I Use Three Different Jar Sizes — Should I Maintain a Separate Approved Wick Range for Each Diameter?

Approvals per jar, stock per wick

"An approved wick range per diameter" sounds like one thing. It is two. The approval is evidence: three candles of one configuration (jar, wax, oil, load, wick) burned to the end without heat, soot or flame failure. It belongs to that jar and that oil group and nothing else. The stock is inventory: wicks on a shelf, bought in packs, counted and reordered. Mixing the two is how makers end up with three bags of C1 labelled "6 cm", "7 cm" and "10 cm", one running dry while another sits full.

So keep them apart on purpose. The approval list stays granular: one row per jar × oil group, and it never borrows a result from a neighbouring jar. How similar two jars' inside diameters must be before one wick can be trusted in both is a technical tolerance question, answered in the one-wick-across-jars post; this page assumes your three jars are different enough that each needed its own test. The stock list is the opposite: as short as the approvals allow.

The oil groups in the worked example are two behaviour groups, "light" (florals, herbals, citrus) and "heavy" (vanilla, gourmand, oud), because heavier and vanillin-rich oils are commonly linked to needing a wick step: a tendency, not a law, and CSI publishes no wick data for any oil. How to admit a new oil to a group without testing it from scratch is the behaviour-group standard post.

The stock map: three jars on CSI's three rungs

The stock map is a jar × rung table with your monthly volumes in it. The worked example uses three CSI jars a small business could plausibly run together. Inside diameters use our labelled 0.35 cm wall, because none of the pages says whether its figure is inside or outside.

Now the map itself. The builds below are worked-example test results, chosen to show how approvals overlap; they are not the wicks these jars need with your wax and oils. Fill the column from your own records.

Read down the SKU column and the overlap is obvious: C1 appears three times, C2 twice, Cotton Braided once. That is not a coincidence of the example; it is what a three-rung tabbed range does to any multi-jar business. Pool area climbs from 22.06 to 67.93 cm² across the three jars, a factor the wicks cannot follow rung for rung, so neighbouring jars and neighbouring oil groups keep landing on the same wick. The 10 cm heavy cell counts twice because each candle takes two C2.

Rolling the map into one order

Here is the month as a buy list: wick, count, the smallest in-stock packs that cover it, cash and per-wick price. Because C1, C2 and Cotton Braided are flat per wick across packs, "smallest set of packs" simply means the fewest spare wicks; it never changes the unit price.

For scale: at flat per-wick prices, the 650 wicks the month actually consumes cost ₹4,645.40. The union order spends a little more than that because packs round up; the spare wicks roll into next month, they are not lost. All of this excludes jars, oil, wax, labour, freight, packaging and GST: the wick line is the smallest line in a candle's bill of materials.

What the union saves, honestly

Compare the same month ordered the other way: each jar treated as its own range, each range rounded to packs on its own.

The union saves ₹94.40 this month: 10 C2 that two separate roundings would have bought and one rounding does not. That is the whole money story, and it is small on purpose. CSI prices C1, C2 and Cotton Braided flat per wick in every pack, so pooling cannot earn a lower unit price; it can only trim rounding.

Safety stock tells the same story. Seven days of C1 kept as one pooled line is 105 wicks; kept in three jar bins it is 105, the same number. What changes is behaviour: one pooled line cannot run out for the 6 cm jar while the 7 cm bin is full, and one person watches three lines instead of five. The real gains are operational:

Testing a new cell without buying a new pack

Every multi-jar business has cells waiting for approval: a new oil in the 7 cm jar, the 10 cm heavy cell that has passed burn 3 but not the full life. Under separate ranges, each of those tests tempts a separate small purchase. Under a union, the test wicks come off the shared shelf if the rung is already stocked, and the pack you were going to buy is the pack you already own.

In the worked example, suppose the 10 cm heavy cell (2 × C2) still needs its confirmation: three candles × two wicks = 6 C2, taken from the 170 in the union order. At a labelled 450 g fill and 8%, each candle is 36 g of oil and 414 g of wax, poured into three Apothecary jars (₹637.20). No wick purchase at all. If the cell fails and needs a rung you do not stock (a cut-to-length braid, say), that is the moment a new SKU enters the map, and you buy the smallest pack that covers three candles, not a production quantity.

The approval rule does not relax because the wicks were free. Screen at burn 3, then carry all three candles of the leading build to about 1 cm left; a cell joins the map only when all three pass. Near the bottom, judge flame distance from the glass by eye, never by touch. The full approval method lives in the cluster hub; the purchase consequence here is that union stock makes the test cheap, not optional.

The same logic runs backwards to the first ladders. When each of the three jars was first tested, the ladder packs could already be shared: one C1 20-pack can feed two jars' ladders, as the 6.5 cm vs 8 cm two-jar post shows. The 7 cm jar's ladder is the 7 cm adjacent-rungs post; the 10 cm jar's single-or-pair stop point is the 10 cm spend-stop post. And if one of the three jars is later replaced by one only 5 mm wider, its cell needs a two-arm confirmation, drawn from union stock: the 5 mm confirm order.

When an approval moves, the map absorbs it

Approvals change. A new oil lot, a new jar batch, a summer of warmer rooms: any of them can send a cell back to the ladder, and sometimes it comes back on a different wick. The union is what keeps that from becoming a stock crisis.

No new SKU, no new supplier, no stranded pack: the shelf simply leans from C1 towards C2 over the next reorder cycle. That only works if you did not over-buy C1 in the first place, which is the practical case against the 1,000-pack above. If a cell moves to a wick outside the union, the SKU count goes up by one and that new wick starts life as a single-jar SKU: buy it lean until a second cell adopts it.

And if a jar is dropped altogether, the map shows exactly what strands: in the worked example, dropping the 10 cm jar removes all 40 Cotton Braided a month and 60 of the C2, but the C2 still serves the 7 cm heavy cell. That is why single-jar SKUs are bought in the smallest packs that cover a month. Whether a business should cut the number of jars altogether, and what that does to stock, is the one-diameter standardisation post; it is a product decision with an inventory consequence, and this page stops at the inventory.

Reorder points on the union

A reorder point is daily use × your lead time + safety stock, set once per SKU on the union total. For C1 in the worked example, 450 a month is 15 a day; with a 10-day order-to-bench time and seven days of cover (105 wicks), reorder when you are down to 255 C1. The 10 days is your figure: CSI dispatches from Pune and does not publish lead times or stock depth, so confirm dispatch on WhatsApp before a big run. Setting reorder points for several wick SKUs at higher volume, including how much safety stock each deserves, is the 500-candles-a-month reorder post; the point here is only that there is one reorder point per wick, not one per jar.

Keep the records that make the union trustworthy: lot codes per SKU, the date each pack was opened, and which cells were poured from it. CSI publishes no wick specifications or lot data, so a retained sample of each lot (a few wicks in a labelled bag, our judgement) is your own reference if a later lot burns differently. How to organise that evidence so the next jar starts from data is the internal wick guide post.

What to stock for three jars, and what to skip

Five items: the two wick listings the union lands on and the three CSI jars the worked example uses, 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, and the jars are examples of a three-size range, not the only one.

Skip for a three-jar union: Performance Wooden Wicks (₹590.00 for 10), one listing with no widths, which adds a SKU and a burn-style change rather than a rung; the Eco Braided Wicks (₹472.00 for 5 m), unsized and cut to length, only if a cell lands between rungs; and a second "jar-specific" pack of any wick you already stock.

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