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How to Keep Candle Soot off the Wall

Candles smell and look nice, but after burning and enjoying them it starts to become apparent their impact on our homes and interior décor.

Although beautiful, candles can deposit soot on surrounding surfaces, including tables and walls. Your first impulse might be to just clean it off, as you would any speck of regular dirt or dust, but the mere use of a normal sponge will spread and smudge the stains. There are special sponges available at hardware stores, made specifically to clean surfaces stained by soot. You can use these sponges to clean and dry the wall as they remove much of the soot on the surface of the wall before you use a liquid cleaning solution.
But how do you keep the soot away from the wall in the first place? Find tips below to avoid candle soot.

How Candle Soot is Formed

Mere burning of candles near vents, open windows or fans can cause soot formation. When the breeze blows the candle flame around, the size of the flame changes. When the flame is still, a constant amount of fuel is used. A bouncing flame, on the other hand, feeds the wick with fuel at a different speed. Sometimes the moving speed is too much, but at other times, at a speed that’s too little. If too much oil is absorbed into the wick and the flame becomes smaller, not all of the fuel is burned. The excess oil is expelled as soot and passed into the air.

How to Prevent Candle Soot

  • Put Candle Cappers on Jar Candles

 Jar candles usually produces more soot as the candle burns further down into the glass. If your jar candles have an opening of around 3 inches, you can buy caps, (they are less than $4). These simple candle accessories will separate the hot air that rises from the cooler air falling and this reduces the turbulence in the jar.

  • Trim or Cut the wicks

One of the easiest ways to prevent candles from producing soot is to cut or trim the wicks –it’s as simple as that.

  • Buy only high-quality candles

Make sure to only buy good quality candles for the store or online. A candle of good quality is not necessarily the most expensive candle, but it is very well made.

Of course, anyone can melt wax through a string and then call what they’ve done a candle. Is that a candle? Of course, it is. Will it burn? Sure, it will. Should you spend a penny of your money on such a candle? Surely not. One of the first things you could do is observe the brand of candles you already have and whichever of them produces the most soot, eliminate them from your list.