ll be more likely to stick with, which leads us to our next point.

Ease of use

One of the biggest issues with electronic cigarettes is that they require batteries to operate. At first glance, this isn’t a big deal…a lot of us have an iPod and that requires batteries and it works just fine. True, and while the battery-powered mobility of electronic cigarettes are exactly why they’re such a great smoking alternative, the batteries can also be sticking point and something you should consider when buying your first e-cig.

What most people don’t consider is what happens when you get stuck outside of the house or office and your batteries run out? Well, for me it meant I was going to bum a traditional smoke from a friend, or perhaps several until I could get back to base and recharge my e-cig batteries. What I found out was that 2 batteries (which is what most e-cig starter kits come with) won’t last an entire day of heavy smoking, so you either need extra batteries, a charger for your car, or some way to charge those batteries on the go.

And this brings us to the reason I ended up choosing BluCigs as my brand of choice. Unlike every other e-cig brand I’ve tried, BluCigs comes with a carrying case, built like a pack of smokes, that will actually charge your batteries on the go up to 6 full charges. That means no matter how forgetful I was in charging my batteries the night before I almost always have enough charge in my “pack” to last me the rest of the day. Running out of batteries is a major issue…the last thing you need when you’re trying to satisfy your nicotine habit is anything that will get in the way, and dead batteries for most people means they’re going to smoke a tobacco cig. So, BluCigs made an excellent decision in offering the carrying case that also functions as a battery charger.

The other factor to consider is how easy your electronic cigarette will be to smoke and how easy the cartridges are to refill. There are two aspects of this to consider.

E-Cig Batteries

First, there are two battery types out there…automatic and manual. Manual batteries require you press a button while inhaling in order to smoke. Automatic batteries on the other hand are designed to sense small pressure changes and activate the device automatically when you inhale, so no button to press. I went into automatic vs manual electronic cigarette batteries in the past, so I won’t go into that in detail here, but I will say that the vast majority of people are going to be better off with automatic batteries.

E-Cig Cartridges

Second, you have to ask, how easy is it to replace cartridges when they run dry? Most cartridges are pretty much the same, the only real difference is that some are sold prefilled and some are sold empty and meant to be refilled manually by you. The thing is though, since cartridges are all pretty much the same, you can manually refill even the prefilled cartridges when they run dry. So, that said, for your first foray into electronic cigarettes I’d recommend a brand that offers prefilled cartridges just because you can refill them manually if you decide that’s something you want to do. Otherwise, you can just reorder prefilled cartridges if you don’t want to bother with the hassle of squirting the nicotine solution into the empty cartridges yourself. If, on the other hand, you order a brand that only offers manual refill cartridges and you decide later you don’t want to deal with the hassle of manual refills, you’re out of luck.

That’s about it for this article, I’ll follow this one up with a few more considerations for your e-cig buyers out there.

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