Pillar Candle Best Practices
Safety First
Be thoughtful about where you burn your candle. Make sure it’s level, make sure nothing will be set aflame by it nearby, and don’t put it near any circulating air, i.e. open windows, fans, high traffic areas. All of these thing will adversely affect the burn time and burn quality of your candle.
Keep your wicks trimmed to 1/4 inch
Before every use, for any candle, trim your wick. This keeps your candle from burning too hot and tunneling and will extend its life about 25% in general. If the wick is too long the candle will burn too hot, which could create several issues for your candle, each of which would negatively affect your burn time. If the wick is too short the flame will suffocate. If the wick is too long it could burn too hot and “tunnel”. Which essentially means that one side will burn more than the other, leading that side to collapse and not only spill all of the collected hot wax everywhere, but it will be much harder to light the candle with its remaining wax for any meaningfully amount of time.
Uneven Melting
If you are burning your pillar candle and there is excess wax, leaving behind “walls” of wax that the heat isn’t reaching, try gently massaging the top of the “walls” towards the center of the candle while it’s still warm. This should allow the heat to better reach the upper parts of the candle as it burns down.
Size and Time Matter
The first burn for a candle is important. The melt pool creates a sort of boundary when it cools the first time and if it’s too small of a diameter then it could adversely effect the burn time and quality of your candle for your subsequent uses afterwards. For our candles you should burn the beehive for about an hour, the Honeycomb Pillar should be burned for about and hour to 1.5 hours, and the Bee-hemoth should be burned for about 2.5-3 hours for their first time.
Don’t let your candles burn too long though. It is not recommended to let any candle burn longer than 4 hours. That is around the time when carbon mushrooms will form and this will make your flame too hot and it will tunnel. Tunneling is a problem that is hard to come back from. Usually a pillar candle that has tunneled will be nearly unusable, Better to put the leftovers in a wax-melter if that occurs.
Beeswax is very different from its contemporary wax counterparts like paraffin, coconut, and soy. The first difference being the higher burn temperature. It doesn’t start melting until 144F/62.2C, which means it won’t melt on some of the hottest days of the year. Good thing for the bees, they’d be out of luck if their homes melted every other weekend in the summer. But this also means it can be a bit more finicky when burning. A higher melting point means that
If the wax touches you when it’s at it hottest, it could burn you. Beeswax is not meant to be applied to skin for any reason when it is melted.
Having beeswax pillar candles means keeping a close eye on them for the entirety of their burn time. Leaving them unattended could mean the difference between ruining your candle and trying to salvage whatever is left into a wax warmer, or your candle having a longer life span.
Pillar candles are essentially different from their foil, the container candle. A container candle is exactly what it sounds like, any candle that is inside of a vessel like a glass, mug, tin, etc. When you burn a pillar candle there is a chance for wax to drip down the side. For the most part, this shouldn’t happen if the candle is burning well, but when there is no container to hold the wax there is a chance for spills or dribbles. Be sure to keep your candle level, away from drafts, and on a plate or candelabra to avoid this.
Be Thoughtful of the Differences
(Burned poorly on purpose to get demonstrative pictures)
This tunneling effect happens when it burns unevenly. This can be caused by wind from high trafficked areas in the home, open windows, fans, AC units, etc. Or the wick is too long and beginning to burn hotter than it should, or similarly it’s too hot because it’s been burning longer than it should. Try to avoid this by keeping it as level as possible in the least drafty place that it’s safe to burn in.
In extreme cases, after you’ve snuffed the candle out, you can try to patch the sides with a bit of malleable, but not fully melted wax to try and make a barrier wall for the next burn so that it won’t drip over one side and tunnel. Be careful, consider using disposable gloves if the wax is very hot, but honestly this only works about half the time. You’ll likely want to melt the remains in a wax warmer.
