My Candle Reaches a Full Melt Pool Very Quickly and the Wax Becomes Extremely Deep — Should I Test a Smaller Wick?

The down-rung order, by the wick you are on

The worked example: three 100 g candles in CSI's Black Shiny Glass Jar with Golden Lid, about 5.3 cm inside on our wall assumption. Each is at 8% Jasmine (8 g of oil + 92 g of Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468, load as a percentage of total weight) on Eco C2. All three reach the glass in about 40 minutes, roughly 31% of the very rough one-hour-per-2.5-cm guide (about 2.1 hours for this jar), and by the end of a three-hour session the pool is well past 1 cm deep, with a tall flame. Example B, for scale: a reader's own 8 cm jar on Cotton Braided showing the same pattern.

From nothing, the C1 arm costs ₹1,281.20 in cash: the wicks, a 50 g bottle, a 1 kg bag and six jars. A 50 g bottle covers six candles with only 2 g to spare, so one spilled pour means a second bottle. The 100 g costs ₹200.00 more and leaves 52 g: ₹1,481.20 in all. Choose by how steady your pouring hand is. Each C1 candle is ₹102.50 in materials before the jar; the C2 one was ₹106.04.

When fast and deep earns a purchase

A fast full pool isn't proof of anything by itself. A warm afternoon, a ceiling fan, a candle relit while still warm, a shallow fill or a softer wax can all speed a pool up. Those confounders, and a fifteen-minute pool timeline that checks them one by one, are the subject of the 8 cm full-pool-in-45-minutes post. How to read a 1 cm deep pool against flame height and session length is the 7.5 cm deep-pool heat post. This page doesn't repeat either method. It sets the point at which they release a purchase.

Why depth carries more weight than speed: a fast pool in a small jar is often just a small jar. A deep pool is heat staying in the wax, and in a container that heat goes into the glass. The CSI 468 page states a melting point of 50°C–53°C; a softer wax commonly pools faster on the same wick, so if you have recently moved from CSI 464 to CSI 468, re-run the old wick in the new wax before blaming the wick. Late-life depth has its own map in the deep-near-the-bottom post.

The honest money case: real, small, and not the reason

Because C1, C2 and Cotton Braided are each priced flat per wick in every pack, a rung down saves the same amount on every candle at any volume.

In the worked example, the C2 → C1 saving is 2.3% of a C2 candle with its jar (₹153.24 down to ₹149.70). The six-candle test pays for itself after about 254 production candles. That arithmetic is real, and it is why we print it. But read it the right way round. If a deep pool and a tall flame were costing you nothing in safety, the step down would still be worth ₹3.54 a candle. Because they can cost you a cracked jar or a scorched surface, the step down is worth doing even if it saved nothing.

Running the down-rung test

A temporary step down that looks fine early still needs the later burns; why is set out in the one-size-down change-control post. And once C1 is approved, you may be holding C2 you no longer need. Whether to move it to other products, use it in tests or write it off is the wicking-down transition post.

The bottom of CSI's range: below C1

Small jars, like the 6 cm listings, the 50 g heart jars and tealight cups, sit at the bottom of any wick range. If C1 is still too hot in your jar, these are the honest options, in order of cost:

The Loose wick is the only CSI wick whose page names a diameter smaller than our 6 cm jars, so it earns a test, but treat it as a different construction rather than "C0". It is sold untabbed by length. At a 8.0 cm cut (jar height plus 1.5 cm, our judgement), 5 m makes 62 wicks at ₹6.66 each, more per wick than C1's ₹5.90. The 10 m pack makes 125 at ₹5.66, slightly less. Both figures are before tabs, which CSI does not list separately. Argued against our own interest: for a range of very small candles, a supplier with a sized, tabbed wick below C1 may simply be the better buy. Message us your jar and we will tell you plainly whether we can help.

After approval: switching production to the smaller wick

When all six C1 candles pass the full life: wicks to buy = candles × wicks per candle × (1 + allowance), 5% being our worked-example allowance.

Reorder point = daily use × your lead time + safety stock: about 7 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 84. If you still hold C2 from before the switch, say 70 left from a 100-pack (₹660.80 at the flat per-wick price), don't pour it into this jar to use it up; the transition post covers where it can go instead. And if the down-step was driven by mushrooming rather than depth, the per-candle comparison across every construction is the mushrooming cost post.

Wicks, oil, wax and jar for the down-step

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

Skip for this symptom: Cotton Braided Wicks (page: "engineered for large-diameter candles exceeding 8 cm") and any second wick. Both add heat, and this symptom needs less of it.

Frequently asked questions