I Want to Create My Own Internal Wick Guide for the Exact Waxes, Jars and Fragrance Oils My Business Uses — How Should I Build It from Controlled Burn-Test Data?

What an internal wick guide is, and is not

Your raw burn records answer "what happened in test T26-041?". The guide answers the question a person at the pouring bench actually asks: "which wick goes in this jar with this oil?". It is the published, short form of your evidence, and it is only as good as the rules that stop anything else creeping in. How to store the raw records it is written from is the burn-data organisation post; this page is about the guide built on top.

It is not a generic wick chart, and it should never look like one. A generic chart gives one wick per diameter. Your guide gives one build per diameter band and oil group, in one wax, at one load basis, and admits that some cells are empty. That honesty is what makes it trustworthy: a staff member who finds "open, test first" knows to stop, while one who finds a guessed entry pours a production run on it.

It is also not a specification for a finished product. Locking every element of a commercial candle (wax, oil, load, wick, jar, dye, temperatures, cure, burn performance) is the commercial specification post. The guide feeds that specification the wick line, with the evidence behind it.

The guide page, section by section

Keep it to one printed page per wax where you can. If it does not fit, the bands are too fine or the oil groups too many.

Oil groups are earned, not assumed. An oil joins a column through a screen on that group's build plus one full life, which is the admission routine in the behaviour-groups post. Until then it sits in a footnote as "provisional" and has no entry to borrow.

Anatomy of one entry

The diagram's bold cell, written out. It is the light-group entry for the 6.0–6.9 cm band in CSI 464, the band that CSI's 150 g jar falls into on our assumed 0.35 cm wall (6.3 cm inside from a 7 cm outside). Measure your own.

Why a tolerance narrower than the band? Because the evidence came from jars measuring 6.1–6.5 cm at the rim, not from every jar between 6.0 and 6.9 cm. Even inside the covered range the pool area moves: shrinking from 6.3 to 6.1 cm loses 6.2% of the surface, and growing to 6.5 cm adds 6.4%. A jar outside the tolerance is a new question, even in the same band.

Confidence levels: what the evidence must show

The thresholds are ours; choose your own if you prefer, but write them on the guide's first page and apply them the same way every time. The point of a mechanical scheme is that two people reading the same evidence rows assign the same letter. "How far down" counts as full life is the burn-depth acceptance post's question; this scheme simply requires it.

Rules for writing entries from controlled data only

Four more rules keep the document itself honest. Name wicks exactly, with supplier and product, and record the wick lot in the evidence. Write "approved for", never "recommended": the guide states what passed, not what might. Date every entry and give it a review date. Change the edition whenever an entry is added, downgraded, suspended or retired, and archive the old page so nobody pours from it.

Retest triggers: when an entry stops being true

A two-candle trigger screen in the worked-example system costs ₹477.99 in materials (₹239.00 a candle on C2 with Cinnamon Vanilla). That is the price of keeping an entry; it is small next to a production run poured on an entry that stopped being true.

Raising an entry from B to A, costed

In the worked example, the 6.0–6.9 cm heavy-group entry is at B: one full-life pass on Eco C2 with Dark Vanilla at 8% (the Dark Vanilla page states "candles (6-10%)" and "Vanillin present - note for light-coloured wax"). Level A needs at least three full-life passes from at least two oils. So pour two candles of a second admitted heavy oil, Cinnamon Vanilla, on the same build, and burn both to about 1 cm left.

Costs exclude labour, freight, packaging and GST. If both pass, the entry has three full-life passes from two oils and moves to A in the next edition. If either fails, the entry stays at B for Dark Vanilla only, Cinnamon Vanilla is logged as an exception for this cell, and the failure's direction decides its next bracket. One caution on loads: Cinnamon Vanilla's page allows "Up to 13%", but CSI 464's page caps the wax at 10%, and the lower ceiling governs, so a guide entry in this wax can never cite more than 15 g of oil in a 150 g candle. (If the 13% were read as a share of wax weight it would be 11.50% of total weight; it is moot here, because the wax's 10% is lower either way.)

Buying for the guide's approved builds

Four items, chosen on page statements, price and stock on 29 September 2026. CSI publishes no wick-performance data, so nothing here is ranked on burn results. A guide is written from evidence you already have; buy only what the next upgrade or trigger screen needs.

Frequently asked questions