7 Common Vaping Mistakes Beginners Make (and How to Avoid Them)

• Match the nicotine to your old smoking habit, not to the biggest number on the shelf. Our guide to how much nicotine you should vape has the full breakdown.
• Draw slowly. A vape is not a cigarette. A long, gentle pull gives flavour; a hard, fast pull gives gurgling and liquid in your mouth.
• Prime every new coil and let it sit for ten minutes before you fire it. Skipping this is the single most common cause of a burnt taste on day one.
• Buy the liquid your device is built for. Thin 50/50 for pod kits and small coils, thicker 70/30 for sub-ohm tanks. Get it wrong and you get dry hits or leaks.
• Keep the contacts clean and rotate two or three flavours so your battery keeps its power and your taste buds keep working.

1. Picking the wrong nicotine strength

This is the mistake we see more than any other, and it goes both ways. Some new vapers reach straight for 20mg because it is the strongest thing on the page, get a throat hit that makes them cough, and decide vaping is not for them. Others buy 3mg in a small pod kit, feel nothing at all, and end up chain vaping or going back to cigarettes.

The honest starting point is your old smoking habit and the device in your hand. A heavy smoker on a small mouth-to-lung pod kit usually needs a 20mg salt. A light smoker, or anyone using a bigger sub-ohm device that produces far more vapour per puff, needs much less nicotine to get the same hit. The UK legal maximum is 20mg/ml and nicotine-containing bottles are capped at 10ml, so everything you buy sits inside that range.

If the throat hit is the part that bothers you, the format matters as much as the number. Freebase liquid at 18mg is genuinely harsh in a small kit. A nic salt at 20mg is noticeably smoother because of the way it is formulated, which is why salts took over the beginner market. Standard 10ml bottles come in both, so check the label before you order.

Start one step lower than you think you need. It is easy to buy a stronger 10ml next week. It is much harder to enjoy vaping after a strength that made you gag.

2. Inhaling too fast and too hard

Twenty years of smoking teaches you to pull sharply. A cigarette is burning the moment you light it, so a quick drag is all you need. A vape works the other way round: the coil has to heat the liquid in the wick and turn it into vapour, and that takes a second or two of steady airflow.

Pull hard and fast on a pod kit and you drag liquid straight past the coil into the airway. That is where the gurgling, the spitting and the drop of e-liquid on your tongue come from. Take a slow, gentle, three to four second draw instead and the same device suddenly tastes right.

There are two inhale styles and they need different gear. Mouth-to-lung means holding the vapour in your mouth first, exactly like a cigarette, and it suits tight-airflow pod kits with higher strength liquid. Direct-to-lung means drawing straight into the lungs through a wide-open airflow, and it suits sub-ohm tanks with low strength liquid. Most beginners want mouth-to-lung. If you are not sure which camp you are in, read our guide to choosing a vape based on inhalation style before you buy anything else.

3. Forgetting to prime a new coil

A fresh coil arrives with dry cotton in it. Fire it before that cotton has soaked and you scorch the wick permanently in about half a second. The taste is unmistakable, it never goes away, and the only fix is a new coil. This is the mistake that costs beginners the most money.

Priming takes under a minute and it works the same way on a pod, a tank coil or a replaceable head. Buy spares with the kit so you are never tempted to run a tired one for another week: our full replacement coil range covers the common fittings, including the Aspire BVC coils used in a lot of first kits.

1. 1
   Wet the cotton directly. Drip e-liquid onto every cotton window you can see on the side of the coil, and a couple of drops down the centre, until the white cotton turns translucent.
2. 2
   Fit the coil and fill the tank or pod. Fill against the glass or the inside wall so you do not force air down the centre chimney. Our walkthrough on how to fill a pod kit correctly covers the awkward ones.
3. 3
   Wait ten minutes. Longer for thick 70/30 liquid. This is the step people skip. Leave it on the side and go and do something else.
4. 4
   Take three or four dry puffs. Draw through the device without pressing the fire button. That pulls liquid into the wick and clears the airway.
5. 5
   Start low and build up. If your device has adjustable power, run the first few puffs at the bottom of the coil’s stated range and work upwards until the flavour is where you want it.

