I'm Comparing Cotton and Wooden Wicks in the Same Jar — What Burn-Test Measurements Should I Record to Choose Between Them Objectively?
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Why assign weights before burning? Because a nine-row judgement with no written weights always resolves in favour of the wick you already liked. Give each row a share of 100 during the cure, write a tie-break row, and compute a total out of five for each wick at the end.
What does the cost row say? Eco Candle Wicks Thick (C2) is ₹9.44 a piece and Performance Wooden Wicks are ₹59.00 from the ten-pack, so the same candle is ₹282.98 or ₹332.54 in CSI materials — a gap of ₹49.56, or 17.51%.
What does the whole comparison cost to set up? The order is ₹6,277.40, but the two candles consume only ₹615.53 of it. The remaining ₹5,661.87 — 90.19% — stays as usable stock: eighteen wicks, most of a kilogram of wax, most of the fragrance and eight jars.
Why a scorecard, and why the weights go in first
A cotton wick and a wooden wick in the same jar produce two very different experiences, and almost none of the difference is a single number. One lights faster, one is quieter or louder, one leaves a different mark on the glass, one looks better in a photograph, one costs more. Put the two candles on a table a fortnight apart and ask which is better and you will get an answer, and the answer will be whichever one you were hoping for. That is not dishonesty; it is what happens when a judgement has nine inputs and no written weights.
So the output of this page is a sheet, not an opinion. Nine rows you record for each candle, a weight you assign to each row before the first light, and a total you compute at the end. The weights are the whole trick. Decided in advance, they are a statement about what your product needs — a gifting candle might weight appearance heavily, a repeat-purchase candle might weight throw heavily, a hospitality order might weight residue heavily. Decided afterwards, they are a way of arranging the evidence to agree with you. A scorecard whose weights were set after the burn has no more authority than a shrug.
The second thing this page refuses to do is hand you thresholds. CSI publishes no burn times, melt-pool diameters or depths, flame heights, consumption rates or soot measurements — not for Eco Candle Wicks, not for Performance Wooden Wicks, not for any combination of our wax and fragrance. None exists in our data and we have not burned these candles. So every figure on the sheet below is blank, and every acceptance threshold is one you write. That is a weaker page to read and a far stronger one to use, because a borrowed threshold from a blog that measured a different wax in a different room is a number you cannot act on anyway.
One row is an exception, and it is the only one we can fill for you. Row nine is cost, and on the candle costed here it is ₹9.44 of wick against ₹59.00 — a candle of ₹282.98 against ₹332.54 in CSI materials. That is a real published difference of ₹49.56, or 17.51%, and it belongs on the sheet with a weight like everything else rather than as a trump card at the end.
The nine rows, and what each one actually discriminates
Record all nine for both candles, in the same session, in the same room. The third column is the point of the row — the reason it separates a cotton wick from a wooden one rather than just filling the sheet. Where a row is prone to a confound, the confound is named, because a measurement you cannot attribute is worse than no measurement at all.
