I Need 1,000 Single-Wick Candles — Should I Buy Exactly 1,000 Wicks or Additional Pieces for Testing, Damaged Wicks and Production Loss?

Exactly 1,000 wicks is the one number that is certainly wrong

One wick per candle is true for the candles you sell. It is not true for the candles you make. A 1,000-candle order pours more than 1,000 candles, because some will be rejected — a tunnel, a crack, a sunken top, a wick that drifted off centre and could not be saved. And some wicks never make it into a candle at all: a tab bent in the box, a wick creased while centring, a sticker that let go and a wick that had to be pulled out and replaced. Each of those consumes a wick without producing a saleable candle. Buying exactly 1,000 guarantees you run short by roughly the number of things that go wrong.

So the wick line has three parts. The test wicks — a small quantity of each candidate, bought before anything else to decide which wick the order uses. The production wicks — one per candle poured, which is the order divided by (1 − reject rate). And the damaged-wick allowance — a small percentage of production for wicks lost in handling. In this example that is 1,000 ÷ 0.98 = 1,020.41 → 1,021 candles poured for production, plus 1% of those, 11 wicks, for damage: 1,032 production wicks. Exactly 1,000 would leave you 32 wicks short.

The wick ledger for 1,000 single-wick candles

The example candle is a 160 g candle in the 200 ml Salsa Glass Jar with Natural Soy Pearl Wax and Orchard Pear at 8% — 12.8 g of oil and 147.2 g of wax. The 200 ml is the jar's brim volume, not a fill weight, and CSI does not publish a fill for it: 160 g is illustrative, so weigh a test pour. Natural Soy Pearl has no published fragrance ceiling, so 8% is a labelled starting load for testing, not a specification. None of that changes the wick count, which depends only on candles.

Two lines say "not applied", and they matter as much as the ones that are. Pour loss is wax left in the jug and on the jar rim — it uses no wicks. Jar breakage, which the 2% breakage post sizes, happens to empty glass before a wick goes in. If you added those percentages to the wick line as well, you would be buying wicks for losses that never touch a wick. The total over-buy would be small in rupees, but it is the same habit that over-buys wax by kilos.

The striking thing about this table is how little the price moves: from no damage allowance to a generous 3%, the Thin C1 bill moves from ₹6,077.00 to ₹6,254.00. Eco wicks are priced at ₹5.90 each in every pack, so the cheapest cover is simply the combination with the smallest overshoot — which is why the zero-allowance row is a fiddly mix of ten packets that saves a few rupees over a 1,000-pack and two 20-packs. Opening fewer packets is worth more than that on a production day. Your damage rate is a reason to handle wicks carefully, not a reason to agonise over the wick order.

The test wicks: small packs, three candidates, four candles each

CSI does not publish wick sizes per jar diameter, so the wick for a 1,000-candle order is decided by burn tests, not by a chart. The cheapest way to run them is three candidates side by side in your actual jar, wax, oil and load: Eco Candle Wicks Thin C1, Eco Candle Wicks Thick C2 and Cotton Braided Wicks Ready Made. Four candles per candidate is a labelled working practice — three to burn in matched cycles, one to take to the end of the jar. That is 12 test candles in all, and they need their own wicks from small packs.

The Thin C1 10-pack is out of stock on the 4 October re-check, so the Thin C1 test comes from a 20-pack at ₹118.00. The spare wicks are useful: a test candle that is poured badly can be re-poured without reordering, and the leftovers of the losing candidates make the first candles of a full-life validation run if the winner later struggles. The 4 + 4 + 4 test candles also need wax, oil and jars, which are included in the shopping list below.

The production order for whichever wick wins

Because the wick is decided by test, the production line has three possible prices. Each is the cheapest in-stock combination covering 1,032 wicks. All three products are priced linearly — ₹5.90, ₹9.44 and ₹12.00 a wick at every pack size — so the 1,000-pack is not a discount, only fewer packets to open.

Wooden wicks are in the table for completeness: their largest listed pack is 100, so a 1,000-candle order needs 11 packets, and at ₹43,660.00 they cost about seven times the Thin C1 line. They are a different product, not a substitute; if you are considering them, test them as a fourth candidate. Whatever wins, the saleable-candle cost of the wick line is a small share of a candle that carries roughly ₹148.28 of CSI material in this example — the wick is about 4% of it with Thin C1.

The priced CSI shopping list

The full order, with Thin C1 as the example winner. The wax and oil cover all 1,033 candles poured — 1,021 for production and 12 for the wick test — plus a 4% pour-loss allowance (labelled). Jars cover the same 1,033 candles; add your own breakage figure with the breakage method. Stickers are one per wick across production and tests.

The wax line uses the ₹21,240.00 50 kg Natural Soy Pearl bag because Soy Pearl is the only CSI soy wax with a real bulk break — ₹424.80 a kilo from 5 kg against ₹450.00 at 1 kg. The 50 kg size is listed in limited stock, so confirm on WhatsApp before planning around it; without it, the cheapest cover is 15 × 10 kg + 1 × 5 kg + 4 × 1 kg at ₹67,644.00. The oil line is 13 × 1 kg + 1 × 500 g + 2 × 100 g + 1 × 50 g + 1 × 15 g because Orchard Pear's 1 kg and 500 g are both ₹3.74 a gram; if you would rather open fewer bottles, 14 × 1 kg costs ₹52,332.00. The Salsa jar comes with its golden lug cap, so lids are not a separate line for this jar.

What to buy this week, what to buy after the burn tests

Single-wick orders are the simplest case of the series' buy-now/buy-later rule. The wax, the oil (if the client has approved the fragrance), the jars and one sheet of stickers can be ordered now, because the test candles need them and every wick candidate uses the same ones. Only the production wick waits. If the client has not yet approved the fragrance, hold the kilos of oil as well — the new-fragrance post shows how to size that wait. If the winning wick later fails the full-life candle, the unvalidated-wick post lists what else to hold.

Where the other allowances live

Wicks are one line of the 1,000-candle sheet. The double-wick post doubles the production line and changes the damage arithmetic; the breakage post owns the jar allowance; the 20-day remake post sizes replacement candles; the buffer-logic post explains why consumables and glass need different rules; and the procurement sheet puts the wick line next to every other. If you have not chosen a wick at all, the sample-wick post sets the candidate count for a smaller first run.

Frequently asked questions