Reuse Candles and Save Yourself a Whole Lot of Pennies

In this video I am going to reuse candle wax and make new candles by melting leftover candles to make new ones. As a mold I will use toilet paper rolls, mason jars or even whisky glasses. It definitely saved me many pennies.

Video transcript:

Hello ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Tony Needs Hobbies. In this video I will show you how to reuse candles so that you can save up to 20 % of your money, and by the way I really need a haircut and I lost the bet with my wife from the last video, so she gets to cut my hair in the next video. If you don’t want to miss that, please subscribe to this channel and hit the bell button so that you get a notification when that video is published. But for now let’s make some candles, have fun watching!

I am from the Netherlands and Dutch people, well we sure like to save our money. Reusing the leftovers from burned candles will definitely save me some pennies and that just warms a Dutch guy’s heart. But before starting to make candles and saving me some money I need to look around the house to find some containers to make the candles in.

In the most strange places I found empty jam jars, a whiskey glass, a beer mug and empty toilet paper rolls. If you don’t have empty toilet paper rolls it is really easy to make them. I guess I don’t need to explain you how. Just, watch this instructional video. Don’t waste the paper though.

We like to burn this type of candles. These candles do not burn up completely resulting in about 20% being left over.

All the supplies have been gathered so I can start by making the wick. You can also use store-bought wick but the process for making it is not that difficult so I will show you how to do it. I do it by soaking this woven cotton thread in some melted candle wax and then taking it out and letting it cure. The wicks will be made by soaking the braided cotton string that I just showed you in some melted candle wax. The color of the wax is not so important yet so just go ahead and choose some lumps that are just big enough to soak the amount of string that you need to make your candles. The size of string that I am using is similar to the size of a wick that you would normally find in candles. Definitely check that you are using cotton. Synthetic string will melt and will not work as a wick in these types of candles. After soaking for a minute or two, take the piece of string out of the wax and organize it in straight segments. When the wax has solidified you can cut the pieces to size.

To get the best looking result sort the pieces of wax based on their colors. In my case I’m going to separate the blue pieces, all the pink and purple pieces and the white, gray and black pieces. As a safety measure be sure to use wax coming from the same types of candles to be sure that you mix the same type of wax.

All the empty toilet paper rolls are then prepared by closing one side with a piece of duct tape. Then I wrap another piece around it just to be sure that melted wax will not drip out of it when I’m pouring it into these little molds. When this is all done I hot glue a wick to the bottom and clamp the wick in the center using these little clamps that you can get at IKEA. I do this for all the containers that I’m going to pour the wax in. It helps to keep the wick in the center of the candle.

For safety reasons I don’t want the flame directly under the saucepan in which I’m going to melt the candle wax so I’m going to use this double boiler method. First up: the pink and purple leftovers. It took about 10 minutes for it to completely melt. After taking the saucepan out of the pot with hot water wipe it off with a cloth so that water doesn’t drip into the candles. Then let it cool down for a few minutes before carefully pouring the melted wax into the molds. The tiny bit that’s left over gets poured into one of the toilet paper rolls.

Then it’s blue’s turn. I have more blue wax so it takes a little bit longer to melt. At the beginning of this little project I wasted a roll of toilet paper so now is the time to roll it back up so it doesn’t need to go to waste. Then, when blue is melted I pour it in the molds likewise as when I poured the pink wax. Again a little bit is left. I pour this in the same toilet paper roll as before to form a hodgepodge of colors.

Last up is the mix of white, grey and black wax. It’s even a bit more than the blue batch so it will again take a little while longer to melt. I really enjoy watching this stuff melt. Hot candle wax takes up more space so when it solidifies it shrinks. To compensate for this I wait with melting the next color until the wax in the molds has solidified a bit. Then I pour additional wax in the holes that have arisen during solidification. This makes for a better looking product. Of course you do not want to use your best cookware for these activities. These pots and pans are not used for cooking anymore.

Now just let the freshly poured candles cool down for a few hours so that the wax can completely solidify. When they are cool to the touch the duct tape and toilet paper rolls can be removed. This goes a lot more easy than you would expect.

Then it is the moment to cut the wicks and finish these candles. I leave about half a centimeter or a quarter of an inch. The next step is not really needed but I really wanted to test them all to see if they would burn properly.

Out of the remains of 15 candles I made 7 new ones so I saved myself a whole lot of pennies. If you want to find out what I will be doing with those pennies please watch the video that I will publish in about two weeks.

I hope you had some fun watching this video and if you did please hit the like button, and for now I’d like to thank you for watching!

Bye, bye!