The complete guide
Setting up your candle warmer lamp on the first evening
The first evening with a candle warmer decides whether you love it or shelve it, and it is almost entirely down to getting the height right. Twenty minutes of attention now saves a lot of shrugging later.
Before you plug it in
Fit the bulb with the lamp unplugged and cold. Do not touch the glass of a halogen bulb with bare fingers if you can avoid it — skin oils shorten its life — so use the small piece of packaging it came wrapped in.
Choose the surface carefully, because this is a permanent resident. It needs to be stable, near a socket, and have clear air above it. Never under a shelf or a wall cabinet.
Set the gap
Put your candle underneath and adjust the pole until the bottom edge of the shade sits roughly 2 to 3 cm above the rim of the jar. That is the starting point for almost every candle; you will fine-tune it in a moment.
Make sure the shade is not touching the jar anywhere, and that the candle sits centrally under the bulb rather than off to one side.
The first twenty minutes
Switch on at full brightness and leave it. Do not keep adjusting.
At about twenty minutes, look at the surface of the wax. You are aiming for a shallow, even pool of liquid right out to the glass — three or four millimetres deep is ideal.
Solid ring at the edges? Lower the shade a centimetre and give it another ten minutes.
Deep well in the middle, or a sharp, slightly burnt smell? You are too close or too hot. Raise the shade and step the brightness down.
Even pool edge to edge? That is your setting. Note roughly where the pole sits for that candle.
Then turn it down
Once the pool exists, drop to about half brightness. A low setting holds a pool much more easily than it creates one, and the scent will stay steady for the rest of the evening while using far less of the candle.
Set the timer — two hours for an evening, eight if you want the room scented overnight — and then genuinely forget about it. That is the entire point.
At the end of the session
Leave the candle where it is until the wax has set. Moving a jar of liquid wax is how people end up with a lopsided candle and a wooden base to scrape.
Give the lamp ten minutes before you touch the shade. It is hotter than it looks.
What to expect over the first week
The scent will seem strongest on nights two and three, once the top layer of wax has been fully melted a couple of times and any surface skin has gone.
If a candle underwhelms after a few sessions, it is usually the candle rather than the lamp — cheap paraffin and beeswax hold less fragrance, and an old candle may already have had the best of its top layer burned away.
The short version
Bulb in cold, stable surface, air above the shade. Gap of 2 to 3 cm to start. Full brightness for twenty minutes, then read the melt pool and adjust. Half brightness to hold it, timer on, and leave the wax to set before you move anything.