The Cloudious9 company has released two new products since unveiling their Hydrology9, a portable water filtration vaporizer that still reminds me of a lightsaber base. I reviewed it here a while back, and have been interested to see what Cloudious9 would come up with next.
Their first new item is a palm-sized portable flower vaporizer called the Atomic9. It offers an impressive array of features and is remarkably well priced at just $59.99. It’s slightly smaller than a PAX 3, and is housed in attractive and texturally pleasing black anodized aluminum. It’s surprisingly light at 2.6 ounces, but offers up a number of well-designed features, two with patents pending.
The device offers six preset temperature settings, between 356 and and 428 degrees Fahrenheit, allowing the user to select from a light to thick vapor. A single button powers the unit on and off, and permits you to cycle through the heat settings, all visible in a slender LED screen along the edge. When ready to hit, a flashing red light turns green.
I settled on the two lowest settings—356 and and 374 degrees Fahrenheit—and got clean flavors of the dominant terpenes in each flower, along with a focused, clear high. The chamber where the ground-up flower is placed is small: I found about 0.1 to 0.2 grams packed it nicely. Filling the Atomic9 was easier than any portable vape I’ve ever used, thanks to a retractable “shovel” which you extend with a slide button on the side of the unit. It allows the user to fill the chamber while forgoing having to touch the herb, sparing you spills and sticky fingers.
The unit’s heating source uses both convection and conduction heating, but never gave me a slightly burnt taste the way some conduction-only-source handheld vapes have produced. I got an average of 10 sessions per charge, and heat-up time was under 45 seconds. After taking 10 or 12 three- to five-second draws, it was time to refill. It’s a great buy for the price.
Cloudious9’s other new product is the Tectonic9 Auto Dispensing Grinder, and as far as grinders go, it’s a beast. Its size (3.5 inches wide by 3.5 inches long by 3.72 inches high) and weight (nine ounces) make it a grinder with tactical capabilities.
Like most any grinder, you place flower in the grinding teeth-laden space between the base and top. A few twists back and forth, and the flower is ground up into pieces small enough to fall through the holes in the bottom of the base into the capture chamber below. From there, things start getting fancy AF.
No more grinding flower, then having to unscrew the top to see just how much ground weed you’ve generated. That’s the sort of things animals do—or would do, if they had opposable thumbs, which, thank god, is not the case… yet. Instead, you look through a small, clear window on the side to determine how much is in the chamber. Don’t worry about it being dark, because a button turns on an LED light so you can check your levels.
Because you are a sophisticated stoner, I recognize that “a button that turns on a light” is nice, but hardly qualifies as fancy. That’s fine, my world-weary reader. But what if I told same that button also activated what the website deems a “built-in vibration motor… optimized at the perfect vibrational frequency for even dispensing and fluffy materials.”
The pearl-clutching among you may recoil from this truth: Pressing the button creates the sensation that you have turned on an eager vibrator. That’s fine, and some curious and adventurous sex-positive stoners out there are bound to make that connection on their own. Good for them.
That said, the intended purpose is to vibrate the ground-up flower through a slick sliding dispensing „gate,” which reveals a small hole for the flower to exit out of. That happens with the help of a hidden “flip spout,” which provides the herb a short yet effective pouring spout. Place the spout over a bowl, filling chamber or rolling paper, and the motor gently agitates the flower out in manageable measured doses.
The grinder doesn’t have a final “kief screen,” so any THC dislodged by the motor stays in the chamber and on the ground-up flower. It doesn’t come flying out out, and with some strains, I found the flower would need to be gently dislodged from the spout with a gentle tap on the side. That’s hardly a sizeable drawback when a few extra seconds of patience allows you to fill your consumption device with one hand. The unit recharges with a mini-USB cable.
At nine ounces, this isn’t a pocket-friendly grinder, and it costs $60. But it has features unseen on any other grinder, and the solid build and admirable design simplifies the task of grinding and allocating.
Check out the Tectonic9 and the Atomic 9 at cloudious9.com.