| Row | What you write down | What it is really telling you |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Ignition | Number of attempts needed to get a self-sustaining flame, and the time from the last touch of the lighter to a flame that holds on its own. Record it for the first light of every session, not just the first light of the candle. | Wooden wicks are lit along an edge rather than at a point, so ignition is a genuinely different action. This row is where a maker finds out whether the customer will struggle — and the customer only has one go at forming an opinion. |
| 2. Relights and go-outs | A count, per session: how many times the flame went out on its own and had to be relit. Note the point in the session when it happened. | The single most useful reliability row, and the cheapest to record. A candle that needs relighting is a complaint whatever else it does well. |
| 3. Pool reach | At the end of each session, the gap between the edge of the melted wax and the glass, measured at four fixed points you mark on the base — front, back, left, right. Write four numbers, not one. | Four numbers catch an off-centre pool that a single number hides. This is also the row most sensitive to the wick being seated off centre, so it tests your pouring as much as the wick. |
| 4. Pool depth | Depth at the centre at the end of the session, taken with a thin wooden skewer dipped and held against a ruler. Same session length every time. | Reach and depth move against each other: a pool that is deep but narrow and one that is wide but shallow are two different failures. Recording only reach lets a deep, narrow pool look like a near miss. |
| 5. Flame behaviour | A rating of 1 to 5 against a scale you write down before you start — what a 5 looks like, what a 1 looks like, in your own words. Plus free text: flicker, dancing, smoking, guttering, and whether the flame changed over the session. | The row most likely to be argued about later, which is exactly why the scale is written in advance. A wooden wick flame is a different shape from a cotton one, so your 5 has to describe behaviour rather than appearance. |
| 6. Carbon, ash and mushrooming | Whether a carbon ball or ash build-up formed, its size relative to the width of the wick, and whether you had to extinguish and trim mid-session to continue. Count the mid-session trims. | Cotton and wooden wicks shed carbon in different ways, so judge by how much intervention the candle needed rather than by appearance alone. Mid-session trims are the honest measure: a candle the customer has to maintain is a candle they will describe as faulty. |
| 7. Residue | Soot on the glass wall and on the inside of the lid, clouding of the glass, and hang-up wax left clinging after the session. Photograph the jar against a plain background at a fixed distance. | Residue is what a customer notices on day three, not day one. It is also a row the photograph settles better than a rating, because your memory of yesterday's soot is unreliable. |
| 8. Throw | Cold throw before lighting and hot throw at a fixed distance and a fixed time into the session — say, standing at the door of the same room. Rate against an anchor you define, not against each other. | The row most likely to be confounded. Throw is driven by load, oil, wax and cure as much as by the wick, so it is only readable here because every one of those is held identical between the two candles. |
| 9. Cost and handling | Wick cost per candle — ₹9.44 for Thick (C2), ₹59.00 for a wooden wick from the ten-pack — plus the time taken to seat and centre the wick, and any wick wasted in the process. | The only row with a published figure. Handling time is yours: a wick that takes longer to seat costs you on every candle for as long as you make it, and CSI does not sell or price your labour. |
Four control rows sit above those nine and are not scored, because they must be identical on both candles: wax grade and pack, fragrance and the exact lot, load as a percentage of wax weight, fill weight, vessel, cure age at first light, room and session length. Write them once at the top of the sheet. If any one of them differs between the two candles, the nine rows below are describing something other than the wick, and no amount of weighting will fix it afterwards.
Assigning the weights before you light anything
Give each of the nine rows a share of 100. Do it during the cure, when you have nothing to see and no result to protect. There is no correct set and we will not give you one — the correct set is the one that describes what your candle is for, and a gifting candle, a repeat-purchase candle and a hospitality order genuinely want different numbers. What follows is an example of the format, not a recommendation of the values, and the figures in it are illustrative only.
| Row | Illustrative weight | Cotton score 1–5 | Wooden score 1–5 | Weighted cotton | Weighted wooden |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Ignition | 10% | ||||
| 2. Relights and go-outs | 20% | ||||
| 3. Pool reach | 15% | ||||
| 4. Pool depth | 10% | ||||
| 5. Flame behaviour | 10% | ||||
| 6. Carbon, ash and mushrooming | 10% | ||||
| 7. Residue | 10% | ||||
| 8. Throw | 10% | ||||
| 9. Cost and handling | 5% | ||||
| Total | 100% | out of 5 | out of 5 |
The arithmetic is the ordinary one: multiply each score by its weight, add the column, and you have a number out of five for each wick. The reason to bother with weights rather than a straight average is that a straight average treats a relight and a slightly shallow pool as the same event, and they are not. The reason to bother with a total at all is that it forces you to notice when the wick you prefer lost — which is the only situation in which any of this was worth doing.
