I Want to Produce 1,000 Candles per Week — What Wax-Melting Capacity Do I Need if I Make 200 g Candles?

Cycles, not capacity: the arithmetic that answers the question

Start with the candle, and state the denominator, because that is where most scale-up arithmetic quietly goes wrong. A 200 g candle at 8% fragrance of finished weight is 16 g of fragrance and 184 g of wax, so 1,000 of them is 184.0 kg of wax and 16.0 kg of fragrance a week. At 8% of the wax weight the same candle is 14.8 g of oil and 185.2 g of wax, and the week becomes 185.2 kg and 14.8 kg — a gap of 1.2 kg of fragrance, every week, for as long as the formula is wrong. Luxury Soy Wax Chunks states its own 13% ceiling as "of total wax weight", so the two conventions collide inside one catalogue. Pick one, write it on the batch sheet, and never say "8%" without the words that follow it.

Now divide. CSI's largest published melting vessel holds 20 kg, and there are two honest ways to run the division depending on where you dose the fragrance.

Plan around the first row, and not for efficiency — ten identical charges are ten identical batches. The second row gives you nine full runs and a 4 kg orphan: one batch a week with different headspace, stir dynamics and cooling rate, all of which you later have to explain to the customer who got a jar from the short run. At this volume the most valuable thing you can buy is uniformity between batches, and an even division buys it for nothing — the same reasoning as in when to stop assuming a small-batch process scales linearly.

One caution on that first row. If you dose fragrance into the melter, charge the wax low enough to leave headroom for the oil — 18.4 kg, not 20 kg — or you are asking a 20 kg vessel to hold 21.7 kg. The arithmetic is tidy: 18.4 + 1.6 = 20.0, and 20.0 kg at 200 g a candle is exactly one hundred jars. That number is what the rest of this page is about, because a hundred jars poured from one vessel is a long time to be pouring.

The 20 kg wall — and why litres are not kilograms

Production advice written for a different kind of supplier will have shown you 40 kg melters, 50 kg jacketed holding tanks, pump fillers and conveyorised fill lines. None of those is in CSI's catalogue. There is no 25 kg, 40 kg, 50 kg or 100 kg melter, no jacketed holding tank, no automated filler, no pump filler and no conveyor. The published range is four vessels and the top of it is 20 kg. Answering your question with a machine would mean inventing one — and you cannot buy an invented machine, whereas you can plan around a real ceiling.

Absorb what this equipment costs relative to everything else you own. A beginner tool set from the CSI range — pen thermometer ₹354.00, weighing scale ₹354.00, 600 ml steel pouring pitcher ₹708.00, CSI Pro Mixer ₹349.00 and five bamboo stirring sticks ₹118.00 — comes to ₹1,883.00. A 20 kg imported melter is ₹25,960.00, roughly fourteen times that entire set. That ratio is the real shape of the decision: every other tool here is a rounding error against the melter, so the melter is the purchase to be slowest about, and the funnel, thermometer and pitcher are ones to simply make.

Two cycles a day means a 100-candle fill window

Here is what the cycle arithmetic hands you. Two charges a day, a hundred jars a charge, every jar filled from the same vessel in sequence while the jars at the front of the queue are already setting. The fill window — first jar to last — is where pour temperature drifts, and drift is one of the commonest reasons a production batch comes out looking like two different products: smooth tops at one end of the run, rough, pitted or sunken tops at the other.

This is where the choice of wax stops being about price and becomes about tolerance, because the pour windows CSI publishes are not the same width.

Read the second column again. CSI 464 gives you ten degrees of pour window; CSI 468 gives you two. A hundred-jar fill out of one vessel is a different proposition on those two waxes, and it has nothing to do with which is the better wax — only with how much drift the published instruction allows. On a two-degree window you need a holding temperature you trust absolutely, a faster fill, or a smaller charge. Which is a legitimate reason to choose the 10 kg vessel and run twenty cycles instead of ten: fifty jars is half the fill window of a hundred, and on a two-degree wax that halving may be worth the labour.

Two caveats on that table. First, Luxury Soy Wax Chunks publishes two different pour temperatures on its own product page — one in the spec table, a slightly different one in the step-by-step. The overlap is 75–80°C, the only figure worth quoting; we have flagged the conflict rather than pretend one is definitive. Second, Eco Soy CSI 400 is the cheapest soy per kilogram at ₹399.00/kg and publishes no pour temperature and no fragrance ceiling at all. At 184 kg a week that gap is real money — but you would run your largest batches on the wax with the least published process data. Defensible if you test properly; bad if you want to be told a number.

