 The following demonstration is for informational purposes only. Please do not attempt. When it comes to heating your VapCap, we generally recommend a pocket butane torch or an induction heater. But what other ways can you heat a VapCap? Is a torch really necessary? Sometimes they fail. Can you use a magnifying glass and the sun? Remember to respect the click. What about an electric stove? It turns out you can use just about any source of heat of sufficient thermal intensity to heat a VapCap. We set up five experiments other than a pocket torch or induction heater on this episode of Exploring the Dynamics. An electric stove with an old-fashioned electric burner element. A magnifying glass and a little bit of solar radiation from our nearest star. And how about a little bit of burning metal, otherwise known as a sparkler? And here we have a propane torch. A little bit higher thermal intensity but also usable. And finally, your standard disposable lighter. The electric stove is a viable heating option. It does produce sufficient thermal intensity but you got to do it just right. In this clip you can see we're using a 2020M with an XL kit. The device is a little bit too far from the burner and the burner is not quite hot enough. So here the burner has been turned on high and you can see as it starts to glow it's giving off so much radiant heat that it becomes very uncomfortable to hold your hand close enough to heat your cap. It's too hot. Somewhere in the neighborhood of medium to medium-high heat and as you can see here placing the cap actually in direct contact with the burner element is going to give you the best heat transfer. Because this way we have both radiant and conductive heat transfer going on with a little bit of convection as the hot air is rushing up past the burner element and transferring heat to the cap. The XL kit works really nice when you switch the stem around so that you don't have your mouthpiece profiles back to back. And this is why you see things are a little different in this example. The electric stove is rather interesting because it produces a significant amount of radiant heat but not the most. We're going to get into that next and Pranaval shows how. I have my beloved picnic table and I have my 20-20 am and a magnifying glass and we're going to use the sun to heat up a VapCap. Let's do it. I particularly like this example of using thermal nuclear radiation to heat a VapCap. In other words, a little bit of light energy coming from that nuclear reactor. It's about 93 million miles away. So as you can see here, we're using magnifying glass to focus and concentrate that thermal energy right onto our cap. It takes a little bit longer than some other heat sources but it also further shows and demonstrates the utility of an energy source independent device. Focus a little bit of sunlight on your cap, preferably wear some sunglasses because there is not an insignificant amount of UV radiation that you might be exposing your eyes to and see if you can make a click. It's like 55 seconds this time. We tried it twice. First time we got it to click in like a minute and 15 seconds. Second time it was about 55 seconds. Nothing changed much. I just moved the magnifying glass a bit so I guess that changed the focal distance a little bit. Let's talk about focus. When we're using a magnifying glass and the solar radiation, we want to focus to the smallest spot as possible because that's going to give us the highest thermal gradient, giving us the best heat transfer. A larger spot, more diffused heat, going to take longer and may not even be of sufficient thermal intensity to make the cap click. Smaller spot, higher temperature, but it makes it a little bit more important as you rotate the device to get good even heat distribution. We tried using a handheld magnifying glass and holding it for that long, you can't really like get it focused that well because human error, my hand kept moving and then we found this guy in the shop and we set it up and got it focused just right and it's also burning the picnic table right now. The handheld magnifying glass is an option but it's going to be much more difficult to achieve the kind of heat that we can with a larger diameter magnifying glass simply because there's just less surface area to collect energy from and focus it down onto a point. I think earlier it was like a little more windy so it was cooling down. I think we got like good conditions for a bit. I mean if you're in a pickle you don't have a torch and you don't have an induction heater, bare bones, but somehow magically you have a magnifying glass. You can do this. We've just demonstrated two combustion-free alternatives for heating your VapCap. In this next experiment, we're going to try something completely different. Josh, let's burn some metal. Now, last year Pranav and I did this test and we thought we'd do it again with a 20-20M and some better sparklers. So, let's see how it goes. The sparkler is actually thermite. It's an interesting combination of metal and an oxidizer or a source of oxygen that can be ignited with a relatively low thermal intensity heat source like a torch. Most sparklers, for example, are a mixture of aluminum, titanium and some sort of oxidizer like potassium perchlorate. And there we have the collect. Some of the disadvantages of using a sparkler is it produces a lot of byproducts and what you'll probably notice is that your cap is going to turn white. It's not the opposite of when you use a candle or a soft flame lighter where the cap turns black because you're getting carbon. When you use a sparkler, you're getting metal ash or metal oxides such as magnesium, aluminum, or titanium oxide or dioxide that are fuming and more or less just sticking to the cap. Most of the stuff will wipe right off but since these aren't compounds that I would recommend that you consume I would probably discourage using sparklers as your primary heat source. Methyl acetylene propadene propane or map gas. Check it out. Believe it or not, a map gas torch is perfectly fine for heating a map cap but you don't want to see your cap glow. If you see it glow like you see here, you're too close. Turn the flame down a bit and move further away and you can effectively heat your device using a heat source that has this much thermal intensity. And finally, we're going to elaborate on the most commonly available alternative heat source a big lighter. I'm going to show you how to use this because it's actually a pretty good heat source especially if you've got nothing else available. And put your device deep in the flame like this. You should see little to no yellow and rotate slowly. This gives the best heat transfer and the smallest amount of soot formation and as you'll see as this cap comes up to temperature and clicks. There's almost no visible soot on the cap and it doesn't take that much longer to heat than a torch lighter. You just need to have a relatively wind-free environment. If you don't heat the device low in the flame like I just demonstrated you're going to get carbon and soot all over your cap. When we hold it in the yellow part of the flame like this we can see the soot coming off the flame and we can see now our cap is very black and covered in soot although most of it will wipe off. After a while it will darken your cap. So how do these heat sources compare to one another? The map gas? Very fast. It burns a lot of fuel and the fuel is not very cheap. Does it work? Sure. But you want to make sure you turn your flame down and hold your device a little further away. The sparkler? It's kind of dirty, probably not the most desirable and you definitely don't want to use this inside because it's going to make a mess and it might catch other things on fire. The electric element on a cook stove? Well it's definitely going to be slow and you've got to get it just right your fingers might get a little bit hot. And the magnifying glass? It's not the most practical. You definitely need a good sunny day in a decent quality magnifying glass. It works. And then finally, the big lighter. It doesn't do so well in the wind. A little bit more challenge to use but all in all a pretty good choice compared to the others. In conclusion, it's not really about what heat source you use with your VapCap but balancing heat, temperature and proximity with a little experimentation and patience. You'll find using alternative heat sources can be very satisfying but using a clean heat source is highly recommended. In other words, hitting your VapCap with a sparkler is probably not going to taste very good. What alternative heat sources have you tried? How well did they work? Please tell us about it in the comments below.