My Wooden Wick Keeps Going Out in a 200 g Soy Candle — Should I Test a Wider Wooden Wick, Different Thickness or Another Wick Type?

Performance Wooden Wicks come in one width — there is no gauge to step to

Start with the part that saves you a week. Performance Wooden Wicks are imported and sold in a single width. There are three variants on the page and all three contain the same wick; what differs is how many you get and what each one costs. There is no wide version, no narrow version, no two-ply or triple-ply option, and no booster strip. If you have been scrolling the page looking for the size dropdown, that is why you cannot find it. A supplier who answered this question with "try the next width up" would be selling you something that does not exist.

That matters because the instinct behind the question is correct. When a cotton wick fails you reach for a different gauge, and in a braided cotton range that is the right first move. A wooden wick does not work that way in CSI's catalogue. The page describes the wicks as thin strips of wood that vaporise as they burn, and it states that one pack contains ten wicks and wick tabs. What it does not publish — and what no CSI wick page publishes — is a diameter-to-wick sizing chart, a burn time, a flame height or a pool measurement. Our live wooden wick guide covers what the family is for, and the wick guide by diameter covers the general diameter reasoning; this page is about what to change when the one width you have is going out.

Put that pack ladder beside the rest of the range and the shape of the decision changes. Eco Candle Wicks Thick (C2) is ₹9.44 a piece and flat at every pack size from ten up to a thousand; Cotton Braided Wicks Ready Made is ₹12.00 a piece and flat throughout. A wooden wick is 6.25 times the price of a Thick (C2) at the smallest pack. Ten wooden wicks cost ₹590.00 — the same money as 100 g of the fragrance oil in the candle, and more than sixty Thick (C2) wicks. That is not an argument against wooden wicks, which sell a different kind of candle. It is an argument for exhausting the free moves before you buy anything at all.

Why a wooden wick goes out, in the order the causes are worth checking

Here is the general mechanism, stated as general candle-making practice rather than as anything we have measured. A wick is a fuel pump. Liquid wax climbs it, the flame vaporises what arrives, and the flame's own heat melts more wax to keep the column fed. Extinction happens when that loop breaks in one of two directions: too little dry wick above the pool for a flame to establish, or too much liquid arriving for the flame to burn, which floods the base and puts it out. Wooden wicks are unusually sensitive at the first of those, because a flat strip of wood holds a wide, low flame rather than the tall taper a braided cotton wick makes, and a wide low flame sits close to the wax surface where the pool can reach it.

That is why this page puts trim length first and width nowhere. The exposed length of wood above the wax is the single variable that decides whether the flame starts above the pool or in it, and it is a variable you set with a Candle Wick Cutter at ₹295.00, not with a purchase decision. The second variable is whether the tab is sitting flat on the base of the jar at all: a tab that has tilted during the pour lifts one edge of the strip and drops the other into the wax, and the low edge drowns first. Both of those are process, both are free to correct, and both are routinely misread as a sizing problem.

Only after those two does fuel chemistry come into it. At 8% of wax weight your 200 g candle is carrying 16 g of Dark Vanilla Oud, and fragrance oil is not a drop-in substitute for wax in a wick's feed path — it changes how the melted mixture flows and how readily it vaporises. In general practice, a wick that is adequate in unscented wax can become marginal at load, and the thinner the fuel path the more that shows. A wooden wick's path is the grain of the wood, and you cannot re-gauge it. You can, however, put less oil in front of it.

The five moves, in order, each with its price per candle

The order below is not about which cause is most likely — it is about which test is cheapest to run and easiest to undo. Any diagnostic order that starts with the most expensive change is a shopping list pretending to be a method. Work down the list and stop at the first move that holds across three candles, because a fix that works once is a coincidence.

What the candle costs on each wick, line by line

The fill reading carried through every figure below is the one your question states: 200 g of wax at 8% of wax weight, which is 200 g of Luxury Soy Wax Chunks plus 16 g of Dark Vanilla Oud, for 216 g poured. That is a different number from "a 200 g candle" read as total fill, so write down which one you are using before you repeat the test. Wax at ₹599.00 per kilogram from the 1 kg pack puts ₹119.80 of wax in the jar. Oil at ₹5.90 per gram from the 100 gm pack puts ₹94.40 of fragrance in it. The vessel costed here is the Clear Glass Jar with Golden Lid at ₹94.40 a piece from the Pack of 10 — priced per piece as a real CSI cost line, with no claim that your 200 g fill belongs in it; its page publishes a 150 g fill capacity, an 8 cm height, a 7 cm outer rim diameter and a hot-pour limit of 85°C.

