I Need to Make 300 × 150 g Candles at 10% Fragrance — How Much Wax and Fragrance Should I Purchase Including Extra Material for Test Candles?

The base numbers for 300 × 150 g at 10%

Three hundred 150 g candles are 45,000 g of finished candle. At 10% of that finished weight, the net need is 40,500 g of wax and 4,500 g of fragrance oil. The most common shortcut — 300 × 150 g = 45 kg of wax, with oil on top — buys 4,500 g of wax the jars cannot hold, an 11.1% over-buy. The 100 × 200 g at 10% post walks through that mistake in detail; this page concentrates on the other half of the title: how much extra to buy for test candles.

How many test candles, and why six

Test candles answer questions you cannot answer on paper. At 10% in a 150 g jar the biggest open question is the wick — CSI does not publish wick sizes per jar diameter, so the only way to choose is to burn. A useful test round compares the wick options you are genuinely considering, with one candle of each to burn and one to keep as a reference. With three wick options that is six candles. On top of that, this page keeps two retained samples from the production pour — one to burn-check the batch, one to keep in case a customer raises a question later.

Each test candle costs about ₹153.44 in wax and oil at the small-pack rates you buy tests in (Chunks at ₹599.00 a kilo, Cinnamon Vanilla at ₹4.84 a gram in 100 g), plus its jar and wick. Six of them are well under two thousand rupees. That is the cost of not discovering a tunnelling wick on candle number 150. If you are also undecided on the load, add a second row of tests at 8%; the 10% ceiling post shows how the oil and wax orders move if 8% or 9% wins.

The worked table with tests included

Tests and retained samples join the count first; the 3% loss (a labelled working assumption) then multiplies the whole melt. The table shows the order both ways — tests counted in, and tests forgotten — so you can see what forgetting them does.

With the test round the order is 42.83 kg of wax and 4.76 kg of oil. Forget the tests and the order drops by 1,112.4 g of wax and 123.6 g of oil — and the 3% loss allowance quietly gets spent on test candles instead of on pour loss, so the production run comes up short. That is the failure this title is really asking about.

One order or two? Buying the test kit first

If the test changes your mind — a different wick, or a lower load — you do not want 4.8 kg of oil already on the shelf. So split the purchase. Stage 1 buys only what the six test candles need, in the smallest sensible packs. Stage 2 buys production once the test is burnt, for 302 candles (300 + 2 retained samples), and uses up the test kit's leftovers.

The two-stage wax and oil cost ₹47,764.60, identical to the single order, because the test kit's 1 kg bag and 100 g bottle are exactly the extra slices the single order would have bought anyway. Stage 1 leaves 165.7 g of wax and 7.3 g of oil, which go into production. What you gain is the option to change course: if the test says 8%, Stage 2's oil drops to about 3.7 kg and you have not bought the difference.

Rounding to Chunks bags and Cinnamon Vanilla bottles

Luxury Soy Wax Chunks are flat-priced: ₹598.00 a kilo in the 500 g bag, ₹599.00 in 1 kg and 5 kg, ₹599.90 in 10 kg. Production's 41,993.1 g rounds to 4 × 10 kg + 2 × 1 kg (₹25,194.00); eight 5 kg bags + 2 × 1 kg would be ₹25,158.00, ₹36.00 less in four more bags. Chunks are rated up to 13% by the wax maker, so a 10% formula has three points of headroom — the reason this page uses Chunks for a 10% order rather than CSI 464, whose stated maximum is exactly 10%.

Cinnamon Vanilla Fragrance Oil is a warm festive gourmand at ₹4.84 a gram in 100 g, ₹4.60 in 500 g and ₹4.55 in 1 kg — a real 5.9% step from 100 g to the kilo. Production's 4,665.9 g rounds to 4 × 1 kg + 1 × 500 g + 2 × 100 g for ₹21,487.80. At 15 g per candle, oil is ₹68.32 of every candle at the kilo rate.

The full priced order

For a 150 g candle the 200 ml Salsa Glass Jar with golden lug cap is a reasonable fit — its 200 ml brim holds roughly 172–180 g of soy wax on a labelled 0.86–0.90 g per ml approximation, so 150 g sits below it. The fill weight is not published; the test round is where you confirm it. Jars: 308 poured + 2 spare = 310. Production wicks: 302 + 18 spare = 320 of whichever type wins (Thin C1 priced below).

If Thick C2 wins, production wicks cost ₹3,020.80 instead of ₹1,888.00; if Cotton Braided wins, 320 at ₹12.00 is ₹3,840.00. One candle's material cost at list rates is ₹184.59 (₹80.86 wax, ₹68.32 oil, ₹5.90 wick, ₹29.50 jar); the order spreads to ₹197.26 per sellable candle with the test round, samples, loss and spares. Both exclude labour, packaging, freight and GST.

How the test allowance scales

Because tests are counted in candles, their share shrinks as orders grow. The same eight extra candles at other order sizes:

On a 100-candle order the test round is 7.4% of everything poured; on 2,000 it is 0.4%. That is exactly why a fixed test percentage misleads. For larger orders, 2,000 × 150 g and 2,000 × 150 g at 10% fragrance run this candle size at scale, and testing three wick sizes across five fragrances plans a much bigger test matrix.

Neighbouring posts in this cluster: the hub page for the five-step method, 300 × 100 g wedding favours for backups on a date-critical order, and 750 × 150 g for reading a label weight that already includes the oil.

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