If you’re looking to vape dry herb, but don’t want to invest in a dedicated dry herb vaporizer, finding the best dry herb atomizer is a handy middle-ground solution.
A dry herb vape tank attaches to your ordinary e-cigarette, but is specifically designed for vaporizing dry herbs instead of e-liquid. The challenge is finding one that works well with dry herb, because most options for a weed atomizer are intended to be used with concentrate or oils rather than plant material. However, there are still plenty of great options if you’re looking for the best atomizer for dry herb, and here are our top picks.
Best Dry Herb Atomizers & Tanks
4 – La Queef / La Keef 510 E-Nail
The La Queef 510 dry herb attachment is basically an electronic dab rig with the ability to vape dry herb. The dry herb atomizer consists of a tank-like section that attaches to your e-cig, with a bubbler branching off from the central glass portion which contains the mouthpiece. There is an e-nail extending up from the top of the tank section, which is attached to a spring and plate you can use to pat down your material. The ease of use and cooling bubbler attachment are two of the main reasons this earns a spot among the best dry herb atomizers on the market.
The dry herb atomizer attachment for the La Queef is ceramic, and the coil isn’t exposed so it doesn’t singe or combust your herb. The coils are replaceable, though, and reach vaping temperature in just 3 seconds. This gives it a lot of potential as a weed atomizer, and the performance is excellent with both dry herb and concentrates. Of course, this is a dry herb 510 thread device so you can use it with your existing vaping gear without issues.
The La Queef comes with a coil for dry herb, one for concentrates, a universal coil base, separate nail chokers for concentrates and dry herb, the Pyrex bubbler section and a user manual, and you can pick it up for $79.95.
3 – Cloud Pen Paragon Herb
The Paragon Herb atomizer for the Cloud Pen is a simple device in the running for the title of best herb atomizer. It features a titanium body and a ceramic dish to hold your herb, so there’s nothing that will interfere with the flavor of your herb when you’re vaping. The atomizer is fairly basic, with a central chamber and a mesh top to cover it over, and you’ll need a Paragon mouthpiece attachment to use it. The coil is also exposed and visible when you open the atomizer. But the performance you get from the device makes it a contender for the title of best atomizer for dry herb.
The Paragon Herb atomizer is 510-threaded, but is intended for use with the Cloud Pen Paragon. While it could screw into any 510-threaded device, the mouthpiece attaches to the vaporizer itself, so you’ll really need the specific device to get the best use out of it. However, when it comes to dry herb vape pens, it’s a really solid option that’s well worth considering anyway. This separates it from most of the options on this list, but if you have the required hardware, it offers a great vape.
The Paragon Herb atomizer is available for just $14.99, so it’s a pretty good deal for anybody with the vaporizer pen, but you can pick it up with the pen too for $99.99.
2 – Honey Stick Oz
The Honey Stick Oz takes a spot in this list thanks to a simple-yet-effective design, with a ceramic encased-heating plate and a Nautilus-like appearance. The Honey Stick Oz is a true 510 dry herb atomizer, which you can use alongside your ordinary mod to vape either dry herb or concentrates. The dry herb vape tank has a glass body, with a ceramic cup on the interior to hold your dry herb or concentrates, and a metallic mouthpiece that includes a filter. The combination of the ceramic heating element – which enables heat transfer without directly burning your material – and the filter means the Honey Stick Oz offers a smooth vaping experience.
The Honey Stick Oz uses 0.5 ohm coils, so you’ll need a sub ohm capable mod or vape pen to use it, and it’s recommended that you keep the wattage below 27 W to avoid overheating your material. The flavor you get from the tank and the performance overall is great: you taste nothing but your herb and always get a potent hit from your material. If you’re vaping concentrates, there are three wicks included with the kit so you get consistent performance. Along with the tank and the concentrate wicks, you also get one silicone ring for the outside of the tank, two silicone tips for the mouthpiece and a user manual.
The tank costs $24.95, which is a great price for one of the best dry herb vape tank devices on the market.
1 – Black Sub-Herb
The Sub-Herb is a strong contender for the title of best atomizer for dry herb. As the name suggests, it’s a lot like a standard sub ohm tank in terms of appearance, but like the Honey Stick Oz, there is a ceramic cup and heating plate to hold your material. It’s a weed vape tank that works with both dry herb and concentrates, so you aren’t limited when it comes to what you can vape. There is a spring-loaded plate to hold everything in place when you’re vaping, and everything is enclosed in a black-bodied tank. They’ve improved on the original Sub-Herb with a gold-plated and spring-loaded 510 connection for excellent conductivity with a wide range of devices.
Unlike many dry herb tank devices – even most of those on this list – the Black Sub-Herb features an airflow control ring, so you have some control over your draw. Thanks to the ceramic components, there is nothing to interfere with the flavor of your herb, and the airflow control gives you some control over the amount of vapor you get. The recommended wattage range is between 17 and 27 W, depending on what you’re vaping (higher settings are for oils or waxes). There are also replaceable mesh screens to filter the vapor.
The price of $42.95 is great for one of the best herb atomizers on the market.