Write a tie-break rule in the same sitting, because totals do come out close. A good tie-break is a single row nominated in advance as the one that decides: for most makers selling by post that is row two, relights, because it is the row a customer turns into a message. Write which row it is, and write what you will do if the wick you like loses on it. Both sentences take a minute to write now and are impossible to write honestly later.
Pouring two candles that differ in one thing only
The run costed here is two candles in the same vessel: Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468 at ₹650.00 a kilogram, Sacred Sandal Ember Fragrance Oil at ₹8.00 a gram, and the Clear Glass Jar with Golden Lid at ₹94.40 a jar from the ten-jar pack. The jar's page publishes a 150 g fill capacity, an 8 cm height and a hot-pour safe limit of 85°C, so this page reads the 150 g as the total fill rather than as the wax weight — which gives 138.89 g of wax and 11.11 g of oil at 8% of wax weight, for 150 g poured. That is the fill reading carried through every figure on this page, and it is deliberately the conservative reading: taking 150 g as the wax weight instead would mean pouring 162 g into a jar whose page gives 150 g. State which reading you used on the sheet, because the next person to repeat this test will otherwise get different numbers and blame the wick.
Row nine, priced — and what the comparison really consumes
Here is row nine filled in properly, because it is the one row where a published figure exists. On the fill reading above — 138.89 g of wax and 11.11 g of oil, 150 g poured — the two candles come to ₹282.98 with a Thick (C2) wick and ₹332.54 with a wooden one. The wick is 3.34% of the cotton candle and 17.74% of the wooden one. The pair costs ₹615.53 in materials.
| Line | Thick (C2) | Wooden wick |
|---|---|---|
| Wax — 138.89 g Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468 | ₹90.28 | ₹90.28 |
| Fragrance — 11.11 g Sacred Sandal Ember Fragrance Oil at 8% of wax weight | ₹88.87 | ₹88.87 |
| Vessel — one Clear Glass Jar with Golden Lid | ₹94.40 | ₹94.40 |
| Wick | ₹9.44 | ₹59.00 |
| One candle, materials from CSI | ₹282.98 | ₹332.54 |
| Wick as a share of the candle | 3.34% | 17.74% |
| The pair, both candles together | ₹615.53 | — |
Now the number that stops people running this comparison at all. The order comes to ₹6,277.40, and read as a cost that is enough to make anyone decide the question is not worth answering. But the two candles consume ₹615.53 of it. The other ₹5,661.87 — 90.19% of the order — is stock you still own the next morning: ₹615.96 of wicks, the rest of the kilogram of wax, the rest of the fragrance and eight more jars. The 1 kg wax pack makes about 7.20 candles at this fill and the 500 g fragrance pack covers about 45.00, so the test is not the purchase; the test is a thin slice off the top of a normal production order.
The wick lines make the point on their own. Buying one Thick (C2) ten-pack and one wooden ten-pack costs ₹684.40 and the two candles use ₹68.44 of it. The remaining ₹615.96, which is 90.00% of the wick spend, is eighteen usable wicks sitting in a drawer — and Eco Candle Wicks are flat at ₹9.44 a piece from the ten-pack to the thousand-pack, so none of that cotton stock cost you anything in unit price.
A note on the fragrance pack, since it is the biggest line on the order and the one with the least room to manoeuvre. Sacred Sandal Ember Fragrance Oil publishes three pack sizes whose rates run ₹7.99, ₹8.00 and ₹7.00 per gram, and at the time of writing only the 500 g pack is available to buy — the smallest and largest packs are out of stock. For a two-candle comparison needing 22.22 g that is a large commitment to one scent, so if you would rather not make it, ask us on WhatsApp before you order, or run the comparison on a fragrance you already stock. The sheet does not care which oil you use, as long as both candles use the same one from the same lot.
Recording discipline: when to write and what to photograph
A scorecard fails at the bench far more often than it fails in the design. Nine rows times two candles times however many sessions you run is a lot of writing, and every shortcut you take is a row that quietly becomes an impression. So decide the mechanics now, while it is still a plan, rather than at nine in the evening with two hot jars in front of you.
