hot throw in CBA Soy

[Candle4Ewe]

I am new to candle making, and purchased the CBA Soy at the recommendation of the seller. The candles are beautiful, and smell terrific until they are lit. Then there is barely any hot throw. From what I have read on this forum, that is a known problem with the CBA. Now I have about 35 pounds of it that I don't know what to do with :/ Is there anything I can do to repurpose it? My local supplier, candlesandsupplies.com, does not carry the C3 that seems to be recommended. Is there an alternative soy wax that would be good for novices that has good hot throw and makes an attractive candle?

Thanks for any help!

[inthedark]

Hi Candle4Ewe, I use EcoSoya CB-Advanced soy wax and I have found that most of the fragrances that I have tried usually work at a maximum of 8% fragrance load, anything over and your fragrance throw can diminish depending on the fragrance oil. I have tried up to 18% fragrance load as an experiment, the hot scent throw was very weak and it had an extremely ugly top once the melt pool had cooled but burned very well.  I live in Australia so I am limited in the range of fragrance oils available here. I have found that some of the nicest fragrance oils actually give off no hot scent throw unless the wax is heated to over 90 deg C (194 deg F) which is not obtainable unless you seriously over wick your candle and have no regard for the fragrance flash point or you wish to create a flame torch. I am currently experimenting with a blend of CB-Advanced soy wax, pillar blend soy wax, bees wax, coconut wax/oil with CDN wicks and I have found some slight hot scent throw improvement (haven’t tried HTP wicks with this blend yet). To those of you who disagree with blending other waxes, I have done it for a reason and it works for me. This is my opinion only ! (It will create visible wet spots if you are using clear or transparent containers but Advanced soy wax will when the set wax is exposed to sharp temperature differences anyway.)

I usually heat my wax up to 83 deg C (181.4 deg F) and add my fragrance oil (I have never found that the scent burns off as others have suggested in the past), stir for a minute or two and pour around 55 to 58 deg C (131 to 136.4 deg F) with an ambient room temperature around 22 deg C (71.6 deg F). I have also found that when you pour the fragrance oil in to the wax and mix it, you will usually get an indication of the scent throw strength when the wax and fragrance oil are around the 72 to 74 deg C mark (161.6 to 165.2 deg F), if you find very little scent at those temperatures when you are mixing, you usually don’t get much hot scent throw. Hope that helps.