Now and then, companies send us medical marijuana-related products ranging from vaporizers to board games to books. We showcase them in our quasi-regular product review section, Stoner MacGyver.

The latest? Cloud essential oil personal vaporizers.

What is it, dude? The Cloud. It's a small personal vaporizer that you can use with "essential oils" (hash oil and solventless wax). How much coin will it run me? $75 or so, depending on where you pick it up. Where can I get one? Gotvape.com, CloudVaporPen.com and a handful of dispensaries around Colorado.

This week at Stoner MacGyver, we're taking a look at one of the hotter personal vapes out there right now, The Cloud. I've seen a lot of people hyping this thing on Facebook as the answer to portable hash oil vaporizing and have been curious for weeks as to how well it really works.

The folks over at GotVape.com sent this unit for review, assuring us that it was Stoner MacGyver worthy and we would quickly become Cloud converts. They were right: We haven't been apart from our Cloud since we got it.

Other vapes we've reviewed are based on the same platform, but they use pre-loaded and self-heating cartridges to do all of the work. You never actually see what is being heated. The Cloud does away with all of that. There are no cartridges to buy and replace (or fill up on your own with a CO2 oil syringe). Instead, the Cloud allows users to put their concentrate of choice directly on the exposed heating element.

For this week's Completely Unscientific test, we packed up the Cloud with a variety of waxes and hashes to see how well the tiny, four-inch device performed.

Using the Cloud is simple and straight-forward. You pull off the mouthpiece, throw a Tic-Tac sized chunk of wax on top of the heating element, put the tightly fitted cap back on and push the button for up to fifteen seconds of straight oil vapor.

Shatter oil works, too (although I found it was best to heat up the pipe just a little before loading it to help the shatter melt down into position), and so does bubble hash, but nowhere near as well. The plant in even the most waxy solventless icewater hash can start to gunk thinks up quickly.

Unlike the glycerin-based vaporizers that I've tried, which deliver a paltry dosing, the Cloud puts out a satisfyingly strong hit of cannabis oil every time. You can get a good ten to fifteen small hits out of filling the thing to the brim with wax if you go easy on it, or you can really let the thing rip for fifteen seconds and pretty much take a skillet-sized, eye-popping dab all at once. Of course, the chamber-less design of the Cloud does mean you're also carrying around a jar of wax with you. That's okay though, since most of you oil heads are doing that anyway.

Continue for more of Stoner Mac's Cloud review. Another bonus is the size. It's thinner than a Bic lighter, shorter than an Iphone is long, and is easily concealable for those of you who have the need to medicate in stealth mode. The cloud also comes in a veritable rainbow of colors, including bright pink and chrome. Charging is easy with the included wall charger, which also connects to a USB port.

The Cloud is not without it's flaws, however. For starters, the heating element is essentially a little nichrome (nickel/chrome/iron alloy) coil that gets red hot really quickly. Initially, it can smell like burning wire, but after a few dabs run through the thing, the flavor mellowed out. Still, a ceramic element of some kind would be much better choice. Also, the combination of having the heating element just an inch from the mouthpiece, as well as the small size of the expansion chamber, also means you're getting a pretty hot hit of vapor to the lungs. If you're only used to smoking oil out of a bubbler, you'll notice that right away.

The other drawback is literally a draw back: Puffing on the thing is not as free-flowing as puffing on other vapes, like a Volcano bag or a Silver Surfer wand. Comparatively, toking on the Cloud is like pulling on a tightly-rolled joint. But the flip side is that you don't need a lot of hits -- and neither must you take huge hits, as with glycerine-based vaporizers. The trade-off is that the hits you blow don't have the ambiguous scent associated with glycerin vapes, and anyone around you is going to know what you're puffing on.

But those problems are minimal in the overall scheme of things, and the Cloud's functionality makes it far and above the best oil-specific vaporizer I've tried to date. For $75, it's a worthwhile investment for those of you chained to your blowtorch and oil bubblers at home wanting a more portable alternative.

We can't guarantee all products sent in will be reviewed here at Stoner MacGyver, but if you've got something you think is the greatest invention since sliced pot-bread, send us an e-mail at marijuana@westword.com.