Baby it’s cold outside, so take advantage of the frosty weather! After a big snow, I always put snow in my bong's ice catcher to really cool down the smoke, and turn a frown upside down on those days trapped inside. It makes any day a celebration and feels festive around the holidays!
To put snow in your bong, you’ll want to first put some water in to make sure your percolator fires. Then, simply drop loose snow in your bong through the mouth piece. Its best to avoid packing the snow down because this can restrict the airflow, making it impossible to hit, or even scratch the glass. The beauty of using snow to cool your smoke is the amount of surface area loosely packed snow has. Smoke is cooled by coming into contact with a cold surface. Loading loosely packed snow into your water pipe, the smoke will filter through small gaps in the snow making contact with the cold snow all the way through. This is a massive improvement over ice cubes, where the smoke only touches the outside of the ice cube. Using crushed ice is an improvement over ice cubes, but with snow the smoke will touch every snowflake on the way through making your smoke not just cool, but down right cold!
Cooling with snow is great for a water pipe, but I wouldn’t recommend trying this with dabbing. You may have noticed that your rig builds up more reclaim during the winter months. That’s because there is such a thing as cooling your concentrate vapor too much, and you can even cause a whole dab to condense if you get the vapor too cold. I have seen an entire dab freeze up in the middle of a freezable coil chamber, and not only is this a disappointing waste, but it is a pain to clean! Avoid this disappointment and be sure not to cool down your concentrate too much.
Also, this should only be done with pipes you won’t mind ending up scratched. Whenever you pick up some snow its likely there will be small particles in it that may scratch your glass. So, I never do this with my nicer pieces that I want to keep shining like the day I got them. Instead, I use one of my cheaper, every day pieces, or, if you have one, a silicone water pipe would be perfect for this! Whatever you use, be sure to rinse your water pipe well soon after to get rid of anything that might have been in the snow. Nobody wants to use a water pipe full of dirt and grime.
Snowed in? Then reach outside, pack your water pipe with snow, and curl up to celebrate the weather! A snow packed water pipe is sure to provide some fun when you’re trapped inside on those cold, dreary winter days!