Two readings out of that table are worth more than the rest. The first: with a wooden wick the wick is 16.05% of the candle's materials, and with a Thick (C2) it is 2.97%. Changing family multiplies the wick's share of your cost by 5.40, which is a real commercial fact about the decision and nothing to do with how either wick burns. The second: the wooden wick at ₹59.00 is 49.25% of the wax in the same candle. You are paying roughly half the price of the wax for the thing that lights it, which is defensible when the crackle and the look are what the customer is buying, and indefensible when the candle keeps going out.

If you are pouring into the vessel costed above rather than your own 200 g jar, run the arithmetic on its own published fill instead and say so on the log. At 150 g of wax at 8% the candle carries 12 g of oil for 162 g poured, which is ₹89.85 of wax and ₹70.80 of fragrance. The wick cost does not change with fill weight, so the wooden wick's share of a smaller candle is larger, not smaller — which is the opposite of what most people assume when they shrink a candle to protect a margin.

The relight log: a protocol, a sheet, and thresholds you set

Extinction is the easiest wick fault to record and the one most often recorded badly, because it is remembered rather than written. "It kept going out" is not a result; "it self-extinguished twice in session two and once in session three, both times within the first half of the session, on a candle trimmed to the length on line one" is a result, and it points at a different move than the first sentence does. CSI publishes no burn times, relight rates, pool diameters, flame heights or soot measurements for any wick in the range, and we have not burned your wax with your oil in your jar. What a supplier can give you is the sheet.

Twelve rows, four candles, and not one figure supplied by us. Notice that six of the twelve are recorded at the light rather than at the end of the session: an extinction problem lives in the first minutes, which is exactly the part of a burn test people do not write down. One calendar note, because this question usually arrives with a deadline behind it: Diwali 2026 falls on 8 November 2026, and four candles plus a 14–21 day cure plus three repeats of whichever move holds is the better part of six weeks. If the deadline is already inside that window, the honest commercial answer is to pour this season on Eco Candle Wicks Thick (C2) and move the wooden line to the next one.

The order to place, and what it leaves on your shelf

This is the whole diagnostic order. It is deliberately not a bulk order: the wooden line is the ten-pack, not the hundred-pack, and the cotton line is the ten-pack too, because the point of this order is to find out which family the candle wants, not to stock either of them. Thirty wooden wicks would not make the answer arrive faster.

That ₹2,917.40 is not what the diagnosis costs, and reading it as a sunk cost is how people decide to keep lighting the broken candle instead. The four candles consume ₹1,407.24 of material. The remaining ₹1,510.16, which is 51.76% of the order, is stock that stays on your shelf and goes straight into production candles the day the log gives you an answer: seven wooden wicks, nine cotton wicks, six vessels, the balance of the oil and most of a sheet of stickers. The genuine cost of finding out why your wooden wick goes out is four jars, 800 g of wax, under 60 g of oil and about ₹186.44 of wick.

What this page deliberately will not tell you

No wider wooden wick, and no apology for it. Performance Wooden Wicks are one width. We have not offered you a second gauge, hinted that one is coming, or suggested that doubling the strip is a supported configuration, because none of those would be true. If the one width does not suit your candle after the five moves, cotton suits it, and that is a cheaper answer than the one you came for.

No burn data, anywhere on this page. No burn hours, no relight counts, no pool width in millimetres, no flame height, no consumption in grams per hour, no soot grade, and no trim length presented as ours. CSI publishes none of those for any wick in the range, none exists in our figures, and we are not going to borrow a number from somewhere else and let it read as a measurement we took.

No sizing chart, and no diameter claim about your jar. Not one wick page in the range carries a chart mapping diameters to wicks, so you will not find one printed above. The vessel costed here is priced per piece; its page publishes a 150 g fill capacity and a 7 cm outer rim diameter, and the figure your wick decision actually rests on is the internal diameter at the wax surface, which you measure with a ruler across the inside of the mouth. A 7 cm surface is about 38.48 cm² of wax for one flame to warm, and that is geometry rather than test data.

And an honest word on the service. Among the reviews at the top of this page is a four-star one on Eco Candle Wicks that asks us, in the buyer's own words, to work on pricing and on delivery timelines. It is published exactly as it was written, because a page recommending a cheap test order should carry what buyers say about ordering. On price, the one thing we can state plainly is that cotton costs the same per piece whether you buy ten or a thousand, so nothing in our pricing rewards you for committing before the log says yes — and wooden wicks, which do fall 30.00% with volume, reward you for waiting rather than guessing. On delivery there is nothing published we can quote beyond the service names, their own published transit wording, and the store's request to allow 1-2 business days for order processing; plan the cure around a comfortable margin and ask on WhatsApp if a date matters.

What is left, after those subtractions, is the part a supplier can honestly do: say how wide the wick range is, price every move to the paisa, put the free ones first, and hand you a log. Four candles, ₹2,917.40 of stock of which ₹1,510.16 stays on the shelf, and one approved line at the end of it that you can reorder at a rate you already know.

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