I Need 1,000 Double-Wick Candles — How Many Production Wicks and Spare Wicks Should I Order?

Two wicks per candle doubles the wick line — and nothing else

A double-wick candle is one candle with two flames sharing a single melt pool. For the bill of materials that means every wick-related line is multiplied by two per candle — production wicks, test wicks, wick stickers, and the holders that keep both wicks straight while the wax sets — and every other line is not. The wax and fragrance follow the candle's finished weight, exactly as they would for a single-wick candle of the same size; the jar is still one jar. The commonest error with double-wick orders is not forgetting to double the wicks. It is doubling the wicks and then sizing every allowance as if the order were single-wick.

Take the rejects first. A rejected double-wick candle loses both wicks, so the reject allowance is applied to candles and then multiplied: 1,000 ÷ 0.98 = 1,021 candles, × 2 = 2,042 wicks. Then the damage allowance. Wicks get bent, creased and re-set one at a time, so damage scales with the number of wicks handled, not the number of candles: 1% of 2,042 is 21 wicks. If you size damage per candle (1% of 1,021 = 11), you have halved the allowance for a line where you handle twice as many wicks. Together: 2,063 production wicks, which is 63 more than the naive 2,000.

The double-wick ledger, line by line

The example is a 400 g candle — the series' illustrative size for a large jar — in Luxury Soy Wax Chunks with Saffron Cedarwood at 8%: 32 g of oil and 368 g of wax per candle. CSI does not list a double-wick (or three-wick) jar, so the container is your own; its fill and diameter are yours to measure. Luxury Soy Wax Chunks' product page states a maximum fragrance load of 13%, so 8% sits well inside it. The 2% reject rate, 1% damage rate, 3% pour loss and four test candles per candidate are labelled working assumptions.

As with single-wick orders, the cost barely moves: Eco wicks are priced per wick in every pack, so the allowance changes the bill by a few hundred rupees at most. What moves more is the spare after packs. Two 1,000-packs cover 2,000 wicks; everything above that is a top-up of 20s and 50s. If your own damage tally is lower than 1%, the top-up shrinks — measure it on your first 100 candles and adjust the second half of the order.

Testing a double-wick candle: pairs, not singles

CSI does not publish wick sizes per jar diameter, and it publishes nothing on wick spacing for double-wick candles. Both are settled by burn tests in your jar. In general practice two wicks are commonly placed so that their individual melt pools meet and merge into one, and the pair is judged on the combined pool: whether it reaches the jar edge within a normal burn, how deep it runs, and whether the two flames stay steady or pull towards each other. That is why each candidate is a matched pair of the same wick, and each test candle uses two wicks.

Production wicks for whichever pair wins

The production line has three possible prices, each the cheapest in-stock cover for 2,063 wicks. Every Eco and Cotton Braided pack is priced linearly per wick, so doubling the wicks doubles the wick cost per candle — a double-wick candle carries two wicks, two stickers and, in practice, more test time.

The spread between the three is ₹12,627.00 on this order — real money, but still small beside the wax and oil. That is why the wick is chosen on the burn sheet and not on price: a pair that tunnels or runs hot turns a 400 g candle carrying about ₹402.62 of wax, oil, wicks and stickers into a reject.

The oil line: why 500 g bottles beat kilos for this fragrance

A 400 g candle at 8% takes 32 g of oil, so a 1,000-candle double-wick order is a large fragrance purchase: 1,033 candles × 32 g × 1.03 = 34.05 kg. Most CSI oils are priced almost linearly above 100 g, but Saffron Cedarwood is one of the exceptions where the per-gram price is lowest at 500 g, not 1 kg: ₹2,584.20 for 500 g is ₹5.17 a gram, while the 1 kg is ₹6,867.60, ₹6.87 a gram.

That is ₹64,286.40 saved by buying the size most people would call "not the bulk one". The lesson generalises: always compute the per-gram price at every listed size for the exact oil you are buying. On CSI's catalogue the one reliable price step is from 15 g to 50 g/100 g; above that most oils are linear, a minority get cheaper at 1 kg, and a few — Saffron Cedarwood and Sage and Cedarwood among them — are cheapest per gram at 500 g. Volume pricing beyond the listed packs is quoted on WhatsApp; no discount figure is published.

The priced CSI shopping list

The full CSI order for 1,000 saleable double-wick candles, with Thin C1 as the example winner. Wax and oil cover 1,033 candles poured (1,021 production + 12 tests) with a 3% pour-loss allowance. The jar is your own and appears only as an example line outside the CSI subtotal; add your breakage figure to it with the breakage method.

On the wax line, the cheapest arithmetic answer is actually 784 × 500 g at ₹2,34,416.00 — the 500 g bag is ₹598.00 a kilo, a rupee under the 5 kg — but that would be 784 bags to open for a saving of ₹392.00. The list uses 78 × 5 kg + 2 × 1 kg. Container soy bags at CSI stop at 10 kg; a single larger delivery is quoted on WhatsApp and no discount figure is published. The holders are tooling, priced separately and kept out of the subtotal.

Buy now, buy after the pair passes

The buy-now/buy-later split is the same as for single-wick orders, with one difference: there is twice as much wick money waiting on the test, and the full-life candle matters more because two flames put more heat into the lower jar. Wax for the test candles, the approved oil and your jars can be ordered now. The production wicks wait until one candle per surviving pair has burned to the end. If the client has not approved the fragrance, the new-fragrance post shows what to hold; if your pair fails late, the unvalidated-wick post lists every line to delay.

The rest of the 500–1,000 candle cluster

This page owns the double-wick arithmetic. The single-wick post covers the one-wick ledger and the test-pack logic in more depth; the breakage post sizes the jar line; the emergency-remake post covers replacement candles on a tight deadline; combined or separate BOMs shows how a double-wick SKU sits beside single-wick ones on one order; and the procurement sheet lays every line out in one copyable table. For a three-wick product, the 500 g three-wick post extends the same rules.

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