I Have a 500-Piece Wedding Order with Three Fragrances — Should I Produce Each Fragrance as a Separate Batch Rather Than Dividing One Large Wax Batch?

Your order as numbers

The title gives you two figures: 500 pieces and three fragrances. It does not give the split, the size or the load, so the page uses labelled worked figures you replace with yours: 200 Jasmine, 150 British Rose and 150 Sandalwood, each a 200 g candle at 8% (the series default), poured in Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 on one 10 kg melter.

Each scent carries its own extras and its own reject buffer, because a Jasmine reject cannot be replaced from a Rose melt. That is the first reason three scents cost more pours than one scent of 500 would: 538 pours here, against 527 for 505 planned candles in one scent. How much oil and wax to buy for a split like this, with the wax purchased together, is the two-scent purchase post; this page is about how the batches are built.

Three ways to get three scents out of one melter

Route 1: scent one big batch, then divide it — not possible

It sounds efficient: melt 10 kg, add oil, divide the batch among the three scents. But the oil goes into all of it, so every portion is the first scent. The tempting rescue, adding Rose to a 3 kg portion of Jasmine-scented wax, produces a Jasmine-Rose blend with 480 g of oil in 3,240 g, a load of 14.81%. That is above the 10% that both CSI 464 and both oil pages state, and it is not what the client approved. There is no route back.

Route 2: divide unscented wax by weight, then scent each portion — works

This is the honest version of "dividing one large wax batch". Melt unscented wax, weigh it into separate clean steel pots, and add each scent’s oil against each pot’s weight. It needs a pot per scent, a scale that can weigh a full pot (the Candle Making Weighing Scale page states no capacity: check yours), and a way to keep each pot at the wax’s add and pour temperature, because portions cool faster than a melter full of wax. In the worked plan it does one job: the three remainders (18 Jasmine, 15 Rose, 15 Sandalwood) share one unscented melt of 8.920 kg instead of taking three part-empty melts.

Route 3: one scent per melt — the default for full batches

Weigh 9,106.16 g of wax into the melter, melt to the wax maker’s stated temperature (CSI 464: pour 80–90°C), add 791.84 g of oil, mix thoroughly, and pour 49 candles; the last 1% stays as heel. Nothing to divide, one weighing per 49 candles, and the scent is fixed for the whole melt. Its cost is the clean-down between scents, which is why melts are grouped by scent rather than alternated.

The batch plan from a 10 kg melter

Start from the melter, not from the order. Ten kilograms of finished mix would fill 50 candles of 200 g with nothing left in the melter, which never happens; with a 1% heel the honest full melt is 49 pours from 9.898 kg of mix. The melter page says it can "create 80 candles at a time", which implies fills of about 125 g from 10 kg; at 200 g, your number is 49. The page also says it melts "10 kg of soy wax in approximately 30 minutes at 100°C" with a "±10°C deviation": 100°C is above CSI 464’s stated 80–90°C pour range, so set it to the wax page’s figure and check with a thermometer.

The split melt goes first, on day 1, while the melter has held nothing scented: its unscented wax must not pick up a trace of Jasmine or Sandalwood from the walls or the tap. After that the full melts run light to heavy, Jasmine, then Rose, then Sandalwood, so whatever a clean-down misses is the lighter scent going into the heavier one. Grouping by scent is what keeps the clean-downs to two; the minutes saved by blocking scents rather than alternating them are worked through in the dedicated-production-days post.

Weighing oil per batch: why batch size is a quality decision

Some makers avoid scent changes in the melter by keeping it unscented and adding oil in each pitcher. With a 600 ml pitcher (roughly 516–540 g of wax to the brim on the rule of thumb) that is two 200 g candles a time: 32 g of oil into 400 g of mix. A 1 g slip, which is a worked example (your scale’s resolution is what decides it), moves the load to anywhere between 7.77% and 8.23%. The same slip on a full melt’s 791.84 g gives 7.99%. And the pitcher method weighs oil 269 times for this order; the batch plan weighs it 13 times.

Two more things follow from weighing per batch. First, the oil for a melt is calculated from the melt, not from the order: 791.84 g for 9,898 g of mix, 290.88 g for the Jasmine portion, 242.40 g for each of the others. Second, mixing has to be thorough in a 10 kg melt so the first candle and the 49th carry the same load; how long and how to stir a large batch is in the 10 kg uniform-mixing post.

Clean-down between scents, and keeping the three apart

Order the scents light to heavy so a missed trace is the lighter scent going into the heavier one. The two clean-downs here cost about 45 minutes each in the worked example. If your order had a vanilla or a coffee in it, it would go last of all.

The decision rule, what you never skip, and the materials

The decision rule. For two or more scents on one melter: one scent per full melt, grouped by scent and ordered light to heavy; divide unscented wax by weight only for remainders or sampling, and only when you can weigh full pots and hold their temperature; never divide scented wax among scents. If the scents’ days do not fit your deadline at about three melts a day, renegotiate the date or the split before you consider a second melter. The settling numbers for the worked order: 11 melts, 2 clean-downs, 4 pouring days, 791.84 g of oil per full melt.

The batch plan fixes the quantities of the lines it touches. Oil is bought per scent, wax once for all three. The full purchase with jars, wicks and labels belongs on your BOM, and the shared-wax purchase logic is in 6349; for completeness, the lines below are what this plan’s pours consume, rounded to in-stock CSI packs.

The products in this plan

Five CSI products from the worked plan: the three oils, the wax and the pitcher. Nothing is ranked on performance (CSI publishes no burn data); the oils are a worked example and your approved scents replace them.

Frequently asked questions