Kevin Fischer

And... WSP has been sold to a different private equity firm. Wow. Just wow. https://inclineequity.com/incline-sells-wholesale-supplies-plus/

Kudos for searching before posting though!

Burned a tin in 2°F MN weather for fun a few days ago. Takes a LOT more thermal energy to melt wax, and it tunneled like crazy. That's an extreme temperature, but the theory holds up. Warmer environments need less wick, colder environments need more. Balancing the combustion on top of that? That's where things get really interesting. Just cause you can generate the right amount of heat doesn't mean you're making a healthy candle.

Agreed.

Is it greater than 3"?

oh no

The craziest part is how much disruption two reports of high flames and broken glass caused. Not to suggest the other 141,998 were safe, but just how serious candle safety is taken by CPSC.

I find items like insurance, rent, equipment, and anything else that doesn't play well on a per-candle basis are best calculated on an axis of time as a period cost. And I pay for it like this: I'll break down my costs for every unit (like @MilosCandlesdid above)... call these unit costs Estimate the sales for every unit over a period of time - let's use a month for arguments sake... call this revenue Determine the effective monthly costs that aren't unit-based... call these period costs If insurance cost $500/yr, that would be $42 a month. I buy about $50 of shipping supplies per month (hard to map this 1:1 with a candle if you occasionally ship multiples together) If my equipment budget was $100/yr, that would be $8 a month If my craft show overhead totaled $135... that would be $135 For a one month period, I now have total costs of my operation (ignoring cashflow) by adding total unit costs with total period costs My net profit is the #2 - #4 (monthly revenue - all costs for the month) The only way it makes sense for me to calculate time is if I truly hire somebodies help and can easily tie it into a unit cost of the candle... but typically that's easier to manage as a period cost. "Paying" for my time on an hourly basis is wildly difficult to estimate, but it's fun to see how I end up over the course of a month by dividing my estimated total time investment by the net profit. So yeah... keeping with the x2 and x3 idea is a bit crazy and really depends on the impact of your period costs. As with all estimations, these things work best with data and good structure. Hopefully I didn't take this wildly off track, @TallTayl!

@TallTayl definitely. It wouldn't hurt to dedicate an entire series to safety. @Marisa11 thank you! I agree - some of the BBW candles I've had were alarmingly hot.

For what it's worth, I've got a blog post about it https://armatagecandlecompany.com/blog/basic-burn-test/ You may also find some of my verbal diarrhea on the tube as well. Safety always trumps performance/hot throw. Great testing sheet! And I feel like we need to encourage others in our industry to build more tracing into their product lines. Freaks me out how easy it is to get into candle making. I'm not a huge proponent of regulation, but I can't for the life of me figure out why these ASTM standards didn't become mandatory. They seem to have died before a council a few years back. Calling them Voluntary makes people think they have a choice, if they even know it exists at all lol

6

Generally speaking, a week should give you a decent look at whether the wick is going to work. Two weeks is better than one, but C-3 will evolve/harden forever. A few months and the wick that worked at 1-week might be too small at 3 months. Most of that behavior settles in the first two weeks (anecdotally, at least). Also comes down to "when" you're expecting your consumers to use them a bit, but I always wait two weeks. I kill time by pouring candles every day.

I'd pay to see boiling points on the fragrance oils. I mean, I can do it myself but that's so much work. General volatility is tied up to the boiling point. I just don't know how complex fragrance oils are compared to essential oils that potentially contain hundreds of different compounds that evaporate at different rates. Essential oils suffer in the performance category mostly because of their volatility in the presence of candle making temperature ranges, but they also degrade from light and heat. Just go really interested in the EO/FO volatility discussion as things went along. No need to hijack this thread any further!

The way you use the word "layer" makes me think you're talking about a second pour event, rather than sub-surface cratering, yes? As in, the top dips down like a bowl and you're filling that in to have a flat-topped candle?

For sure. At that point we're probably discussing the effective volumes and a weird level of thermodynamic interpolation. Even if we answered it perfectly, it doesn't matter because flash points are irrelevant for candle making processes. Flashing off aromatic compounds is part of why wick sizing ends up being important (among other reasons) for generating a flame that works in harmony with the melt pool. An entirely different discussion of it's own.