Write before you move the jars. The moment the candles are picked up, rows three, four, six and seven start changing — the pool skins over, the carbon ball drops, the hang-up resettles. Record the physical rows with the candles standing where they burned, immediately after extinguishing, and record the rest afterwards. If you can only do one thing properly, do this one.
Photograph four of the nine. Pool reach, pool depth, carbon and residue all survive as pictures and none of them survives as a memory. Set up one fixed position — same distance, same angle, same background, same light — and take the same four shots at the end of every session for both candles. The point of the fixed position is not photography, it is comparability: two pictures taken from different distances cannot be compared, and you will not remember that in a fortnight. Shoot the jar from directly above for reach, from the side for hang-up and wall residue, and into the lid for lid soot.
Number the sessions, do not date them. Write session 1, 2, 3 on the sheet, with the date beside it, and keep the numbering parallel on both candles — session 3 on the cotton candle must be session 3 on the wooden one. Comparing session 2 of one against session 4 of the other is the second most common way this test goes wrong, after burning on different days. A wick behaves differently at the top of the jar from the way it behaves two thirds of the way down, which is also the reason to keep going to the bottom of both jars rather than stopping when you think you know.
And keep the sheet on paper or in one file, not in your head and three places. A sheet with the control rows at the top, nine rows in the middle, and a session column added each time is a document you can hand to someone else. For a maker selling under a brand, that document is also the thing that lets you answer a customer question about why the candle behaves as it does — our live note on keeping consistency between large soy batches is the production version of the same habit.
Indian rooms: ceiling fans, heat and the rows they move
Every burn-test protocol written abroad assumes a still room. Most Indian homes and workshops have a ceiling fan running for eight months of the year, and a ceiling fan is not a draught at the edge of the room — it is a column of moving air directly above the candle. It changes flame height and flicker, it pushes the pool to one side, it increases soot, and it does all of that differently to a wooden wick than to a cotton one because the two have different flame shapes. If the fan is on for one candle and off for the other, your sheet is a record of the fan.
So fix it as a control row and write it down: fan off for both candles, or fan at the same setting for both, for every session. If you cannot turn it off — and in May in Nagpur or Ahmedabad you may genuinely not be able to — then run both candles under the same fan at the same speed, note the speed on the sheet, and accept that the result applies to a room with a fan in it. That is not a flaw if your customers burn candles in rooms with fans, which most of them do. It is only a flaw if you pretend the fan was not there.
Room temperature deserves the same treatment. A candle that starts a session at 38°C of ambient heat begins with wax that is already soft, and rows three and four will read differently from the same candle in January. Write the temperature at the start of every session next to the session number. The Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468 page publishes a melting point of 50–53°C, so a 40°C room is not melting your candle on the shelf, but it is a materially different starting point and it is the kind of thing that makes a result from April disagree with a result from December for reasons that have nothing to do with the wick.
Monsoon humidity belongs in the control rows too, especially in Mumbai, Kochi and Kolkata. It is less likely than heat or moving air to change the burn itself, but it will affect how a wick that has been sitting in a drawer behaves, and it is the kind of variable that is free to record and expensive to reconstruct. One line per session: date, session number, room temperature, fan setting, windows open or shut. Five seconds of writing that makes the whole sheet portable to the next test you run.
Finally, the calendar. If this comparison is feeding a festive decision, work backwards from the date rather than forwards from today. Diwali 2026 falls on 8 November 2026, and with a cure of 14 to 21 days plus transit to your own customer, a festive pour wants to be finished by about mid-October. A nine-row comparison run properly — pour, cure, several sessions to the bottom of both jars — is weeks, not days, so a comparison that starts inside the festive window will not finish in time to inform it. Run the sheet in a quiet month and let the festive run use a configuration that already has a filled-in sheet behind it.
What the scorecard cannot tell you
The sheet is honest about nine things and silent about four, and knowing which is which keeps you from over-reading a result you worked hard for.