Dry Herb Atomizer Tanks: The Basics
The list of the best-rated dry herb atomizers above gives you a practical guide to which devices to consider, but you might feel a little out of your depth if this is your first time looking for an atomizer for weed. What is a dry herb atomizer? How do they work? How do you maintain your dry herb attachment? Here’s everything you need to know.
What is a Dry Herb Atomizer?
As the name suggests, a dry herb atomizer is an atomizer – essentially another word for a vaping tank – that works with dry herb. In practice, a dry herb atomizer is an e-cig weed attachment you can use to vape marijuana with your ordinary e-cigarette. Unlike traditional e-cigarette atomizers or tanks, they don’t use wicks, and if they do hold liquid, they tend to do so in a cup rather than in the whole tank like ordinary e-cigarette tanks.
Most dry herb vape tank devices have a ceramic cup to hold your marijuana or concentrate, and in most cases the coil itself isn’t exposed. Because they’re designed to work with ordinary e-cigarettes rather than marijuana personal vaporizers – which function more like a mini oven – the lack of direct contact is useful to raise the temperature in the chamber without burning the material. Instead, the coil heats the ceramic, which in turn creates an effect much like a purpose-built weed vaporizer.
This isn’t exactly ideal, but for a dry herb 510 thread device, this is the best solution unless you want to pay for a whole new device intended for dry herb vaping. However, options like the V2 Pro Series offer the best of both worlds (having multiple operation modes for vaping different materials) and have some of the top-rated dry herb atomizer options in terms of performance.
Dry Herb Atomizer vs. E-Liquid Atomizer
As the previous section explains, the dry herb atomizer vs. e-liquid atomizer issue really comes down to design. An e-liquid atomizer is designed to hold liquid and channel the liquid towards the coil through use of an absorbent wick. Conversely, a dry herb atomizer is intended to hold dry material – whether marijuana, tobacco or something else – and raise it to vaping temperature without direct contact with the coil. In a nutshell, the distinction is that an e-liquid atomizer directly feeds e-liquid to the heating coil, while a dry herb vape tank is intended to supply heat to a smaller chamber which contains your material. Both can connect to ordinary e-cigarette mods, and use 510 threading, but the operation and design is different.
How to Use a Dry Herb Tank
Using a dry herb tank is quite different to using a traditional vape tank, both in how you fill it up and how it’s used. Getting consistent performance from a dry herb atomizer depends largely on how finely you grind up your material. You need to grind up your marijuana more finely than you would if you were smoking it, so it’s worth investing in a quality grinder alongside one of the best-performing dry herb atomizer devices you can find. Once you’ve ground your material, you open up the tank and pack some down into the cup. On some dry herb tank atomizers, there is a plate you can press down to keep the material packed down as you vape.
To vape with a dry herb atomizer, you need to ensure you keep your mod to a reasonably low setting (most work best at between 10 and 25 W) so you avoid combustion. It also helps to keep your puffs quite short. Without the sort of temperature control feature you find on purpose-build marijuana vaporizers, you have to take care to keep the temperature in the chamber in the optimal range. Other than that, you inhale and vape as you ordinarily would, although you don’t have to keep the fire button pressed down throughout your draw in the same way.
How to Clean a Dry Herb Atomizer Tank
When you’ve finished vaping with one of the best weed vape tank devices, you need to clear out the vaporized weed (called “ABV”) before you can use it again. This part of the process is pretty easy, but you’ll almost always leave some residue in the chamber. The mesh screens used to filter the vapor before you inhale also often pick up small bits during the vaping process. This in particular can impact the performance of your weed atomizer by throttling the path from the chamber to the mouthpiece.
Most dry herb atomizer options come with a cleaning brush or some other tool you can use to clean it. This is really all you need if you’re wondering how to clean a dry herb atomizer tank, but if you can get some rubbing alcohol or acetone and Q-tips, you can do a much more thorough job. Soak the mesh filter and your mouthpiece in the rubbing alcohol, and carefully clean the coil and chamber with the brush. Be careful around the coil in particular, because if you misshape it, that could impact its performance. After the mouthpiece and filter have soaked for five minutes or so, they can be removed, and you can soak the coil and chamber in the same way. Let the components air-dry, and use Q-tips to ensure everything is completely dry before using your dry herb atomizer again.
How to Make a Dry Herb Atomizer
Unfortunately, if you’re wondering how to make a dry herb atomizer, it isn’t a particularly easy task. Although you could use a rebuildable atomizer to make a stove-top style coil, the ceramic chambers found in the best dry herb atomizer devices are really central to their functionality. These ensure the coil doesn’t make direct contact with your material and thereby prevent combustion. While there have been a couple of examples of functional DIY dry herb atomizers, the amount of effort and ingenuity required far exceeds the relative simplicity of picking up one of the top dry herb tanks listed above.
Conclusion
Getting a great dry herb vape tank is a nice middle-ground if you want to vape dry herb but don’t want to invest in a vaporizer specifically designed for it. As the “best dry herb atomizer” list above shows, there are plenty of great devices that get the job done well, but it must be said that the performance you get with purpose-built vaporizers is much more consistent and reliable than you can achieve with 510 dry herb atomizer devices. That said, if you want a taster of what dry herb vaping is like, the best atomizer for dry herb gives you the highest-quality trial of the experience you can get, and for much less money than you’d spend otherwise.