HOW TO STORE E-LIQUIDS
Storing vape juice is something that every vaper needs to deal with, and we’re sure that more than a few of you have left a bottle of juice on the shelf for a few months, thinking you want to keep the great flavour for another time only to come back to a vape juice that gives barely any of the flavour you remember.
What affects our e-liquids?
There are a few things to keep in mind when you’re storing your vape juice for long periods of time. If you’re not using it daily, there are three things to avoid: light, air, and heat.
Knowing you have to avoid these three things allows us to store our e-juices much more safely.
Heat affects your vape juices like anything that gets hot — heating up chemicals causes the molecules to be agitated, which causes them to break down or interact with other molecules. Because your flavours are carefully crafted, you can damage the flavour profiles by letting your vape juice get too warm.
You’re advised to avoid light and air because nicotine is affected by them both. When exposed to the air, oxygen loves to bind with the flavour molecules in your vape juice. This oxidation has been reported to have a positive effect on the flavour at first, but can easily kill flavour profiles if allowed to happen too much.
The best solution is to ensure that your vape juices don’t encounter open air for long, as you’ll get a much more consistent flavour.
Light, or more specifically UV rays, will provide extra energy to your vape juice molecules, similarly to heat but on a lower scale. Over time, if your vape juices are exposed to enough light, the excitement of the molecules inside the e-liquid are likely to cause changes in the flavour and effectiveness of the juice.
Long term e-juice storage ideas
Over the long term, e-juice should be stored carefully or you’ll find yourself reaching for the wallet to buy another few bottles when you realise you’ve ruined your stored containers.
When considering storing your e-juices for more than a few months, you should reconsider just letting them sit in a dark cupboard in their plastic bottles. Ideally, you should use glass bottles. This is because the e-liquid can react with the plastic. As we mentioned before, anything that interacts with the molecules in the vape juice can change the flavour.
Additionally, you’ll find that many plastic bottles are actually permeable to oxygen — oxygen molecules can pass through the plastic, in other words. As we noted, oxygen is your number one vape juice killer, so keeping it away from your stored juices is the best thing. Glass isn’t permeable, and makes it the superior choice here.
For real long term storage, keeping your juices in the fridge is good. Basically, this reduces the chance that the chemical changes we’ve been talking about can occur. When they don’t occur, that keeps your vape juice the same and keeps you happy.
Storing them in the freezer seems to be okay for your vape juices too, though any e-liquid mix with higher than 80 per cent VG will freeze. Because PG and VG have low freezing points you can generally store them without freezing solid.
Keep in mind that storing the liquids at typical freezer temperatures will cause them to thicken, so make sure you allow them to warm to room temperature before you refill and vape with them.
Further considerations
When you are storing your e-liquids, you should also remember that kids and pets need to be kept completely out of reach of the vape juices. Nicotine is poisonous and bad things happen in the hands of pets or kids that don’t know better.
Whether or not your liquids are in so-called childproof bottles, you should only consider these obstacles the kid will try their hardest to get past, and can; insurmountable barriers they are not.
The only solution here is: keep them high, keep them safe. A key-locked container or an out of reach cupboard are good choices.
Lessons Learnt about Storing Vape Juice
Okay, so number one we have: oxygen is bad for our juices, keeping them away from open air is a great idea for keeping them as fresh as possible for as long as possible.
Secondly, colder temperatures will increase the lifespan of our e-liquids. The only problem then is the potential for innocent hands getting their paws on your juices. If you’re certain that won’t be a problem then go ahead, but otherwise ensure that a lockable box, a very high shelf, or eagle-eyed parenting is the method of choice
Hopefully, these things will stop the newest vapers among you from making similar mistakes that many people have made over the years.If you did commit the mistakes of leaving your e-liquids out in the sun for days on end, we’ve got a whole range of amazing flavours in various nicotine strengths for you to look through to recuperate from the loss.