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Candle making
All Containers›Shop by use case›Candle making›Growing the operation›Equipment at the next sizeShop all candles →
Growing the operation

Equipment at the next size

By Dwight Davis, Founder

Updated

On this page5

Time your own process before buying anything, because the answer is rarely the machine people want.

Buy against measured hours

Minutes per hundred candles for pouring, for trimming and cleaning, for labeling, for banding and boxing.

Then spend against the largest number. In almost every hand operation that is finishing, not pouring.

A melter and multiple pots

A temperature-controlled melter as a reservoir, feeding two or three pouring pots.

That combination fixes the real constraint, which is pouring inside the window, rather than the apparent one, which is melting enough wax.

A melter with a spigot lets you draw wax at temperature without lifting anything hot, which is a safety improvement as much as a speed one.

Label applicator

A hand-cranked roller for round vessels is inexpensive and makes labels straight, which is the most visible signal of a produced rather than a homemade candle.

It is usually the best-value purchase at this stage and it is rarely the first one made.

What to resist

A filling machine before a few thousand per run: it will sit idle and cost cleaning time on every small batch.

Anything specific to one vessel, until that vessel is certain.

And a larger melter bought to enable larger batches, when larger batches are limited by the pour window rather than by melt capacity. That is the purchase that most often disappoints in this craft.

References

No published source. This page is written from practice rather than from published guidance. No extension service or agency publishes on this question for candles, so nothing here is cited, and it should be weighed as experience and not as a standard.
Written from the federal regulation, the CPSC material and the published scope of the ASTM candle standards. The standards themselves are copyrighted documents that must be bought; what is described here is their scope and requirements as published, not their text. Your own burn testing against your own vessel and wick is what establishes whether a candle you made is safe.