I Used the Wrong Wick Size in an Entire Production Batch — How Do I Decide Whether Rewicking or Completely Remelting the Candles Will Waste Less Material?

What the two routes actually are

"Rewicking" implies the wax stays put and only the wick moves. In cured wax that is not available: the wick is bonded along its length, tabbed to the base, and any replacement dropped into the void left behind sits unseated in disturbed wax with no predictable burn. So at production scale there are exactly two real methods, and both of them melt wax. They differ in where the wax goes while the jar is being rewicked, and everything else follows from that.

Read the "transfers per candle" row against the "what drives the labour" row and the shape of the answer is already visible. Route A minimises the thing that is cheap and maximises the thing that is expensive. Wax is cheap per candle — ₹99.19 of it in each of these candles — and your hours are not. But do not take that on faith; the next two sections put numbers on it so you can substitute your own.

The exchange rate: minutes against percentage points

Every argument about this question stalls because the two sides are measured in different units — one in grams of wax, the other in hours of your Saturday. Convert both to rupees per candle and the argument ends. Here are the two conversions for this batch, and they are the only two you need.

That single ratio is the whole decision. If Route A saves you fewer percentage points of wax than 2.5 times the extra minutes it costs, Route B wins. Put the other way round: for pour-off to be worth an extra minute and a half per candle, it would have to lose 3.8 percentage points less wax than the bulk route — Route B at 6.8% against Route A at 3%. That is a big gap, and nothing about a bulk remelt suggests it should be that much worse, because the extra surfaces in the chain are a pot and a jug shared across 250 candles, not per candle.

The 250-candle comparison, costed

Here is the whole thing on one page, with the batch's material value at the top so the scale of the correction is visible against it. The illustration assumes Route A at 4 minutes and 3% loss and Route B at 2.5 minutes and 5% loss. Those four figures are assumptions, not measurements — the point of the table is the structure, and the next section shows you how to replace them with your own.

Two things are worth pulling out. First, the correction costs under 10% of the batch's material value on either route — ₹5,418.96 and ₹4,977.43 against ₹55,678.80. A wrong wick in a production batch is not a catastrophe; it is a bad week. Second, the routes are only ₹441.53 apart, which is ₹1.77 a candle. That is close enough that the tie-breaker should not be money at all, and the section below says what it should be instead.

Measuring your own loss on ten candles

Every number in the table above that matters is one you have to produce yourself. Here is how to produce them in about an hour, using ten candles out of the 250 — which is 4% of the batch and buys you a decision you can defend.

What the repour needs

Four purchases, one of which is an instrument rather than a consumable. Notice what is not on the list: fresh wax and fresh glass, because both are already in the batch.

The tie-breaker nobody costs

When two routes land within a couple of rupees of each other, the money has stopped being informative and something else has to decide. In this case that something is unusually concrete: one route produces a number and the other does not. At the end of a bulk remelt you know the recovered weight, so you know the candle count, so you can price the batch, plan the labels, tell the customer how many units are coming and write a batch sheet with real figures on it. At the end of a candle-by-candle pour-off you know that you touched 250 candles.

And whichever route you choose, one obligation is identical: the repoured batch has a different wick and a reset cure, so it is an untested batch until you have burned samples from it. Keep six jars back — three on the wick you chose, three on the next size — cure them for fourteen days with the rest, and burn them on the same day in the same room. The wax page states a cure of a minimum 48 hours and ideally one to two weeks before burn testing; at 250 units, take the two weeks. The method is in how to test hot throw before launching a candle fragrance, and the case for the full cure in why your candle needs a 14-day cure.

The batch-sheet line that ends this

One line, written before the first jar is wicked: "wick: Eco Candle Wicks, Thin (C1) · qualified in this jar on date · pool reached the glass in 2 h 40 at day 14". A wick that has a qualification date against a specific jar cannot be swapped for a different one by accident, because the sheet does not say "the usual wick" — it names a variant and a test.

Then two storage habits that cost nothing. Keep C1 and C2 in separate labelled containers, because they look similar and this is how most wrong-wick batches actually begin. And when a wick page states no diameter — which is most of them, including the Eco Candle Wicks page — record "not stated" rather than leaving the field blank, so that six months later you know the choice was tested rather than looked up.

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