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.

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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?