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Safety Silicone Safety

Kellya86

Herb Gardener.....
When I first started vaping, I used an eq with a silicone whip for a year, not the same whip obviously. I made sure I got platinum cured silicone from Vapefiend to ensure safe materials. And all was fine.....

But last september, after a year of quitting smoking (sure there's another name for it), i got an evo, and iv been using it ever since...

Occasionally id use the eq, but only with an all glass setup...
But yesterday I got the whip out for old times sake...
And got a surprise when I could really taste silicone.....

Now if you smell a fart, then poo particles have entered your nose.... right????
So does it follow that id been inhaling silicone particles for a year...???

I don't remember ever having that taste, but id just quit smoking so it's was far better than that....
And maybe it's only since moving up again to the evo, that now I can taste the bad...
Make sense...???

I'm begginging to doubt the safety of silicone for vaping across the board...
I will always try to avoid vapes with silicone near to the heat....

I plan to research this alot more to discover of its harmless, or asbestos...
 
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First Hi @Kellya86 :wave:and Hi fellow vaporists. :dogpile:

I've been getting my silicone hose direct from a beverage distributor. Hose that is designed for beverage equipment as opposed to a vape store/shop.
Foodsafe 500C temp proof. Been also cleaning them with ISO regularly and even contacted the seller with questions about what is safe to use. Mine was cured with ISO, so that is a huge relief.

They do get funky if put away with a little residue left. Like a dirty dish.

"So does it follow that id been inhaling silicone particles for a year...???"

If there is cracks in the hose, I'd be suspect of that, otherwise rinse away any leftover mold and sanitize. If it is proper silicone hose that is foodsafe(at 500C preferably) and has been cleaned with no cracks, then it should be re-usable.
 
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When I first started vaping, I used an eq with a silicone whip for a year, not the same whip obviously. I made sure I got platinum cured silicone from Vapefiend to ensure safe materials. And all was fine.....

But last september, after a year of quitting smoking (sure there's another name for it), i got an evo, and iv been using it ever since...

Occasionally id use the eq, but only with an all glass setup...
But yesterday I got the whip out for old times sake...
And got a surprise when I could really taste silicone.....

Now if you smell a fart, then poo particles have entered your nose.... right????
So does it follow that id been inhaling silicone particles for a year...???

I don't remember ever having that taste, but id just quit smoking so it's was far better than that....
And maybe it's only since moving up again to the evo, that now I can taste the bad...
Make sense...???

[FONT=Open Sans, Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif]I'm begginging to doubt the safety of silicone for vaping across the board...
I will always try to avoid vapes with silicone [/FONT]near to the heat....

I plan to research this alot more to discover of its harmless, or asbestos...
This is an excellent topic and I am glad to see it become the first for this section :D

Depending on the manufacturing process used in a given piece of silicone, your silicone may be more or less polymerized (ie: bound together as 'one' material, rather than a bunch of smaller pieces of silicone more loosely bound together into a whole whip with various silane - btw silane is a precursor to polymerized silicone - residues trapped within etc. Silane smells very chemical-like, sort of like white vinegar mixed with some other nasty chemical smell). I have noticed that some whips even when brand new noticeably smell of strong silicone smell. Over time and with exposure to heat, you may deteriorate the polymer enough to get smell from a whip that was not originally smelly.

Mechanical stressing of silicone whips from too much flexing/bending/twisting or any other mechanical stress can lead to parts of the polymer coming loose which means you can inhale small pieces of silicone (see 'polymer flu' on google), or solvent residues bound up within the silicone either from solvent cleaning or manufacturing may be exposed and volatilized in the vaporization process. This is a problem for silicone in other medical applications, where mechanical stress can lead to bodily fluids being transferred through silicone hoses and into a patients body become contaminated! Search 'Spallation' on google if you are curious.

Silicone also swells with solvents and resins over time through cumulative exposure. This is why a heavily used silicone whip simply will not get fully clean. Some of the resin etc is bound up inside the polymer and cannot be fully cleaned out with much more advanced methods than any of us are using!

Silicone whips cannot be avoided in some applications. The key is to know when a given silicone implement is ready for replacement. If you get any noticeable damage/decomposition of the silicone, or build up of resin in the silicone, time to replace it. If it gets any kind of chemical smell that you can't get rid of, no matter how faint, replace it. If something you buy has a smell to begin with, return it and find another product that doesn't. If there is a way that you can achieve what you want from a vape setup without using silicone - IMO do that instead ;)

Cuckfombustions ideas above for sourcing silicone are well considered btw :D thanks for sharing man! Don't leave a whip with residue in it and if it won't come up 100% clean and smell free, bin it with extreme prejudice.
 
Hmm. So is there a material that could be used in place of silicone that's pliable and heat resistant? Now I'm kinda freaking out. :tinfoil:
Not necessarily (it depends on your intended application of course), silicone is about as good as a pliable polymer gets for most of our applications unfortunately.
 
Not necessarily (it depends on your intended application of course), silicone is about as good as a pliable polymer gets for most of our applications unfortunately.

