Maintenance, yes you heard that dreaded word correctly. If there's something that all hobbyists or all tool keepers hate, it's the never-ending maintenance (well, that's probably why it's called maintenance) of their tools and machinery. Vaporizers are also tools in their own right, tools for aromatherapy or inhalation of the aromatic and medicinal active ingredients of a herb. And as a tool, proper maintenance would have to be done regularly if you ever want it to be running at optimal condition at all times.
Well, for a generalization, you just basically have to clean each and every working part of the vaporizer in a way that when you assemble it again, it will be at its maximum performance rate. Yes, that includes all residue that has settled on where you put the herbs. And just in case you still don't know what are the aftermaths of a poorly maintained vaporizer is, chances are you won't want to know.
For a start, dismantle all of the working parts of the vaporizer first, this depends on what kind of vaporizer that your are using, but simply detach all of the things that are detachable (not what you think is detachable). If this is your first time doing this, always refer to your vaporizer's instruction manual about dismantling procedures.
The next thing is to prepare the proper materials to clean each and every operating part accordingly. This can be cleaning agents or certain tools needed. For example, most portable vaporizers are effectively cleansed by tepid soap water, so you should accordingly prepare the necessary material.
Cleaning vigorously is good, but cleaning carefully will always be statistically better. No matter how much you want the operating parts to be sparkling clean, you don't want any one of these parts breaking and ruining the entire vaporizer, so you'll have to clean vigorously, while being careful enough not to damage or break any of them in the process.
Finally, reassemble the vaporizer in the way that it is assembled before it was dismantled earlier. This should already be obvious but remember that reassembly procedures aren't always the exact reverse of the dismantling process. Take the plastic price tag holders for example, where they can be assembled easily by just attaching the end to the other end, but you can't actually detach them easily because of the unique way that the plastic tag is shaped.
This instructions as you might have observed even at the start of our discussion, presents a very crude and oversimplified way of cleaning your vaporizer. But you must remember, this is maintenance, and these are just some pointers that you are to do to check if your cleaning procedures are correct and if your are doing "maintenance" in the correct fashion.
Maintenance unfortunately requires the virtue called diligence, and doing cleaning procedures for around a thousand times would almost make any owner to grow tired and try to do things simpler and easier. This is the greatest mistake that we humans simply cannot escape (unless of course if you're an android or a fanatic, or something that mechanically works the same way), but you don't need to be a slave of this bad habit forever.
