Cleaning glassware is a delicate and essential process to keeping your vapor tasting and flowing like it should. The cleaner you keep your glass, the easier it is to clean. Clean often for best flavor and function.
We recommend wearing safety glasses and gloves while handling solvent and during the glassware cleaning process. Keep all solvent, glassware and cleaning material out of reach of children and pets. Store in a safe location and keep in mind that the solvents are flamable if exposed to spark, flame or high heat.
Glassware can be soaked in isopropyl alcohol (culinary solvent can be used but it is more costly). The higher the %/proof, the more powerful the solvent. We soak smaller pieces in a beer tasting glass and keep it capped so the solvent doesn't evaporate as quickly as it would if uncapped. Solvent can be reused until you wish to switch it with fresh solvent or fresh solvent can be added to replace what has evaporated.
The longer you soak the glass, the easier it will be to clean during the rinse. Rinse with hot water from your faucet, using the high pressure hose on the kitchen sink may be helpful here as well. When cleaning the Pill BotL, we recommend rinsing from the Mouthpiece end so that water ejects through the AirPort and chamber of the stem. The goal here is to push any material that pulls through out the AirPort or chamber side of the glass, not upwards further into sphere array as it will be harder to manipulate and get through the spheres.
Glassware that doesn't have a complex array of spheres can also be soaked in a solvent mix with salt (table salt or sea salt) as an abrasive to help dislodge resin and stuck material. We don't recommend salt with the Pill BotL as it will be difficult to get out of the sphere array. A ziplock bag with solvent and salt mix works well, be sure the ziplock bag is not damaged as they can leak and will easily. We store the ziplock bag solvent salt mix in a glass jar between uses assuming it will leak.
The solvent soak and hot water rinse may need to be repeated for heavily resinated glass or glass that has accumulated a lot of ground flower bits from the finer ground/dry material.
Drying glassware can be done a number of ways. A sunny breazy window sill is an easy solution but it may take longer than you are planning. In the winter months, we use our gas stove heater top (be careful if you try to remove it while the heater/glass is hot). Another option is the oven in your kitchen. Place the glassware on a safe surface so it isn't rolling around or falling off the shelving. Put it in the oven while it is cold. Heat the oven to 250-300˚F and try to give the water vapor an exit point in how you position the glass on the safe surface. Once all the water has evaporated, allow the glass to cool before handling.