I Need 1,000 Candles in 15 Days — How Many Kilograms of Finished Candle Mixture Must I Process Every Working Day?

From 15 calendar days to 10 pouring days

The title gives two figures: 1,000 candles and 15 days. Everything else is a labelled worked example: a 200 g fill at 8% on total weight (the series default: 16 g of oil and 184 g of wax per candle), a 6-day week, and day 1 a Monday.

One set-up day is only possible if the wax, oil, wicks and jars are already on your floor, or confirmed to arrive by the morning of day 1. If they are not, every pouring day shifts and the last pour misses its 72-hour set. The plan uses 72 hours as a planning judgement (many CSI oil pages state 48–72 hours of cure for soy before burn testing; British Rose's states none in the text we captured). How cure age should be kept the same across candles poured on different days is the cure-standardisation post.

Kilograms a day, wax and oil, at 200 g and 150 g

Count what you actually process, not what you sell. Planned extras (12: 4 retains and 8 burn checks, more than usual because a 15-day plan has no slack to find a problem late) and a 5% loss buffer for rejects are separate lines; the 1% heel is wax left in the melter and pitchers. How big those buffers should be from your own records is the production-buffer post.

Why three equal melts rather than two full ones and a small third? Every melt then uses the same recipe card (6,579 g of wax, 572 g of oil), the same stir time and the same pour-out, so melt 1 and melt 30 are made the same way. A part-melt of 1.45 kg is easy to get wrong on the oil, and small batches heat and cool differently from big ones. That is judgement, not a rule; if your melter's own cycle favours two full melts and a small one, keep the oil ratio exact. For how many candles one melter can turn out in a day, see the one-melter post; for the batch count on a much larger order, the 5,000-in-30-days post.

What 21 kg a day means for weighing

Ten pouring days at three melts a day is 30 oil weigh-outs and 30 wax weigh-outs, plus a weighed fill on every QC candle. A 10 g slip on the oil in a 10 kg-equivalent melt moves the load from 8% to between 7.91% and 8.09%; a 50 g slip on the wax moves it between 7.96% and 8.04%. One slip changes one melt. A scale that reads 10 g light every time changes all of them: 30 g of oil a day, 300 g across the order, without anyone noticing.

Staffing follows the kilograms. About 106.2 candles a day, at the worked-example labour figure used in the hub post (5.25 hands-on minutes a candle plus an hour of fixed work), is 1.51 people-shifts: two people, with one owning the weighing and the melt sheet. A batch record good enough to reproduce the candle months later is the record-keeping post.

Does your daily kg fit? The delivery-day table

Take the mix the order needs (214.52 kg), divide by the kilograms your workshop can process in a normal day, round up, and add the three non-pouring working days (one set-up, two tail). That gives the date you can honestly offer.

The decision rule: accept with conditions only if your normal day processes at least 21.45 kg of mix, with the people to pour, finish and pack what that produces; otherwise offer the date in the table for your figure. At exactly 21.45 kg there is no spare day, so a lost day in week one comes off the 72-hour set or the QC. A day or two in hand is worth negotiating for (the spare-capacity post).

The purchase sheet, on your floor before day 1

The sheet assumes your proven candle is Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468, British Rose at 8% and an Eco C2 wick in your own 200 g jar. Extras and loss buffer as above; pieces carry a 2% buffer.

₹190.20 a candle is CSI materials with buffers; it excludes your jars, labour, freight, packaging and GST. Comparing ingredients per gram before you buy is the cost-per-gram post. On the wax, the 5 kg and 10 kg bags save ₹2,535.00 against 198 × 1 kg (₹1,28,700.00); twenty 10 kg bags would cost ₹1,27,400.00 and leave 2.64 kg spare. On jars, 1,083 pieces should be measured on arrival like any batch of glass, and how much extra wax a 1,000-jar run really needs is the extra-wax-for-1,000-jars post.

Argued against our own interest: if CSI cannot confirm on WhatsApp that this list will arrive before your day 1, do not accept day 15 and hope. Offer the client a date that starts when the materials arrive. And do not buy a 1 kg of a second rose "in case": the order is one oil, from one lot if we can supply it, and a second oil is a second candle.

What to buy for 15 days of production

Five items, chosen on page statements, price and stock on 7 October 2026. CSI publishes no burn or throw data, so nothing here is ranked on performance. Each card says when not to buy.

Skip for this order: any wax or oil you have not already burn-tested in this jar, the 10 kg wax bags "because they're bigger" (no cheaper per kilo than 5 kg), and equipment you will not have set up and tried by day 1. A melter bought on day 3 is a process change in the middle of the order (the bigger-melter revalidation post).

Frequently asked questions