Cost per sellable candle, with the wasted wax and the seconds in it

Counts from one finished batch, not a plan. The candles poured is the number that came out of the moulds or jars; the three counts below it are the ones you did not sell at full price. What is left is a first. If the three counts come to more candles than you poured, the page says so and prints no cost a first and no defect rate. The three counts here are ones you counted; the 3 in the worked example, and the one-click fill beside the quoted 3 test candles in part G, are a publisher’s figure about batches in general and not a count of yours.

Two figures, and they apply to every material row you mark as melted and poured in part C. This page ships no allowance of its own. Weigh your pitcher: pour the batch, let what is left set, weigh the pitcher, subtract its empty weight. The figure you weigh is about your pitcher; none of the published figures is. A weighed figure is turned into a percentage of what the candles took and that one percentage is then applied to each poured row, because what is left in the pitcher is the same melt the candles are made of. That needs every poured row in part C to be entered for one candle: an amount entered for the whole batch already includes whatever the batch used, so there is no melt left for the weighed figure to be a share of, and the page says so and shares out nothing rather than loading it onto the other rows.

One row per material. What a pack cost, what that pack contained, and how much of it this candle or this batch used. The amount is in grams for a pack bought by weight, millilitres for a pack bought by volume, and each for a pack of things you count; the conversion from pounds, ounces or kilograms is shown. An ounce here is the avoirdupois ounce, 28.349523125 g, which is the same either side of the Atlantic; fl oz is the US fluid ounce, 29.5735295625 ml, and an imperial fluid ounce is 28.4130625 ml, so an imperial pack size typed into this page comes out 4.1 per cent larger than the pack you bought. A row you do not use can be left at zero and it prints nothing.

The last question is underneath, and none of the unit-cost calculators read for this page asks it - claycalc’s, in part G below, among them: you opened a pack and did not finish it, so who pays for the rest. That is about the pages read on 2026-09-29 and nothing wider; another calculator may well ask it. Both answers are printed on every line and you pick which one the cost a candle uses. Carrying it is right if the remainder gets used; charging it to this batch is right if it goes stale, gets contaminated or sits for a year. You know which, and the page does not decide it for you.

Minutes on this batch, at the rate you pay yourself, and the monthly overhead spread over the candles you make in a month. Both are your figures. The page has no view on what an hour of your time is worth.

The channel fee is a percentage you type, so nothing on this page goes stale when a marketplace changes its terms. The margin is also yours: the page prints the price at which this batch reaches the margin you entered and says nothing about whether that margin is the right one. It does not recommend a price and it has no opinion on your prices.

Every line is computed from the figures printed beside it. Quantities run to a tenth of a gram or a millilitre and money to the cent, which is what a bench scale and an invoice read. The lines that belong beside an input are printed there - the pitcher percentage in part B, the six material rows in part C, the hours and the overhead a candle in part D - and the numbering runs straight through, so the working is one list and no line of it is printed twice.

Both costs divide this batch's money, and where the seconds recovered anything they do not divide the same figure of it. The one on the left divides what the batch cost by the candles you poured, which is the figure a cost calculator prints when it divides by the candles that came out; the one on the right divides what is left after the seconds have paid some of it back by the candles you can sell at full price. Two numerators and two divisors, and all four are lines of the working above. The difference is not an opinion about your pricing: it is the test candles, the seconds and the scrapped candles you counted in part A. Where those counts are nothing there is nothing to divide out, so the two figures are the same number and the gap is nothing — and the cell on the right says so rather than leaving you to wonder why the page printed one figure twice.

This page ships no allowance of its own. The figures below are other people’s, each quoted to the page it came from with the date that page was read. The first five fill a field in one click if you have not weighed your own yet. None of the pages that published them said where its figure came from on the date it was read, and any of them may have changed since.

And the figures on calculators outside candle making, or inside it, that already carry a loss input. They are here because this page claims nothing about being first, and because the spread between them is the whole question: 3 per cent to 20 per cent, published, and not one of the seven rows below carried a source for its own figure on the date beside it.

Every row above is a page that was opened on the date beside it. Nothing here is averaged, rounded, improved or inferred, and no figure this page computes comes from any of them: the loss figures this page divides by are the counts you entered in part A.