I Need to Produce 500 × 200 g Candles in One Day — What Wax-Melting Capacity Would I Need to Avoid Constant Small Batches?

What 500 × 200 g in one day actually means

Start with the weight, because everything else follows from it. Five hundred candles of 200 g contain 100 kg of scented wax. Fragrance load is a share of total candle weight, so at 8% the split is 92 kg of wax and 8 kg of fragrance oil. Allow 5% for losses in pitchers, spills and rejects and the day needs about 105.3 kg prepared (100 ÷ 0.95): roughly 96.8 kg of wax and 8.4 kg of oil.

A 10 kg scented batch fills 50 candles of 200 g, or 48 after the allowance. A 20 kg batch fills 100, or 95. Those are the building blocks. The question is how many of them you are willing to run in one working day, and how many melters you need running side by side so that those batches do not queue behind each other.

Melting capacity is tank size times cycles

The capacity you need is not a single tank figure. It is kilograms per cycle × cycles per day. A cycle is everything one tank does between batches: melting, coming down to the wax maker's stated fragrance-addition temperature, scenting and mixing, pouring the batch, and cleaning or changing over. You can only learn your cycle length by timing one. What follows uses the number of cycles as the thing you decide, so you can see what each setup asks of you.

Eleven cycles on a single 10 kg unit is exactly the constant small-batch day you are trying to avoid. Six cycles on one 20 kg unit is possible only if your cycle is short and you have a long day. Two 20 kg melters running three cycles each is the setup most workshops would reach for: three batches per tank is a pattern people can keep repeatable, and while one tank is pouring the other can be melting or cooling to addition temperature.

Note what the arithmetic does not settle. CSI's listing gives only one melt figure — approximately 30 minutes for 10 kg of soy wax at 100°C, for the 10 kg unit. No melt time is published for the 20 kg, and melting is only one part of a cycle. The wait while a large mass comes down to your addition temperature, and the time to pour 100 candles out of it, will usually be longer than the melt itself. Time a full cycle on one tank before buying the second or third.

Staggering two tanks

Two tanks work best when they are out of step. Start the second melt only once the first tank is being scented, so that one tank is always pouring while the other is melting or cooling. Run in step, both tanks reach pouring temperature together, the pouring table is swamped for an hour and then stands idle while both melt again. Staggered, the pourers see a steady supply and the scented wax in each tank spends less time waiting. Write the stagger into the day's plan — tank A cycle one, tank B cycle one, and so on — with the batch weights beside each, so nobody improvises it at the melter.

At 500 a day, pouring becomes the real limit

Once melting is solved with two or three tanks, the queue moves to the pouring table. Five hundred candles in an eight-hour day is about 63 candles an hour, one every minute or so, sustained from start to finish. With a Large 600 ml Steel Pouring Pitcher at ₹708.00, which carries around 540 g at roughly 0.9 g per ml, you get two 200 g candles per trip. That is about 250 pitcher trips in a day. One person will not do that well, and a tired pourer produces the uneven fill weights and splashes that turn into rejects.

This is the volume at which some makers start looking at heated pouring pots with taps or wax dispensing equipment. CSI does not sell either. If you shop for them elsewhere, look for a heated vessel whose temperature you can verify with your own thermometer, a tap or valve that can be cleaned completely between fragrances, and a capacity that suits one fragrance run rather than the whole day. Until then, more pitchers and more people are the reliable answer.

The honest alternative: do not do it in one day

Ask whether the order really needs 500 in a single day. The same 105.3 kg spread across two days is 52.6 kg a day: one 20 kg melter at three cycles a day covers it, for ₹25,960.00 rather than ₹51,920.00. Across three days it is about 35.1 kg a day, which a single 20 kg unit handles in two cycles. The candles are identical; the difference is equipment you will need to keep busy after this order ships.

If 500 a day is your normal rhythm, not an exception, two 20 kg melters are justified and will be used. If it is a one-off corporate order, one 20 kg unit and two production days is the lower-risk choice. It also halves the number of hot-wax trips each person makes per day, which matters for accuracy and for burns.

Getting ready for a 100 kg day

Keep the pouring route between tanks and jars short and clear. Twenty kilograms of hot wax, split across dozens of pitcher trips, is a serious burn risk when people are tired late in the day, so plan breaks into the schedule rather than pushing through the last batch.

After the day, compare what you prepared with what you poured. If far more than 5% went into pitcher residue, spills and rejects, raise the allowance for the next 100 kg day rather than running short in the final batch.

Where this page fits

CSI already has guides that cover parts of this question. This page takes the production-floor angle; these go deeper on the rest:

Three things to buy for this job

Frequently asked questions