4. Buying the cheapest gear you can find

There is a floor below which a vape kit stops being a bargain and starts being a problem. Very cheap unbranded devices leak, lose their charge, fire inconsistently and often use coils nobody stocks, so the first time one wears out you are back to square one. A beginner who has been fighting a bad device for a fortnight usually blames vaping rather than the hardware.

You do not need to spend a lot. You need a known brand with coils that are easy to buy again. The starter kit range is built around exactly that, and our pick of the best pod kits for beginners narrows it further. Three that consistently suit first-time vapers:

Vaporesso Xros Mini Pod Kit is the safe recommendation. Draw activated, refillable, adjustable airflow and widely stocked replacement pods, with a 1000mah battery that comfortably does a day. Spec line: 1000mah battery, 2ml pod, 1.2Ω pod supplied with a 0.8Ω mesh pod available separately, best with 10mg to 20mg salts.

Uwell Caliburn Koko Pod Kit is the small, pocketable option. The draw is tight and cigarette-like, which is exactly what most ex-smokers want, and the top-fill pod is designed to reduce leakage. Spec line: 520mah battery, 2ml pod, 1.2Ω coil, 20mg salts.

Innokin Endura T18ii Starter Kit is the pen-style choice if you would rather have a tank than a pod. Tough, simple, and it takes replaceable 1.5Ω T18E coils. Spec line: 1300mah battery, 1.8ml tank, 1.5Ω Prism T18E coil, 10mg to 20mg.

Prefilled pod kits and larger refillable big-puff style kits are the legal replacements for the old single-use devices, which have not been on sale in the UK since 1 June 2025. If a listing anywhere promises you a disposable, walk away from it.

5. Ignoring the battery and the contacts

A vape battery is the one part of the kit nobody thinks about until it stops working properly. Two habits cover almost all of it. First, wipe the connection between the battery and the pod or tank every few days with a dry tissue or a cotton bud. Condensation and stray e-liquid build up there, and a dirty contact means weaker power, weaker vapour and a device that sometimes will not fire at all.

Second, charge it properly. Use the cable that came with the kit or a decent replacement, charge from a computer port or a low-output plug rather than a fast phone charger, and unplug it when it is done. Do not leave a vape charging on a bed or overnight, and do not run it flat to zero every single day if you can help it. Batteries in this class last longest when you top them up before they are fully empty.

If your device has genuinely stopped behaving, work through the eight most common vape problems before you replace it. Most of them turn out to be a contact, a coil or an o-ring.

6. Vaping the same flavour for months

Vaper’s tongue is real and it catches people out. Use one flavour all day every day and after a few weeks your palate stops registering it. The liquid has not gone off and the coil is not necessarily dead; your taste buds have simply tuned it out, the same way you stop noticing a smell in your own house.

The fix is to rotate. Keep two or three bottles on the go and swap between them, ideally ones that are not close relatives. A fruit, a menthol and a dessert will keep each other interesting far longer than three variations on strawberry. Drink more water too, because a dry mouth flattens flavour more than most people realise.

Buying formats that suit rotation helps. Multipacks of 10ml bottles let you carry three flavours for the price of committing to one, while shortfills make sense once you know what you like. If you are weighing those up, shortfill vs 10ml e-liquid sets out the difference, and longfill e-liquid is the third option worth knowing about. Store the spares upright, cool and out of daylight so the flavour holds; our notes on e-liquid shelf life and storage go into the detail.

7. Using the wrong type of liquid for the device

E-liquid is mostly PG and VG in some ratio, and that ratio decides how thick it is. A 50/50 liquid is thin and wicks easily through the small cotton ports in a pod coil. A 70/30 liquid is much thicker, needs a big coil and a lot of power to move, and will not travel fast enough through a narrow pod wick.

Put 70/30 in a small pod kit and the wick dries out faster than it refills. That is a dry hit, and repeated dry hits kill the coil. Go the other way and put thin 50/50 in a wide-open sub-ohm tank and it floods past the coil and out of the airflow holes, which is one of the usual suspects when a tank starts leaking.

The rule of thumb is simple. Coils of 0.8Ω and above want 50/50. Coils below 0.5Ω want 70/30. Check the ratio on the bottle before you buy and you will avoid the problem entirely. If you are trying to work out how long a bottle should realistically last you, how long a 100ml lasts gives you a sensible baseline.

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