I'm Making 10 Kg of Scented Candles at 8% Fragrance Load — How Do I Calculate the Exact Wax and Fragrance Quantities Without Accidentally Making a 10.8 Kg Batch?

The 10 kg split

The CSI convention is that load is a share of the finished candle. For any batch: oil = W × L, wax = W − oil. At 10 kg and 8% that is 800 g of oil and 9,200 g of wax. Divided into 200 g candles, it is fifty candles of 16 g oil and 184 g wax. The same recipe at 1 kg is 80 g + 920 g, and at one jar 16 g + 184 g. Because every scale uses the same formula, the candle you tested at 1 kg is the candle you pour at 10 kg.

Every row makes fifty candles, because the finished weight is fixed. What changes is how the 10 kg divides between wax and oil. At 10%, the batch sits on CSI 464's stated maximum; Luxury Soy Wax Chunks are rated up to 13% if your tested recipe runs higher. Those are the wax makers' stated formulation maximums, not targets — My Soy Wax Supplier Says the Wax Can Hold 12% Fragrance Oil — Does That Mean I Should Actually Use 12% for the Strongest Hot Throw? explains why.

How the 10.8 kg batch happens

The mistake is not bad arithmetic. It is arithmetic on the wrong number. Wax arrives in round bags — CSI 464 comes in 500 g, 1 kg, 5 kg and 10 kg — and the bag feels like the batch. So a maker planning “10 kg at 8%” opens the 10 kg bag, multiplies by 0.08 and gets 800 g of oil. Every step is correct except the first.

There is a legitimate version of “use the whole bag”. If you want every gram of the 10 kg, calculate a true 8% on the fixed wax — oil = wax × L ÷ (1 − L) — which is 869.57 g, and plan for 10,869.57 g of candle. That is 54.35 candles: buy jars and wicks for 54 and use the spare for QC and retained samples. What you must not do is weigh 800 g against a full bag and call it 8%.

Splitting 10 kg into equal melts

Most small workshops melt in jugs or small melters and pour in rounds. The safe way to do that is to make each melt a complete, identical copy of the recipe, not to divide the wax into jugs and then share the oil out by eye. How big a melt your equipment handles is your figure — CSI does not publish melter throughput — so the table shows three common sizes as examples.

The 2,500 g split is the one in the diagram: four melts of 200 g oil + 2,300 g wax. It divides the batch evenly, but 2,500 ÷ 200 is 12.5 candles, so every second melt finishes a jar the previous one started — fine if the melts are identical, awkward if they are not. The 2,000 g split gives exactly ten candles per melt and is the easiest to track. Pick the size your jug or melter handles comfortably, and weigh the oil into each melt separately against the scale.

CSI's own guidance for CSI 464 is a melt/pour range of 80–90°C — confirm on the product page. For when to add oil and how long to stir, follow the wax maker's instructions; any stirring time you settle on is a working practice that depends on the melt size. I'm Making 10 Kg of Scented Wax at Once — How Do I Ensure Fragrance Oil Is Distributed Uniformly Throughout the Entire Batch? covers how to keep fragrance evenly distributed through a large batch, and My First Candles from a Production Batch Smell Weaker than the Last Ones — Could the Fragrance Oil be Settling or Mixing Unevenly? covers the case where the first candles smell different from the last.

Buying for the batch

With a 5% allowance — a working assumption for pour loss and test burns — the batch needs 840 g of oil and 9,660 g of wax. CSI 464's 10 kg bag covers the wax with 340 g to spare. For the oil, Jasmine is one of the oils where buying bigger does save money per gram, but the options below are close enough to be worth checking.

Two 500 g bottles cost ₹1.00 less than one kilo for the same 1,000 g — a rounding difference, not a discount. Nine 100 g bottles are cheaper in rupees but give only 100 g of spare, and at ₹4.30 a gram they are dearer per gram. The kilo at ₹3.92 a gram is the tidy choice for this batch. Across the catalogue, per-gram price breaks above 100 g are rare: 52 of 91 oils cost within 1% per gram at 1 kg and 100 g. Jasmine is one of the 24 that save 5% or more (8.8%).

The priced production list

Material cost per candle is ₹232.83: ₹62.77 of Jasmine, ₹93.36 of CSI 464, ₹5.90 for the wick and ₹70.80 for the jar. Fifty candles use ₹11,641.48 of that list; the rest is spare stock. Labour, packaging, freight and GST are not included. The Eco Thin C1 wick is an example — burn-test it in your jar before the full pour, and keep the spare ten for that test.

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