It cannot tell you about variation. One candle of each kind gives you one observation of each kind. If the wooden candle performs beautifully, you know that this wooden wick, in this jar, on this day, did well — not that the next nine will. Consistency across repeats is a different question with a different design, and a two-candle sheet that comes out close is a reason to repeat rather than a reason to decide.
It cannot separate the wick from the vessel. Every row from three to seven is partly a property of the glass: its internal diameter, its wall thickness, whether it tapers. The Clear Glass Jar with Golden Lid page publishes a 150 g fill capacity and an 8 cm height, and like almost every vessel page it publishes no internal diameter — so the result you get is for this jar, and a 7 cm jar or a 10 cm one may rank the two wicks differently. Our live note on jar dimensions varying between batches is worth reading before you generalise a result across a vessel range.
It cannot settle throw on its own. Row eight is the most confounded row on the sheet. Hot throw is driven by fragrance load, oil choice, wax grade and cure age at least as much as by the wick, and the only reason it is readable here is that all four are held identical between the two candles. The moment you compare a wooden candle poured in March against a cotton candle poured in January, row eight is measuring the cure and the weather.
And it cannot tell you what to do if the wooden wick loses. That is worth knowing before you start, because the options are narrower than they would be with cotton: Performance Wooden Wicks come in one width, so there is no wider or thinner wooden wick in CSI's range to retest with. What you have instead is trim length, fragrance load, wax grade, and going back to a cotton family. If the wooden candle fails on rows one, two or four, those are the levers — not a different wooden gauge, because CSI does not stock one.
On safety, the advice stays general and conservative for both candles and we will not certify either configuration: trim before every light, keep sessions to the length you have written on your own care card, never leave a burning candle unattended, keep both jars away from draughts and anything that can catch, and stop using any configuration that makes the vessel hot rather than warm to the touch. Nothing on this sheet is a safety clearance, and a good score on nine rows is not one either.
CANDLEMAKINGSUPPLIESINDIA supplies raw materials, not finished candles, and sells both wicks on this page. That is why the page scores them on a sheet we cannot fill in: there is no row here where we tell you which wick won, no borrowed threshold, and an explicit warning that the ₹59.00 ten-pack rate is the dearest on the wooden ladder and will mark the wooden wick down unfairly if you score row nine against a production decision. It also says plainly that the order total of ₹6,277.40 is not the cost of the test — the two candles consume ₹615.53 and 90.19% of the order stays on your shelf — and that the fragrance pack sizes with the lower per-gram rates are currently unavailable.
Every price comes from live CSI stock, September 2026 pricing, taxes included; the linked product pages are authoritative if anything changes. Published fragrance ceilings are the manufacturer's stated formulation maximums printed on each page, as a percentage of wax weight — Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468 states up to 13% and the Sacred Sandal Ember Fragrance Oil page gives 8–10% in soy wax, so the lower figure of 10% governs here. The fill reading used throughout is 150 g of total fill at 8% of wax weight, which is 138.89 g of wax plus 11.11 g of oil; the vessel is priced per piece from its published 150 g fill capacity, 8 cm height and 85°C hot-pour limit, and it publishes no internal diameter. CSI publishes no burn times, melt-pool diameters or depths, flame heights, consumption rates or soot measurements for any wick, none exists in our figures, and none is quoted or implied here — the sheet is a method, not results. The illustrative weighting is an example of the format only and the values in it are not a recommendation. The wooden wick page's descriptions of crackle, clean burning and long burning are that page's claims, attributed as such.
Message WhatsApp +91 7397976926 for bulk pricing beyond the published pack sizes, GST invoicing, MSDS and IFRA documentation, a delivery quote to your pincode, or help putting together a smaller quantity of fragrance for a two-candle comparison.