So it seems we are stuck with silicone as a material in our vapes, barring the discovery of some new elements...

So now my focus is on how safe it really is....
I'm currently trawling through mountains of research papers about spallation in dialysis machines...
It's kind of the wrong research as these particles are entering the body through blood...
And the silicone is under constant flex...
But I'll report back if I find something useful..
 
Maybe neither here nor there but I've been using the same couple Old Style Underdog stems with silicone bowls for a Few years now.

I get weekly bloodwork done along with regular lung and liver biopsies and nothing out of the ordinary has shown up yet.

:peace:

Yeah but these issues are normally brought to light during the autopsy....
Maybe then they will find small particles of silicon embedded deep in your lungs????

Or maybe not, this is what I want to know...
It encouraging that your bloods and biops are clean though...
 
Yeah but these issues are normally brought to light during the autopsy....
Maybe then they will find small particles of silicon embedded deep in your lungs????

Or maybe not, this is what I want to know...
It encouraging that your bloods and biops are clean though...
Also silanes and incompletely polymerized silicone residues would not necessarily be solid objects to be found in a lung biopsy. These could go undetected very easily, especially if nobody knows to look for it.
 
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Some very basic silicon information here....
Gotta stat with the basics....

It is a man-made polymer, but instead of a carbon backbone like plastic, it has a backbone of silicon and oxygen. (Note that I'm using two different words here: silicone is the polymer and silicon, spelled without the “e” on the end, is an ingredient in silicone.) Silicon is an element found in silica, i.e., sand, one of the most common materials on earth. However, to make silicone, silicon is extracted from silica (it rarely exists by itself in nature) and passed through hydrocarbons to create a new polymer with an inorganic silicon-oxygen backbone and carbon-based side groups. What that means is that while the silicon might come from a relatively benign and plentiful resource like sand, the hydrocarbons in silicone come from fossil sources like petroleum and natural gas. So silicone is a kind of hybrid material.”
 
Some very basic silicon information here....
Gotta stat with the basics....

It is a man-made polymer, but instead of a carbon backbone like plastic, it has a backbone of silicon and oxygen. (Note that I'm using two different words here: silicone is the polymer and silicon, spelled without the “e” on the end, is an ingredient in silicone.) Silicon is an element found in silica, i.e., sand, one of the most common materials on earth. However, to make silicone, silicon is extracted from silica (it rarely exists by itself in nature) and passed through hydrocarbons to create a new polymer with an inorganic silicon-oxygen backbone and carbon-based side groups. What that means is that while the silicon might come from a relatively benign and plentiful resource like sand, the hydrocarbons in silicone come from fossil sources like petroleum and natural gas. So silicone is a kind of hybrid material.”
Read up about polymerization (as it relates to silicone manufacturing; there are other scientific concepts - some of which coincidentally relate to our purposes - that go by the same term, but mean totally different things) too brother. That'll help you understand how silicone is made more specifically and may help you understand some of the attached risks for our application.
 
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So it seems we are stuck with silicone as a material in our vapes, barring the discovery of some new elements...

Amen.

It's part of the reason that I like something like the Davinci IQ with a zirconia air path - which I don't think has much silicone with the exception of the gaskets around the mouthpiece I think.

Very different (and refreshing) experience I thought was reserved for something like SIC and concentrates. Yet it can handle the same full-time all-day every-day workload as my whip units did, and they freaking plugged into the wall! (And that's the IQ when working properly, I have gotten a defective one before, they're new so don't yell at me later!).

:peace:

Peace!
 
Will a build up of resin on the inside silicone hose help to keep these polymers in place? Could the resin act as a kind insulation?
 
Will a build up of resin on the inside silicone hose help to keep these polymers in place? Could the resin act as a kind insulation?
Perhaps - however I know of no specific evidence of anything to this effect - but obviously you cannot be certain that a resin coating will be so perfect and uniform even if this were the case. Even if it were even coated in condensed resin, you're going to have a whip that permanently tastes and smells like old decarbed reclaim, rather than only tasting the bowl you are currently vaping on.
 
I had my orbiter two years now (the whip, glass is gone) and after reading here I realised whip must be at the end of its life.. when used for less than a dozen of loads draw is restricted by this kind of silicony dust (like reclaim but whiteish, airy) accumulated on the mouthpiece connection, never noticed before.. whip dumped..any good link for those beverage whip?
 
any good link for those beverage whip?

So wandering around a local grower supply store (we live in fruit country) I've discovered a huge supply of all things 'garden', which seems to include huge spools of food grade plastic and silicone tubing.

If you already go to these kinds of places you probably know all this already. I'm just learning how these 'garden' things actually work, and they have all sorts of cool gadgets - this could be a fun hobby :)
 
The hazzle of the whips is a major reason I wanna switch from the Da Buddha. Safe or not, it is hard to keep clean!
Oh man, that is what first put me off of whips too. Silicone gets nasty with resin far too quickly as you say! I really would like to see some more use of high durability aerospace ceramics in vapor paths tbh, I don't think that glass is necessarily the answer either, IMO as something tougher would help.
 

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