After less than a day puffing on the 50/50 + 6mg 'base' nicotine, the throat irritation was getting worse again... At that point, we started getting a bit frustrated.
So then we went back to the Liquidarom Silver Blend 70/30 (PG/VG, French brand I think) 6mg that is pH = 6.5 out of the box. That's what Chu started using, and I was taking some puffs every day - for over 2 weeks - with no throat irritation. So we took that as our "back to basics" baseline.
Puffed that again for about 2.5 days and WOW the difference was huge. It's like puffing on silk! Both of our throats healed right up. We also had a small bit of lung congestion, and that cleared up as well.
Then this morning, our super-pure "natural" 50/50 (PG/VG) arrived, along with nicotine salts. Naturally I measured the pH of everything:
New 50/50 liquid = 6.5
Nic salts = 6.25-6.5 (hard to read on our pH strips with 2 little colored squares)
So after breakfast I mixed a little batch at 6mg, and at first, we couldn't tell a difference between the Silver Blend and this stuff - it's uber-smooth. BUT... by the time dinner rolled around, it's clear that this new blend is not as throat-friendly as the Silver Blend. But it hasn't even been a full day yet, so we'll give it some time.
Is it possible that one can be extra-sensitive to glycerin?!
The other change we made is we were using 0.4ohm mesh coils at 30W. We both switched to 1.2ohm at 12W last night. It's more of a mouth-to-lung puff instead of direct-to-lung, but that's more like smoking which is nice.
We didn't want to change too many things at once because then it's hard to figure out what makes the biggest difference, but it was also getting frustrating... So we took everyone's good advice and implemented it all at once!
Stay tuned for the next exciting (and dramatic and confusing) installment!