My Candle Flame Is Very Tall but the Melt Pool Still Does Not Reach the Edge — Could the Wick Type Be Wrong Rather than Simply Too Small?

Before any order: the free causes of a tall flame

The worked example: three 200 g candles in the reader's own jar, 8.0 cm inside and 9 cm tall (CSI lists no jar at 8 cm; about 8.7 cm outside on our 0.35 cm wall assumption). Each is at 8% Cinnamon Vanilla (16 g of oil + 184 g of CSI 464, load as a percentage of total weight) on Eco C2. At the end of a 3.5-hour session the trimmed flame stands well above the 2.5–5 cm many makers use as a practical range, and a ring of about 6 mm is left all round, 27.8% of the surface unmelted. A very rough rule of thumb puts this jar at about 3.2 hours to the edge.

If trimming alone brings the flame back into range and the pool to the glass, you have no wick purchase to make. That is the cheapest outcome in this cluster, and it is the subject of the long-wick smoke post. If carbon caps keep coming back only with dark gourmands like this one, the oil-group test in the dark-gourmand mushrooming post may be the better order. This page carries on for the case where the free checks are done and the flame is still tall.

What "wick type" means in CSI's range

Three of those make a clean type-swap order: they are tabbed, or come with tabs, and need no extra part from another supplier. The Eco Braided Wicks don't mention tabs, and CSI lists no separate tabs in the catalogue data we captured. The wooden wick is a different family with its own cost case, which the mushrooming cost-per-candle post lays out, so it stays out of this order.

What none of the pages give is the thing a construction question really needs: braid pattern, ply count, core, diameter, or whether the wick is pre-waxed. We aren't hiding a spec sheet; we don't publish one. A supplier that sells several numbered series with stated specs can let you swap "type" while holding "size" steady. Whether you need that, and how to weigh it, is the another-wick-series post. With CSI's range, the honest framing is narrower: which of these products burns your jar with a calm flame and a full pool.

The type-swap order: arms, counts and packs

Three candles per arm, as in every test in this cluster, plus a three-candle replicate of the winner from a second pour. The replicate count follows the confirm-plus-replicate rule. Costed at the worked example's 200 g fill, with Cinnamon Vanilla at the 100 g price (₹4.84 a gram) and CSI 464 at the 1 kg price.

Stage 1 costs one wick pack, ₹120.00, if you have the oil and wax. All three arms plus a replicate, from nothing except your C2 and jars, come to ₹3,069.22. The wick is a small part of each candle (Cotton Braided is 6.6% of a ₹182.77 candle), so the real cost of every arm is three candles of a fairly expensive gourmand. Each candle's materials: C2 ₹180.21, Cotton Braided ₹182.77, roll-cut ₹177.84, all excluding the jar, labour, freight, packaging and GST.

Why not the 500 g of Cinnamon Vanilla? It is ₹0.24 a gram cheaper than the 100 g, but a type-swap test needs 192 g at most. Two 100 g bottles cover it with 8 g to spare, and the 500 g belongs to production, after a construction has passed full life.

The roll, priced honestly: the tabs cap the yield

The Braided Wick Roll is sold as 61 m of braided cotton with 100 wick tabs. Cut at 11 cm (jar height plus 2 cm, our judgement for a 9 cm tall jar; your cut depends on your fill height and trim allowance), 61 m would make 554 lengths. Only 100 of them can have a tab. The tabbed wicks use 11 m, 18% of the roll, and the other 50 m is untabbed wick. CSI lists no separate wick tabs in the catalogue data we captured, so that remainder needs tabs from elsewhere before it can stand in a container.

So the roll is the cheapest of the three per tabbed wick, provided you use all 100 tabs and count your own labour as free, which this page never does in its costs (they exclude labour). Two things the page doesn't tell you affect the test. First, whether the tabs come crimped on or loose: the page says "These are small metal tabs that are attached to one end of the wick", which reads like an instruction as much as a description. Second, whether the wick is pre-waxed. Many makers prime an untreated wick by dipping it in melted wax and letting it set straight (judgement), and a primed and an unprimed wick can burn differently; the untreated-versus-pre-waxed post covers that change. Ask us both questions on WhatsApp before you order, and prime all six roll wicks the same way.

Pouring and reading the arms

If your flame problem came from changing wick brands rather than from a new jar, it has its own change-control checklist: the larger-flame-after-a-brand-change post. And whichever arm wins, the approval gate is the series rule in the 8 cm ladder hub: the full life on every candle.

If a different construction wins

Once six candles of one arm pass the full life: wicks to buy = candles × wicks per candle × (1 + allowance), with a 5% allowance as our worked example.

The roll comes in one size, so production buys it in whole rolls of 100 tabbed wicks. At 158 wicks a month that is two rolls, with the spare tabbed wicks carried into the next month. Reorder point = daily use × your lead time + safety stock: about 5.3 a day here, so with a 7-day lead time and five days of safety stock (your figures; CSI publishes no lead times or stock depth), reorder at about 63 wicks. For the roll, that means a reorder whenever the tabbed wicks you have cut fall below that figure, not the metres.

The three constructions, the oil and the wax

Chosen on page statements, price and stock on 1 October 2026. CSI publishes no wick-performance data or construction specs, so nothing here is ranked on burn results.

Skip for this test: Eco Braided Wicks (₹472.00 for 5 m): braided and cut to length, but its page doesn't mention tabs, and CSI lists none separately. Also Performance Wooden Wicks (₹590.00 for 10): a different family with no widths. Its cost case is in the construction-cost post.

Frequently asked questions