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I'll get back to theme days once I find a groove of posting regularly. In the meantime, most of my posts are about some variation of books, bikes, buses, or Broadway. Plus bits about writing, nonprofits, and grief from time to time.

This blog is mostly lighthearted and pretty silly. It's not about the terrible things happening in the world, but please know that I'm not ignoring those things. I just generally don't write about them here.

29 January 2016

Melt It All Away

From time to time, people ask me what to do with their candles that have burned all the way to the bottom but left a fair amount of wax behind. I don't know if people ask me because I write about reusing so often, or because I do other green things so it's naturally presumed that I have have Thoughts On The Subject.

Source: Sorina Bindea on
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I do, as it happens. Before I married a guy with asthma, I was quite the scented candle fanatic (and from where I'm sitting in my living room, I can see four right now, so I suppose I am again) and they never burn down to my satisfaction. I paid for that whole jar of wax, dangit, and I am not amused when it burns straight down the middle. That's just cheating.

Some things I've tried with varying degrees of success: Stick a tealight in it and see what happens. (Nothing. Don't bother.) Put the jar on one of those heater things--this one works, of course. Stick a taper candle in the middle-- this one works best if you cut the taper down to the size of your jar, but in the end it really only works marginally better than putting in a tealight.

Then there's sticking in a new wick, which I've also done. This works best in conjunction with melting the whole thing down. If I were going to try this again, I think I'd get the wax just warm enough to pop out of the jar, put it into a double-boiler-ish setup so it melts faster, then pour it back in once I'd made sure the wick was in place. (Not what I did last time. Last time--well, let's just say there was a big mess.) Oh, and once you finally do melt the candle all the way to the end, remember there are things you can do with the empty jar, like put a pillar candle in it to catch the spare wax, for instance.

And, of course, you can always ask Pinterest to see what people more expert than I am have to say.

Do you burn scented candles? What do you do with the leftover wax?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

You can clean wax from the jars by turning them upside down on a parchment or wax paper lined baking sheet and baking them at a low temperature till the wax melts onto the liner. I can think of a variety of ways to repurpose the wax.

Su said...

'Tis true! I mostly just re-make it into a candle, but one *could* do other things with it.