My Wedding Candle Needs Six Hours Before Demoulding — How Many Identical Moulds Do I Need to Complete 500 Pieces Before the Event?

Your order as numbers

The title fixes two figures: 500 pieces and 6 hours before demoulding. Both are treated as yours and used exactly. The rest is a labelled worked example: pieces are demoulded, cleaned and the mould re-sealed and re-poured, with 30 minutes of hands-on time on each side of the set; you work a 14-hour day from 08:00 to 22:00; you hold back 10 extra pieces (two client samples, four retains, four for burn tests); and 6% of moulded pieces fail inspection (air pockets, a surface mark, an off-centre wick, a chipped edge). If your history says 3% or 10%, use that. The weight of one piece does not change the mould count at all, which is why this post does not need it; it matters for wax and melter capacity, covered briefly below and in full in 6356.

Notice what is not on this list: a demould time from us. None of the CSI mould pages or the Soy Pillar Wax page states one in the text we captured. The Polycarbonate Pillar Candle Mould page only says "Allow it to cool completely before unmolding". Six hours is your measurement, and the plan is only as good as that measurement.

How many cycles one mould gives you a day

A mould is occupied from the moment you seal and wick it until it is clean and ready again: hands-on before, set, hands-on after. In the worked plan that is 0.5 + 6 + 0.5 = 7 hours. Divide the staffed window by the cycle and round down, because a cycle that cannot finish inside the day does not count.

Plan A: two cycles inside a 14-hour day

Pour at 08:00, set until 14:30, demould and re-pour by 15:30, set until 21:30, demould by 22:00. That is 14 ÷ 7 = 2 cycles, exactly. "Exactly" is the warning: there is no room in that day for the set to run long.

Plan B: a third cycle that sets while you sleep

The 6-hour set does not need you in the room. If someone pours one more round at 22:00 and someone demoulds at 07:30, each mould does 3 cycles a day: two in daylight and one overnight. The staffed span becomes 15 hours (or two overlapping shifts), but the hands-on hours barely change: you add one pour and one demould per mould. Leave the overnight pieces somewhere draught-free, where the room temperature does not swing (no AC switched off at midnight or open window at dawn), because the set time you measured was measured in a steady room.

The mould count for 5, 7 and 10 production days

Moulds = ceil(543 ÷ (cycles a day × production days)), then 10% spares rounded up. Spares cover a mould that tears, one that releases badly, and one that fails inspection on arrival; CSI pages state no cycle life for these moulds, so the spare figure is judgement, not data.

Read across the rows and the economics are plain. The 10-day Plan A costs ₹29,227.42 in moulds, ₹58.45 a piece across 500 pieces. The 5-day Plan A costs ₹57,512.02, ₹115.02 a piece. Adding the overnight cycle is the cheapest lever: on 10 days Plan B needs 21 moulds (₹19,799.22, ₹39.60 a piece). On 7 days Plan B (29 moulds) is cheaper than Plan A on 10.

Buying in two steps matters. Three moulds for the trial (₹2,828.46) tell you the real set time, the real reject rate and whether the shape releases cleanly; the other 28 (₹26,398.96) follow only when those numbers hold. If the trial shows 7 hours, you have learnt it for ₹2,828.46, not for ₹29,227.42.

Does the rest of the line keep up?

Moulds are usually the bottleneck, but check the melt. With a worked piece of 250 g (weigh one from your own mould), 543 pours is 135.75 kg of finished mix, and the busiest day on the 10-day plan (28 moulds × 2 = 56 pours) is 14.00 kg: 2 melts in a 10 kg melter. The Electric Wax Melter page says it "can melt 10 kg of soy wax in approximately 30 minutes at 100°C"; treat that as the maker’s claim, and melt to your wax’s working temperature, checked with a thermometer, not to 100°C. Hands-on time is the other limit: 56 pours a day at, say, 4 minutes of combined pour and demould work each is under 4 hours of labour, well inside the day. The three-constraint version (melt, moulds, people) for a different order is the 300-candles-in-10-days post.

The set-time cliff: why you time it before you buy

Because cycles are rounded down, the count does not rise smoothly as the set gets longer. It jumps. At 6 hours, Plan A fits two cycles with not a minute to spare; at 7 hours, the second cycle cannot finish before 22:00 and the day collapses to one cycle. The mould count for 10 days goes from 31 to 61 (₹57,512.02). Plan B is far more forgiving: at 7 hours it still gets two cycles (one by day, one overnight), and needs 31 moulds.

Set times move with the room. Pieces that release at 6 hours in a cool October workshop can need longer in a warm room, and a hot spell or a different production space changes the figure again. Soy pillar wax that is still warm in the core can also crack or mark when forced. So time it where you will produce: pour three trial pieces at your production pour temperature, test one at 5 hours, one at 6, one at 7, and note the room temperature. If the 6-hour piece releases cleanly and the 5-hour one does not, your 6 hours is real and Plan A works; if only the 7-hour piece is clean, plan on Plan B or more days.

Where the production days come from

Start from the event and subtract everything that is not pouring. In the worked plan the event is 24 days away. Moulds take 4 days to arrive (a worked figure; we do not publish dispatch or transit times, so confirm on WhatsApp), 1 day to inspect, number and trial them, then after the last demould 3 days of cure before final QC (the Soy Pillar Wax page states no cure time in the text we captured, so this is your own approved figure; for soy, many makers wait longer before judging scent), 2 days for QC and packing, 1 for delivery, and 3 of slack. That leaves 10 production days, which is why the settling number in this post is the 10-day count.

The burn test is not in those days, and it must already be done

The worked calendar assumes the client has signed a sample piece made from this mould, wax, wick and oil, and that the piece has passed a burn test. A freestanding pillar burns differently from a container candle, and the wick choice for a moulded shape belongs to 6356. If that test has not happened, it comes first and it takes calendar time: pour, cure, burn over several sessions. Put a 7-day test round into the worked calendar and production falls to 3 days; Plan A would then need 101 moulds (₹95,224.82). That is the decision rule doing its job: at that point the honest answer is a new date, fewer pieces, or a simpler design, not a hundred moulds and an untested candle. Shortening cure for a deadline is its own question, answered in the cure-time-under-deadline post; standardising cure across pour days is 3158.

Identical means identical: buying 31 of one mould

For a wedding table, every piece must match the approved sample. That means one listing and one variant: Pillar Candle Mould Tall and Short are different pieces, and so is the Polycarbonate Pillar Candle Mould at 16.3 cm by 4.1 cm. Within one variant, moulds made at different times can still differ slightly in finish or wall. CSI does not publish batch information for moulds, and we will not promise that 31 units come from one batch; ask on WhatsApp, and inspect what arrives.

The moulds and materials in this plan

Three moulds at the same price, the wax for the trial, and the sealer that keeps rigid moulds from leaking. Nothing is ranked on performance: CSI publishes no demould times or cycle lives for these moulds, so your trial decides. The Twisted Pillar Mould is out of stock on 7 October 2026 and is not offered.

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