How to: Use a Multimeter to measure your coil resistance and battery voltage
As Vapers, electricity is our life-blood. Without it, we’d have no vape! Yet so many new vapers out there wouldn’t know how to check the resistance of their coils or voltage of their batteries with a multimeter.
Obviously the ultimate, would be to use an Ohm Meter for your building, to make sure you’re getting accurate results.
If you’re serious about your vaping, specially if you are rebuilding, a multimeter is a valuable device, even if only kept on standby in case your ohm reader breaks.
Let’s face it, the multimeter is a versatile device, so versatile in fact that unless you know what you are doing, it’s likely that you’ll take one look at the dials and give up in confusion.
So here are a few ways we can use them for vaping:
Coil Resistance
Even though our resistance is so very important to us, the resistance we use as vapers is on quite a small scale compared to other applications.
- Turn your multimeter dial to the lowest ohms setting, usually 20 or 200.
- Touch the two probes together and take note of the internal resistance that the multimeter has. (Most multimeters have some degree of internal resistance)
- Place the two probes on the atomizer your coil is in, one probe on the positive pin (the one in the middle of the 510 connection), and the other on the outside 510 threading, to get the total resistance of the coil in the atomizer. Take note of this resistance reading.
You can also test your resistance by touching the probes on the positive and negative posts like below.
- You’re done with your multimeter now.
- Take the total resistance of your atomizer and minus the internal resistance of the multimeter. (Total resistance – Internal multimeter resistance) This is your actual resistance.
Battery Voltage
When you rebuild, use mech mods or even advanced devices, its important to know about battery safety, and one of the most important things you will learn, is that allowing your batteries to run too low, or charge too high, can be much more dangerous than you think.
As your batteries run lower, their voltage output also drops. Normally a freshly charged 18650 or any battery from the 18xxx range, will read at about 4.2 volts. We don’t want to run them too low. Some can go lower than others, so you need to be careful here. As a rule of thumb, I don’t like to run mine any lower than about 3.2 volts. I will recharge when they get that low. Usually the vape will suffer on a mech mod with batteries that low anyway, so you’ll know.
Here is how to check your battery voltage with a multimeter.
- Take out your multimeter and switch it to the lowest voltage setting, usually 20 or 200.
- Red is power, Black is Earth. Take your multimeter probes and touch them to the correct ends of the battery. Red goes to the positive side of the battery, Black goes to the negative side.
- Read your volts!
