When you use an electronic cigarette designed for dripping such as the eGo e-cigarette or one of the many USA-made e-cigarettes, you have to maintain a constant balance. If you add too little e-liquid to the atomizer and the heating coil becomes dry, you’ll receive no vapor when you puff — or worse, you’ll sting your throat. Add too much e-liquid, though, and the atomizer will make a gurgling noise. When this happens, there’s little that you can do except continue vaping through it or give your e-cigarette a quick cleaning. I’ll also discuss what to do if you have a gurgling e-cigarette cartomizer or clearomizer.

Gurgling E-Cigarette Atomizer

You’ll need to have a few paper towels handy to take care of an e-cigarette gurgling issue. To begin, check the outside of the e-cigarette and clean up any e-liquid that might have started to run down the side. Many e-cigarettes have “drip wells” to help prevent this from happening, but some don’t. If your e-cigarette has a drip well, fold a paper towel into a triangle, push it into the well and let it soak up the e-liquid.

If you have an eGo e-cigarette with a removable atomizer cone, remove the cone, fold a paper towel over several times and run it through the cone to soak up any e-liquid inside. When an eGo e-cigarette starts gurgling, this is almost always where most of the e-liquid collects.

Next, you’ll need to take care of your flooded atomizer. I like to remove the atomizer with the drip tip still attached, hold a paper towel over the end of the atomizer and blow. Some people actually recommend blowing through atomizers backwards, with your lips over the threading rather than the drip tip. I hate doing this because I don’t like to get any amount of e-liquid in my mouth. If you blow with your lips over the drip tip, there is a chance of pushing the atomizer’s wick down toward the threading, which would restrict airflow when you vape — so blow gently.

Finally, fold a paper towel into a triangle and use it to soak up the e-liquid collected in the atomizer threading at the top of the e-cigarette. When you flood your atomizer, the wick is unable to hold all of the e-liquid that you’ve added. It runs out the bottom of the atomizer and collects in the threading below, which is what causes the gurgling noise when you vape.

Put everything back together and add one or two drops of e-liquid to replace what you blew out of the atomizer. You should now be all set to continue vaping.

Gurgling E-Cigarette Cartomizer or Clearomizer

If you have a gurgling e-cigarette cartomizer or clearomizer, you’re probably using something similar to the CE3 clearomizer pictured to the right. This type of clearomizer has a heating coil on the bottom and a long, narrow air tube extending to the top. In this case, you can’t just disassemble the clearomizer for cleaning like you would an e-cigarette with an atomizer. This type of clearomizer gurgles because all of the vapor doesn’t exit the air tube; some of it condenses and returns to liquid form. This is a fault of the CE3 clearomizer design; you can eliminate this problem by switching to something along the lines of a CE5 clearomizer for an e-cigarette with a smaller battery or the Rocket Tank if you’re using a larger battery.

Until then, though, you’re going to need to fix the clearomizer you have. First, I suggest using it until the e-liquid chamber is empty. You’ll end up wasting a lot of e-liquid if you don’t. Once the e-liquid is used up, remove the clearomizer’s stopper or mouthpiece and dab the inside with a paper towel to remove some of the excess e-liquid.

Next, fold the paper towel into a square and blow firmly through the clearomizer. This should send excess e-liquid out the air tube and through the bottom of the clearomizer. You can resume using the clearomizer at this point, but I suggest leaving it out for a day or two to allow it to dry. Because the tiny air tube makes it impossible to blow all of the e-liquid out, you may find that it begins gurgling again rather quickly if it isn’t completely dry.