Burning Guide for Beeswax Candles
We’ve put together this burning guide to help you get the best out of your beeswax candles.
Beeswax is a natural wax with a realtively high melting temperature compared with other waxes used for candles.
As a result they have a relatively long burn time (which is one of their biggest selling points) compared with other waxes and do enjoy long burning times, but some care is needed to get the best out of your beeswax candle.
Normal Appearance of Candles Related to Burn Time
How the Candles Burn
We have designed the candles to have a thin wall around the edge of the wax pool to help contain the molten wax.
With the larger candles this wall is only apparent after 6-8 hours of burning (above), it takes 2-3 burning sessions for the heat to penetrate the outer edge due to
the diameter of the larger candles.
Longer burn times than 3 hours will help to reduce the thickness of the residual wall on the candle.
An example of how the larger church candles enjoy a longer burn time is that we have customers who use the large church candles for long ritual ceremonies burning for 24 hours+ and these candles perform very well in these circumstances and traditionally beeswax candles would have been used in this way for extended periods of time, to give light as one of the oldest light source known to man.
Trimming the Wick
We are often asked if you have to trim the wick, it’s not straight forward. If you are burning for extended periods of time you do not necessarily have to extinguish the candle and trim the wick. The wick will burn down with the candle. But it can be helpful between burns to trim the wick slightly if you notice that the wick is particularly long, or has curved to one side.
If the wick isn’t trimmed and it has folded to one side then that can cause uneven heat distribution to the candle and guttering on one side.
See below the example of how the wick looks before trimming on the left, and after trimming on the right.
Alternatively checkout the video we put together on trimming the wick.
Positioning your Beeswax Candle
Ensure your candle is level, on a heat proof surface, out of draughts and at least 15cm away from other candles, to avoid any transfer of heat.
Dinner candles can be badly affected by draughts and not being straight in their holder.
With its small diameter, an uneven burn is more detrimental to a dinner candle and can cause dripping. It is imperitive to ensure these candles are vertically level to reduce the chance of dripping, and also important to trim the wick between burns to avoid the uneven distribution of heat from a curled wick.
Burn Times
For the 50 hour, 65 hour and 120 hour pillar candles we recommend a burn time of 3-4 hours, beeswax has a high melting point and requires time for the heat to penetrate the outer edge of the wax.
Historically beeswax candles were burnt for extended periods of time, as in all day, however, since the introduction of fire regulations we can only recommend 3-4 hours in keeping with the regulations.
For the small pillar candles we recommend a burn time up to 3 hours but the candle also responds well to 1-2 hour burn time.
If you are looking to burn a candle for just an hour at a time, we recommend you use the dinner candles, these are designed for shorter use.
Troubleshooting
If you have burnt a large pillar candle for just a short period of time (1-2h) repeatedly, you will need to trim the wax wall down to reset the candle and burn the candle for a longer period of time as suggested above.
For any further help with troubleshooting, please either check out the videos on this page, or do contact us on e-mail with a photo of the problem and we’ll do our best to help.