One melter twice a day, or two melters once

With a 20 kg ceiling and a 184 kg week your production day has two possible shapes. Serial: one 20 kg vessel charged twice a day, two 100-jar fills. Parallel: two vessels running once each, two fills that can overlap. Ten charges a week either way — but almost everything else differs.

The case for serial is money, and at ₹25,960.00 against ₹51,920.00 it is not weak. The case for parallel is twofold, and makers underestimate the second half. The first is the fill window: two vessels filling at once halves how long each charge waits to be poured. The second is fragrance changeover. If your 1,000 a week are not all one scent — and at this volume they almost never are — a single vessel means either cleaning down between scents or carrying the previous one forward as contamination. A residual film of oud will show up in the next charge of lavender. Two vessels means two scents in a day with no changeover at all, which is why production makers end up with a second melter long before they want a bigger one.

Parallel has one more advantage: a single vessel is a single point of failure. If your only melter is down on a Tuesday you have lost 200 candles and cannot recover them inside the week, because there is nowhere else to melt 18.4 kg — the 1 L mini melter at ₹2,360.00 is a sampling vessel, not a backup line. Whether that insurance is worth ₹25,960.00 depends on what a missed week costs you, which is your figure, not ours.

Time your own cycle: the protocol, and the five numbers to record

Everything above is arithmetic you can do from a catalogue. The number you still do not have is how long one cycle takes — and without it you cannot tell whether two cycles fit your working day. No supplier figure gives it to you: it depends on your mains supply, ambient temperature, charge weight, wax, decanting speed and changeover. Establish it on the first charge you run.

With those five numbers the question resolves one of three ways. Two cycles fit comfortably in the day, and one 20 kg vessel is your answer. Or they fit but the drift at jar 100 falls outside your wax's published pour window, and the fix is a smaller charge run more often — fifty jars, not a hundred — rather than a larger machine. Or two cycles do not fit at all, and you need a second vessel at the costs above. In two of the three, what you buy is not more capacity.

What 1,000 candles a week consumes, in packs that actually exist

If you have decided to produce 1,000 × 200 g candles a week, this is what 1,000 consumes. We are not forecasting that you will sell them; the figures below convert a volume you have already committed to into purchasable packs. CSI's wax ladder is 500 g / 1 kg / 5 kg / 10 kg, with no 25 kg pack of anything and one exception above 10 kg: Natural Soy Pearl Wax at 50 kg for ₹21,240.00. A 184 kg week therefore rounds to 185 kg of real packs on most waxes, and the leftover kilogram carries forward.

Two findings in that table run against our own interest. First, CSI 464 is flat at ₹507.40/kg from 1 kg up — no bulk saving above a single kilogram, so the 10 kg pack buys fewer parcels, nothing else. Second, more bluntly: Luxury Soy Wax Chunks' 10 kg pack is ₹0.90 per kilogram dearer than its 1 kg — ₹599.90 against ₹599.00 — so on a 185 kg week, thirty-seven 5 kg packs saves ₹162.00 against eighteen 10 kg plus a 5 kg. Not a fortune, but a clean demonstration that "bigger pack is cheaper" is not a law here, and a reason to check the per-kilogram figure on every reorder. The broader purchasing shape is in managing wax as manufacturing inventory and buying wax as a manufacturer.

The fragrance side has a harder ceiling than the wax side. CSI's fragrance ladder stops at 1 kg — there is no 2 kg, 5 kg or 10 kg bottle of any oil in the catalogue. Your 16 kg a week is therefore sixteen 1 kg bottles, and there is a trap in that: 1 kg at 16 g a candle is 62 candles (62 × 16 g = 992 g), so sixteen bottles yields 992, not 1,000. Sixteen is your theoretical requirement with zero allowance for what stays inside a bottle, a jug or on a stirrer. Seventeen is the honest purchase. We publish no quantity slab, no rate card and no MOQ, so the only comparison worth running is published price × quantity — arithmetic you can do without us. If you are buying sixteen kilograms of oil a week, message us on WhatsApp at +91 7397976926 and talk to a person. We are not going to promise a discount on a web page.

The wick row reverses the instinct you brought to this page. Eco Candle Wicks are flat per wick at every pack size — ₹5.90 Thin (C1), ₹9.44 Thick (C2), identical whether you buy ten or a thousand. The 1,000 pack buys continuity of supply, not a lower price, which cuts both ways: no penalty for keeping a generous buffer, since spares cost what the originals did, and no financial argument for over-ordering. Buy the 1,000 pack because you do not want to run out mid-week.

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