How Long Does a 510-Thread Battery Last?
Thanks to the advent of disposable vapes, getting started in the world of oil vaping is easier today than it’s ever been before. All that you need to do is buy a pre-filled disposable vape online or from your local dispensary, and you’re off and running.
As soon as you’ve decided that oil vaping is definitely for you, though, it’s natural that you’d want to upgrade to a 510-thread battery and start buying vape cartridges. It’s much less wasteful because a vape battery isn’t just something that you use and throw away – it’s a true vaping device that you can continue using until the battery stops holding a charge.
Using a 510-thread battery is also much less expensive than buying disposable vapes because the cartridge is the only component that you need to replace. When a disposable vape runs out of oil, on the other hand, you have to throw the entire thing away.
Before you buy your first vape battery, though, it’s natural that you might have a few questions. In particular, you might want to know how long a 510-thread battery lasts. In this guide, we’ll aim to answer that question from two angles by discussing how long a vape battery lasts on a charge and how long you can expect a battery to last in total before you need to replace it.
How Long Does a 510-Thread Battery Last on a Charge?
The short answer to this question is that you can usually expect a 510-thread battery to provide several vaping sessions on a charge. If you use your battery once a day, you probably won’t have to charge it for a week or more. If you want a more exact answer, though, we’ll explain how to calculate it.
Calculating the Life of a Vape Battery
To answer the question more exactly, you need to know the specifications of the battery and the cartridge you’re using. Specifically, you need to know:
The battery’s capacity in milliampere-hours or mAh. You should be able to find this information fairly easily online or in the battery’s instruction manual.
The voltage at which the battery operates. Some vape batteries deliver their maximum available voltage at all times, and the voltage decreases as the battery’s charge decreases. In other cases, a battery may be regulated to operate at a constant voltage.
The resistance of the cartridge in ohms. This should be fairly easy to find if you’re buying and filling your own cartridges, but it may be a little harder to find if you’re buying pre-filled cartridges.
Once you have the information above, you just need to perform a little math.
You need to know the current that your cartridge will draw from the battery in amps, which you can determine by plugging your cartridge’s resistance and your battery’s voltage into an Ohm’s Law calculator. The current is measured in amps.
Once you’ve calculated the current, multiply it by 1,000 to convert it to milliamps.
Divide your battery’s capacity by that number to determine how many hours of vaping the battery can provide. The number will most likely be less than one hour.
Let’s see how these calculations work in practice. Suppose that your vaping setup has these specifications.
The battery’s capacity is 1,000 mAh.
The battery is regulated to operate at a constant 3.7 volts.
The resistance of the cartridge is 1.0 ohm.
Now, let’s run through the calculations.
Plugging the voltage and resistance into an Ohm’s Law calculator, we find that the cartridge draws a current of 3.7 amps or 3,700 milliamps.
Next, we divide the 1,000 mAh capacity of the battery by 3,700 milliamps to arrive at a total of .27 of an hour.
This battery and cartridge can provide .27 of an hour of vaping time, or about 16 minutes and 12 seconds.
You can get even more granular if you like.
16 minutes and 12 seconds works out to 972 seconds.
If you puff on your vape an average of two seconds at a time, your battery should provide around 486 puffs on a charge.
How to Make a Vape Battery Last Longer on a Charge
If you want a 510-thread battery to provide as much vaping time as possible on a charge, there are three simple things that you can do to maximize its life.
If the battery has adjustable power, vape at the lowest available power setting.
Use a cartridge with a high resistance to minimize the current draw.
Keep your battery away from extremely cold temperatures. Freezing temperatures cause a lithium-ion battery to lose its charge rapidly.
How Long Does a 510-Thread Battery Last Before It Needs Replacement?
Now that you understand how long you can expect a 510-thread battery to last on a charge, let’s discuss how long you can expect a battery to last in total before it requires replacement. This answer is much simpler than the previous one. On average, you can expect a lithium-ion battery to last through about 300-500 charge-discharge cycles before its capacity is decreased so much that the battery essentially becomes unusable.
Because the number of charge-discharge cycles is the main factor affecting the longevity of a vape battery, you can base your estimate of how long it’ll last on how often you charge it. If you charge the battery once a day, for instance, you can probably expect it to last a little over a year. If you only charge the battery once a week, it could conceivably last much longer. In fact, there’s a good chance that a shiny new battery will catch your eye before the one you’re currently using reaches the end of its life.
How to Make a Vape Battery Last Longer Before It Stops Holding a Charge
Although a vape battery can conceivably last through hundreds of charge-discharge cycles, that’s only true if you take care of it. Here are some things that you can do to maximize a battery’s total life.
Charge the battery at the lowest amperage that’s feasible. You can control the charging amperage by charging the battery with a wall charger. Charging at a lower amperage reduces the heat that the battery generates during charging, although it also increases the charging time.
Keep the battery away from extreme temperatures. Extreme cold drains a battery’s charge, and extreme heat can cause thermal instability inside the battery.
Consider disconnecting the charger before the battery is fully charged. Charging a 4.20-volt battery to 4.10 volts, for instance, increases its life from 300-500 cycles to 600-1,000 cycles, although it also reduces the battery’s capacity per charge by 19 percent.