Frequently asked questions
- Why Every New Wax × Wick × Fragrance Combination Needs Burn Testing
- How to Compare Two Fragrance Oils Using a Controlled Burn Test
- Cotton Wick vs Wooden Wick - Which Should a Beginner Choose?
- Best Performance Wooden Wicks for Candle Making in India: CSI Imported Wood Wicks
- Candle Flame Troubleshooting — How to Tell If Your Wick Is Too Small or Too Large
- Best Wick for Candle Making: Complete Guide by Diameter
- I'm Comparing Two Fragrance Oils — Should I Burn-Test Them at Exactly the Same Cure Age to Make the Comparison Fair?
- My Glass Jars Are Cheap but Their Dimensions Vary Slightly Between Batches — How Can That Affect Wick Testing and Production Consistency?
- Soy Wax vs Coconut Soy: Which Gives Better Throw?
- What is Cold Throw in Candles?
Customer reviews: The six reviews at the top of this page are genuine, published Judge.me reviews left by CSI customers on their product pages. Names, star ratings, dates and products are as recorded by Judge.me. Wording is unedited. Two are below five stars and one is not recorded as a verified purchase — shown as recorded. Not recorded by Judge.me as a verified purchase, so shown without a verified-buyer badge: Ashwini. No location is shown against any review because Judge.me does not store one.
Figures verified September 2026 (CSI live pricing). Wick prices, taxes included: Eco Candle Wicks Thick (C2) ₹9.44 a piece at every pack size, the 10-piece pack ₹94.40; Performance Wooden Wicks ₹59.00 a piece at 10 (₹590.00 a pack, ten wicks and tabs), ₹47.20 at 50 and ₹41.30 at 100, with the 25% and 30% pack savings stated on the page. Fill reading used throughout: 150 g of total fill at 8% of wax weight = 138.89 g of wax plus 11.11 g of oil. Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468 1 kg ₹650.00 (₹650.00 per kg, so ₹90.28 per 138.89 g); Sacred Sandal Ember Fragrance Oil 500 g ₹3,999.00 (₹8.00 per gram, so ₹88.87 per 11.11 g), with the published pack rates running ₹7.99, ₹8.00 and ₹7.00 per gram and only the 500 g pack available to buy at the time of writing; Clear Glass Jar with Golden Lid (150 gram) Pack of 10 ₹944.00 (₹94.40 a jar) — priced per piece, with its published 150 g fill capacity, 8 cm height and hot-pour safe limit of 85°C, and no internal diameter published. Candle totals in CSI materials: ₹282.98 with Thick (C2) and ₹332.54 with a wooden wick from the ten-pack, a difference of ₹49.56 or 17.51%; the wick is 3.34% of the cotton candle and 17.74% of the wooden one; the pair is ₹615.53. The comparison order totals ₹6,277.40, of which the two candles consume ₹615.53 and ₹5,661.87 (90.19%) stays as stock; the two wick packs alone are ₹684.40, of which ₹68.44 is consumed and ₹615.96 (90.00%) remains. The 1 kg wax pack makes about 7.20 candles at this fill and the 500 g fragrance pack covers about 45.00. The weighting table is illustrative — an example of the format, not a recommendation, with every score cell deliberately blank. Specs from product pages: Performance Wooden Wicks come in one width, 10 wicks and tabs per pack, with crackling sound, clean burning, long burning and natural appearance given as page claims; Eco Candle Wicks are cotton and paper fibres for natural waxes, with no diameter published. Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468 publishes a melting point of 50–53°C, a pour temperature of 58–60°C and fragrance up to 13% of total wax weight; Sacred Sandal Ember publishes 8–10% in soy wax, a cure of 48–72 hours minimum, IFRA certification, and that its amber and resin content may cause golden or warm toning in white or light-coloured wax. Where two published ceilings apply the lower governs, which here is 10%. CSI publishes no burn times, melt-pool diameters or depths, flame heights, consumption rates, soot measurements or failure rates for any wick, and none exists in our figures. Prices and availability change — the linked product pages are always authoritative.