Should I chose a convection or conduction Dry Herb Vaporizer?

Typically in the UK, Dry Herb Vaporizerswill either be conduction or convection. This can make choosing the best cannabis vaporizer for you quite difficult. Both options have their pros and cons so we thought it would be useful to explain what they are.

Convection

A convection oven works just like the oven you have in your kitchen. The heating element creates an atmosphere of hot steam and air inside the oven. It is this hot atmosphere that will bring your oven to a hot enough temperature to emit vapour from your cannabis.

Pros

• Because it relies on a hot atmosphere, the entire contents of your oven should be effectively heated by the end of a session.
• Because the temperatures inside a convection oven are more stable and efficiently spread, they produce better flavours when compared to a conduction vaporizer in the same price range.

Cons

• Because convection ovens are more technologically advanced, they tend to be more expensive.
• Before they heat up, convection ovens need to create that hot atmosphere. This can take upwards of one minute making the heating time far slower than conduction vaporizers.

Conduction

Conduction vaporizers heat by touch, the cannabinoids in your weed will begin to evaporate when they come into direct contact with the heating element inside your vaporizers oven.

Despite conduction technology being quite primitive, they are typically very powerful and can produce clouds from your herbs in mere seconds.

Pros

• Can typically bring your herbs to vaping temperature in under 30 seconds. Powerful conduction vaporizers such as the Pax 3 can achieve this in under 20 seconds!
• Because the technology is older, conduction vapes are mostly quite affordable.

Cons

• Conduction vaporizers can put your herbs at risk of combustion – which is something you will want to avoid after making the switch from smoking. This is because the heating element can get very hot, sometimes in excess of the temperature required for combustion of cannabis.
• The weed in the middle of your vaporizers oven is at risk of not being heated fully. This is because it is furthest away from the heating element. Because of this, conduction vaporizers are not the most efficient.

Hybrid Heaters

Hybrid heaters such as The Mightyoffer the best of both worlds. They have all the advantages of conduction and convection with none of the cons.

Typically, they’ll use conduction first to bring your oven up to vaping temperature as quickly as possible. Towards the end of the session, they’ll bring in convection to ensure that your herbs are heated as efficiently as possible.