My 200 g Jar Has a Heavy Glass Base — Why Should I Complete a Full-Life Burn Test Instead of Selecting the Wick from the First Burn?

What the first burn can't see in a heavy-based jar

A first burn of 3–4 hours in a 200 g candle consumes a small part of the wax (in our worked example, 22 g of 200 g). Everything it tells you, pool width, flame height, soot, comes from the top of the candle, with cold glass all round. A heavy glass base changes the other end. It lifts the wick tab off the table, so the wick finishes its life closer to a thick slab of glass; that glass and the glass above the pool commonly hold heat from session to session; and as the wax level falls, the pool can deepen and the flame grow. These are tendencies, not certainties, and they vary with wick, oil, load and session length. How a thick base affects the bottom of the burn is the thick-glass-base post; the depth-by-depth picture of late-burn changes is the late-burn flame-growth hub.

The usual first-burn yardsticks still apply at the top: a full pool to the glass within about 3–4 hours and a very rough hour per 2.5 cm of width (about 3.2 hours for an 8 cm jar) are commonly cited rules of thumb, not CSI data. They grade burn 1. They do not grade the base.

The full-life bill: three candles, grams, days

The test is three 200 g candles on the wick you chose, all from one pot, in three jars from the batch you will sell in. Three, so one odd candle (an off-centre tab, a draught) is outvoted. Load is 8% of total candle weight, CSI's convention: 16 g of oil and 184 g of wax each.

Each candle is ₹89.60 of oil plus ₹93.36 of wax plus a ₹9.44 wick: ₹192.40 in materials, excluding the jar, labour, freight, packaging and GST. Three are ₹577.20. In cash from nothing it is ₹1,161.80 for wicks, oil and wax, or ₹1,515.80 with the scale. The 100 g bottle is the right size for a reason: a 50 g holds 50 g and the test needs 48 g, leaving 2 g; the 100 g costs exactly two 50 g and leaves 52 g, enough to pour all three again (3 candles) if one splits.

Days are the other half of the bill. On the worked-example numbers (a 3-day cure, as the oil's load line says "cure 48-72 hours", then one 4-hour session a day at 5.5 g an hour, stopping with about 30 g left), the three candles reach their verdict on day 11: 8 sessions, 30.9 hours of burning. Wait a week to cure, as many makers do before judging throw, and it is day 15. All three burn in parallel, so three candles take no longer than one. The method for building a full-life calendar from your own first session is the full-life calendar post.

The wrong bulk order, priced

Here is the order a first-burn decision tends to produce, as a worked example. You buy the C2 1,000-pack (₹9,440.00) after burn 1 and start production at 25 candles a day. The first production candles reach their final third about twelve days later, and the base fails: tall flames, heavy carbon, too much heat to sell. By then you have poured 300.

Look where the money is. The 1,000-pack is ₹9,440.00 of it; most of the rest is oil and wax already poured into candles that now need reworking or can't be sold as firsts. Per candle, a production candle is ₹189.79 in materials (₹86.99 oil, ₹93.36 wax, ₹9.44 wick) before its jar. Add jars at, say, the CSI 150 g jar's pack price and 300 more would be ₹28,320.00; your heavy-base jars may cost more.

And waiting? It costs days, not rupees: the 11–15 days of the test. The C2 price does not move with pack size (the 1,000-pack is ₹9.44 a wick, the same as the 10-pack), and CSI 464 is flat per gram from 1 kg to 10 kg, so nothing gets cheaper by buying early. If a deadline is the worry, the deadline is a reason to start the test today, not to skip it.

The purchase gate: what may be bought before the verdict

Not everything has to wait. The full-life test decides the wick for this jar, oil and load; it does not decide whether you will make the candle at all. So the gate falls on two things only: bulk wicks and poured production. The acceptance gates themselves (what to record at the first full pool, halfway, the final third and the stop at about 1 cm) are the acceptance-depth post; this page owns which purchases each gate releases.

If the base fails, the next test is one rung down, and it starts from zero days. That is the case for carrying a small reserve of the smaller rung from the start, laid out in the narrowing-jar reserve post. If your heavy base also comes with thick walls and an early edge ring, read the ring with the thick-glass control arm before you buy anything bigger.

Turning sessions into a date: weigh, don't guess

The worked-example calendar uses 5.5 g an hour; yours will differ with wick, oil, load and jar. Weighing gives you the real figure after one session, and with it the verdict date and the date your production wicks need to arrive. Placing those orders against your own lead time is the final-third order-timeline post.

The stop weight is jar-specific. In a heavy-based jar, "about 1 cm of wax left" is measured from the top of the glass base, not the outside bottom of the jar; weigh a candle at that point once and use the figure for the other two.

After the full life: three candles to a production order

When all three candles pass the final third, size the wick order from your production: wicks = candles × wicks per candle × (1 + allowance). At 300 candles a month (the pace of the worked example) and a 5% allowance, that is 315 wicks.

Two small honesty points sit in that table. Bergamot Amber's 1 kg costs ₹1.00 more than two 500 g bottles, so buy 500 g bottles if the counts work. And the wick line is the smallest line on the page, again. Reorder points follow the hub's method: at 10.5 wicks a day, a 10-day lead time (your figure) and a week of safety stock, reorder at about 178 wicks (the hub's production section; several SKUs at once is the per-SKU reorder post). CSI dispatches from Pune and publishes no lead times or stock depth; confirm dispatch on WhatsApp before a large run.

What to buy, and what to skip

Five items for the full-life test, chosen on page statements, price and stock on 1 October 2026. CSI publishes no wick-performance data, so nothing is ranked on burn results. Oil candle counts use 16 g per 200 g candle and 12 g per 150 g candle.

Skip for this test: Cotton Braided Wicks (₹120.00 for 10): the question is whether your chosen wick survives the base, not whether a bigger one fills the top faster. Steel Wick Holder (₹250.00 for 5): a single-wick 200 g candle doesn't need it. Pen Thermometer (₹354.00): useful for pour temperature, but it is not a glass thermometer; CSI lists no non-contact one.

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