How Wickless Candle Testing Can Save You Time
“Wickless” can mean a lot of things to a home fragrance maker.
Most commonly calling something wickless in candlemaking means a wax melt or tart, which are blocks of wax and fragrance designed for melting without a flame.
Wickless testing is a different beast altogether, and serves as the subject of this post where you’ll learn all about how using it can accelerate your candle tests to save you precious time in the workshop.
What Is Wickless Testing?
Wickless testing is a candle making testing framework for systematically checking multiple different wick sizes and series without creating a new candle for each wick.
Typically, a candle maker will pour the initial candle without a wick, allow it to cure an appropriate amount of time, then manually insert a wick without a tab prior to starting a burn test.
If the selected wick (or wicks) fails the test, it is simply removed with pliers or by hand from the candle and replaced with a different wick before restarting the test.
Make sure the surface of the candle is “reset” to a smooth top to evaluate the behavior of the replacement wick.
Wicks that successfully pass a burn test are continually tested per normal, but replaced if they don’t meet the required standard.
This method does not always work as well for harder, brittle waxes like palm or beeswax given the “rip and replace” nature of this method, but your mileage may vary. Read more about the thermal properties of beeswax here.
When Should You Use Wickless Testing?
Wickless testing is one way to rapidly evaluate a lot of different wicks in a single container or mold without rebuilding the entire candle every time a wick test fails.
Most candle makers use this method during their design and development phase – creating a new candle.
While you can replace the wick using more traditional means, using a non-tabbed wick is usually quicker and easier to execute since you don’t need an apple corer.
Consider using the wickless testing framework when you create a new candle design from scratch and have no clue which wick size or series to pursue. Using the framework also works when you need to identify potential changes in the supply chain because a previous design is behaving differently.
Getting Started
Wickless testing is a multi-step process:
- Create a new candle in a container or mold without a wick
- Allow candle to cure for an appropriate period of time. Generally speaking:
- Soy = 14 days
- Paraffin = 72 hours
- Palm = 5 – 7 days
- Beeswax = 5 – 7 days
- Parasoy = 7 – 14 days
- Using an item that can pierce the wax (skewer, etc) create a pilot hole where you intend on placing the wick.
- Insert a tab-less wick into the pilot hole and restore the surface of the candle with a heat gun, if needed.
- Allow the surface to cool for a minimum of 5 – 8 hours.
- Perform wick test. Learn more about safety testing here.
Note: the following steps are only necessary if the candle fails the test.
- Remove the existing wick after the wax has cooled. Pliers recommended, but any practical way to pull vertically out of the candle works.
- If the area left by the existing wick is too small, enlarge by any means necessary.
- Insert new wick into the existing or new pilot hole.
- Restore the candle top using a heat gun.
Repeat steps 6 through 10 until satisfied.
Benefits
Wickless testing is an efficient way to learn which wick works best in your design.
Benefit #1: INVENTORY
One of the primary benefits is removing the need to create a new candle for every wick you want to test.
Many candle makers have a “graveyard” of old candles that didn’t work out, which grows into a collection of unused wax tied up with a wick that doesn’t fit. By utilizing the same candle for every iteration and only replacing the wick, you can save on supplies by limiting the amount of candles you make for purely testing purposes.
This means you have more wax to use in your production line or other testing.
Benefit #2: SPEED
Experienced chandlers know that curing is the longest part of candle design. Depending on your wax, you may need to wait up to two weeks to perform a proper burn test.
Wickless testing enables you to re-use the same candle for every test, just using a different wick.
Obviously this means huge gains in time as you don’t need to wait for the entire candle to cure before starting a wick test. While these gains in iteration speed are advantageous, they don’t always translate into system speed. More on that below.
Cautions
Wickless tests aren’t all butterflies and efficiency. Don’t jump into this trend before understanding the potential shortcomings.
Caution #1: SYSTEM SPEED vs ITERATION SPEED
While the methods allow you to quickly iterate through a lot of wicks, you aren’t necessarily gaining complete acceptance of the design through wickless testing.
Let’s explain.
Suppose you pour a candle and test three wicks that all fail, but the fourth wick you check passes the burn test. One problem is that you haven’t burn tested the entire candle with that successful, fourth wick.
The way a candle burns depends on the prior burn’s characteristics. Stated differently, if the previous burn created a deep enough melt pool, that wax reacts different to the current wick because it hasn’t “re-cured” (unless you waited the appropriate amount of time before testing again).
Everything about the melt pool depth and width of the previous burn potentially impacts the next burn; previously melted wax is easier to re-melt which may lead one to believe the wick is hotter than it actually is. In reality, that same wick may not have created as wide or deep as a melt pool if it was the first time melting the wax.
This doesn’t always mean the “winning” wick is bad.
Iteration speed is how fast you can test between wicks. System speed refers to how long it takes to identify a winning wick.
Generally speaking, you need to perform a complete burn test with a single wick, start to finish, before accepting it as the right wick for your candle.
In the earlier example, if the fourth wick appears to be awesome, the right follow-up move is to create a fresh candle with that wick (the normal way) and burn test it from start to finish. This validates that wick was correct since there’s unknowns about how the prior three failed wicks may have impacted the final wicks behavior.
Caution #2: WICK STABILITY
Possibly the largest drawback in wickless testing is the lack of a wick tab.
If you think about how wicks support themselves, they generally have a tab connected to the bottom of the candle jar. Tabs have a small neck, almost a jacket, that hold the wick upright.
Unmelted wax also holds the wick upright, preventing it from tipping or moving off center.
However, when the candle nears the end of its life and all the wax is melted during operation (full melt pool… like the entire candle is a melt pool), the wick tab is the only thing holding the wick.
Wickless testing doesn’t include a wick tab, meaning the wick may just lose structure and tip into the candle, self extinguishing. This shouldn’t be a fire hazard in any way, but it means you can’t test the bottom part of the candle effectively.
Final Thoughts
Wickless testing offers a lot of agility in your process.
By omitting wicks in your design, and swapping them in and out as needed, you can iterate much quicker through a variety of different sizes and series. You’re also making great use of your supplies and inventory since you don’t need to make an individual candle for every wick you want to test.
No matter the results of your wickless testing, it’s best practice to perform a proper burn test with a traditionally built candle using a single wick. This is the only way to convincingly understand the full relationship between the wick and the candle because iterative wicks can influence the results in unknown ways.
If you enjoyed this, consider checking out 7 Ways To Test Candles More Quickly (which includes a bit on wickless testing too!).
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