The usual e-cigarette cartomizer is characterized by a very simple design; a filler material is wrapped around a tube, and at the bottom of the tube is an opening with at least one heating coil. The heat from the coil gets e-liquid out of the filler material, vaporizes it and sends the vapor up through the tube.
If you’ve been using e-cigarettes for some period of time, you know that you can keep a cartomizer functioning for quite some time by occasionally adding a few drops of e-liquid to the filler material. When refilling a cartomizer in such a manner, problems can happen when you add e-liquid so quickly that it can’t infiltrate into the filler material.
When this happens, e-liquid pools at the top and finally travels down the center air tube — a direct path out through the bottom of the cartomizer. Overfilling a cartomizer can also be a direct problem, which is peculiar when the heating coil is dying.
Dripping e-liquid into an atomizer is the best way to taste the pure flavor of your e-liquid with no compromise in vapor production. The problem with dripping, however, is that an atomizer includes no filler material or reservoir to hold e-liquid in suspension; all it has is a wick. It is a fact that even experienced e-smokers have tendency to drip too much e-liquid into their atomizers when their heating coils are about to stop operating.
Just because you aren’t getting the amount of vapor you expect, you logically come to a conclusion that you haven’t used enough e-liquid. Before you realize it, your e-cigarette is leaking and you’ve got e-liquid all over your hands and personal things. You may be able to clean your atomizer to prolong its life. But some e-smokers do report, though, that cleaned atomizers have never functiones as well as new ones. That is why, it would be recommended to simply buy a new atomizer every 2-3 weeks.