From a more flavorful taste to a less obvious odor, vaping cannabis has a number of benefits over smoking it. Once you’ve made the choice to vape it, you still have a few other decisions to make.

Choose between Dry Herbs or Cannabis Concentrates

Your first choice is opting to vape dry herbs or concentrates. Go for the dry herbs and you can use a grinder to crush up the buds to a fine powder before vaping, as the smaller particles provide the greatest surface area for heating.

Go for a cannabis concentrate and you’re likely to run across butane hash oil (BHO), the most common type of concentrate on the market. BHO is also called shatter, wax, crumble and nectar.

Know the Precautions of Vaping Concentrate

BHO is a  highly concentrated form of cannabis, it contains much higher levels of THC than the flowers people have consumed for many years. This means you’ll need a lesser amount to achieve the same results as you would if consuming dry herbs. The typical BHO contains about 60 percent THC, compared to the 15 to 20 percent THC found in most strains available to purchase.

Although you can grind dry herbs at home, you don’t want to try to make your own BHO. The process involves extracting the essential oils from the plant, not something the average person would be adept at doing.

Traditional extraction methods involve lengthy, natural processes. The traditional method involves steeping the leaves for up to 8 weeks to extract the flavor and then micro filtering out the impurities. But modern extraction methods are typically used for BHO, and they involve extracting the oils using flammable solvents.

When people who don’t have easy access to BHO try to reproduce this process at home, it can result in a deadly explosion. There have been enough explosions from DIY hash oil for the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms to actually issue a warning about the practice.

Pick a Compatible Vaping Device

Once you decide if you’d prefer vaping dry herb or marijuana concentrate, you’ll want to pick a device that’s compatible with your choice. You’ll also have a choice between portable and stationary devices, as well as two different types of heating methods, conduction or convection.

The vape pen is by far one of the most popular portable devices. They’re small, relatively inexpensive, and incredibly easy to use. Vape pens consist of a heating element, a chamber for your herb, and a rechargeable battery. They work using conduction heat, which involves exposing the ground flowers to the low heat of the heating element.

Stationary devices include a range of tabletop devices that you typically plug into a wall socket. You’ll find a variety of styles, some of which use conduction heat and others that use convection heat. Convection heating involves using the heating element to heat air, which is then pushed through the cannabis to create a vapor. The cannabis and heating element are never in direct contact when using a convection vaporizer.

There is no right way or wrong way to vape. The choice that’s the best for you is all about personal preference.