A PAX that’s been run hard and never cleaned gives itself away fast. The mouthpiece stops sliding, the draw goes stiff, and the flavour turns flat and a bit scorched. Good news is the clean takes about five minutes of actual work, and the PAX is forgiving as long as you keep the liquid where it belongs.
This covers the PAX 2 and the PAX 3. Both are pocket vaporisers built around the same oven, the same screen and the same magnetic mouthpiece, so the routine is identical.
What you’ll need
- Isopropyl alcohol, 90% or higher
- A handful of pipe cleaners
- A few cotton buds
- The wire brush or the cleaning kit that came in the box
- A small dish for soaking the mouthpiece
Step by step
1. Empty the oven and let it cool. Tip out the spent material. Work on it warm, not hot and not stone cold. A warm oven lets old residue wipe away instead of smearing.
2. Pull the mouthpiece off. Both the flat and the raised mouthpieces lift straight out. They’re held by a magnet, so there’s no twisting or clipping, just a gentle pull. Set the raised one aside to soak.
3. Soak the raised mouthpiece in iso. Drop it in a little dish of isopropyl for fifteen to twenty minutes. The raised mouthpiece has the longer airpath and it’s where most of the gunk hides, so it needs the soak more than the flat one does. The flat mouthpiece you can just wipe.
4. Run a pipe cleaner through the airpath. Dip a pipe cleaner in iso and push it down through the oven into the airpath, then work it back and forth. This is the bit that actually fixes a tight draw. You’ll be surprised what comes out the first time. Repeat with a fresh one until it comes back clean.
5. Clean the oven and screen. Brush the oven walls, then deal with the screen at the bottom. The little raised oven screen lifts out with a fingernail or the tip of a pipe cleaner. Give it a scrub in iso or swap it for a fresh one. A clogged screen is the usual reason a PAX starts pulling hard and tasting harsh.
6. Wipe the mouthpiece magnets and lip. A cotton bud with a touch of iso around the magnet and the rim keeps the mouthpiece sliding smoothly. Sticky residue around there is what makes the raised mouthpiece feel gritty when it moves.
7. Dry everything, then reassemble. Let the mouthpiece and screen air-dry fully. Iso flashes off in a couple of minutes, but pop the mouthpiece back in damp and your first hit tastes like a hospital. Click it back on, drop the screen in, done.
What not to do
- Don’t dunk the whole unit. The battery and heater are sealed inside, and liquid in there is the end of it.
- Don’t get iso near the charging pins on the base. Wipe those with a dry bud only.
- Don’t leave the mouthpiece soaking overnight. Twenty minutes is plenty, and long soaks can dull the finish.
- Don’t reassemble wet. Trapped iso or water plus heat makes a foul first pull.
- Don’t ignore the mouthpiece slide. If it’s stiff and gritty, that’s residue telling you it’s well past time for a clean.
Keeping the mouthpiece moving
The magnetic mouthpiece is the PAX’s neat trick and also the first thing people let go. Resin creeps up around the magnet and the lip, and before long the mouthpiece sticks instead of sliding clean. A quick bud-and-iso wipe around there every clean keeps it gliding the way it did out of the box. Two minutes, and it’s the difference between a PAX that feels premium and one that feels tired.
A pipe cleaner left poking down the airpath between proper cleans does a lot of the heavy lifting too. Thirty seconds after a session, while it’s still warm, and the gunk never gets a chance to set hard.
If your PAX came to you second-hand or the buttons feel off, our PAX collection walks through the range and what each model does. For the iso, pipe cleaners and spare screens that make this a five-minute job, see our cleaning products. And there’s more general advice in vaporizer maintenance.