Re-wicked Tealights

A few years ago I unknowingly bought a pack of the world's worst tealights (Sainsbury's Basics). The wicks always died way before the wax was consumed, so you got around half the burn time you ought to.

This is my go at fixing them, rather than wasting all that wax! I only bought new wicks for this project, as I had all the other supplies I needed and wanted to reuse as much of the original candles as I could. If you're starting from scratch, you can skip the fragrance and colourants to cut down on costs if preferred.

1. poorly made tealights (I had just over thirty)
2. replacement tealight wicks (I bought ones recommended for paraffin wax)
3. double boiler
4. spatula

Optional:

1. fragrance oil suitable for candles (I used marshmallow)
2. scales, a spare glass jar and a pipette, for weighing out fragrance oil
3. candle dyes
4. wick stickers (I decided not to use these, to cut down on materials, but you will get a more professional result using them)

I found that with a bit of jiggling I could get the candles out of their metal cups fairly easily, with only one or two casualties. I was able to reuse almost all the cups. Likewise the crappy wicks came out easily too, so I was left with a bunch of cakes of paraffin wax, the metal cups, and a bunch of wicks that went straight in the bin.

I weighed out ten cakes of wax, which came to 107g, and then calculated 3.5% of that to give a medium fragranced candle. It came to about 3.7g of fragrance (I did my candles in three batches, but if you want to melt all the wax at once and do the whole lot, weigh the whole lot and then calculate 3.5% of the total).

I started off by melting a little bit of wax, as I wanted to try sticking the new wicks down using the candle wax itself (this worked with about a 70% success rate I'd say, it was better than nothing, and cheaper than using wick stickers, but if I ever wanted to sell candles, or give them as a nice gift, I'd crack out the wick stickers).

Once my first bit of wax (unfragranced) was melted, I dipped the new wicks in, base first, and stuck them down to the middle of the metal cases. More wax and a firm smooshing with my fingers worked best!

While I was sticking down all my wicks, I simultaneously put ten pucks of wax on to melt. Once I'd finished with the wicks and the wax was all melted, I added the weighed out fragrance oil (and dye when I did the second and third batches - I wiped the remnants of coloured wax out with kitchen towel). I stirred it all together and took it off the heat.

You can test how your finished colours will look by dropping a little dyed wax onto a kitchen towel - I went a little darker than I'd intended, which is easy to do with such small quantities, but they still turned out nice.

Next I filled each candle cup with wax. I tried a couple of different methods with this, to see what worked best with keeping the wicks in place. I tried a partial pour, letting it cool a little and then filling to the brim, but this was less successful than just filling it all at once.

If the wicks went way off centre, I carefully moved them back with my fingers, which worked more or less ok.

I let the candles set (this was pretty quick, about an hour), and then put them aside for a week to let them 100% cure, before trimming all the wicks.

I lit one candle, and let it burn continuously. It lasted around two hours, and the wax was burned up almost completely. It smelled nice too, noticeable but not overpowering. So we're calling that a win!

Overall I'm really happy with my experiments - the candles are now fully functioning, smell great, and the only new element I bought in was a pack of wicks.

If I wanted to make them perfect, I would use wick stickers to centre them perfectly, and I'd also keep aside some of the coloured wax to top the candles up the next day (this would give me a fully level surface instead of a little dip where the wax has shrunk as it cooled). I'd also be using nicer containers if I wanted to make them really pretty. But as my aim here was to fix up a specific set of candles without buying in a bunch of supplies, I'm really pleased with how they turned out!