Wax warmer vs candle warmer lamp

A wax warmer is a dish with a heat source. Either an element under the dish (a plate warmer) or a bulb inside the body. You put loose wax cubes in the dish. That is the whole product.

A candle warmer lamp is a bulb in an adjustable head that hangs over whatever you put beneath it, heating from the top down. It was designed to warm a jar candle without lighting it - the wick never burns, the wax is never consumed, and the fragrance comes off the surface.

The lamp is the more flexible of the two, because "whatever you put beneath it" includes a small dish of wax melts. The dish warmer is the more specialized.

Using a jar candle without burning it, and it is genuinely the best reason to own one.

A great many people arrive at wax melts with a shelf of candles they stopped burning - a cat arrived, a baby arrived, a landlord objected. Those candles are not waste. A warmer lamp heats the jar from above, the fragrance comes off the surface, and the wax is never consumed. The jar lasts far longer than it would burned, and there is no flame.

That is a specific machine for a specific situation, and if it is your situation the lamp is the obvious purchase.

Check the jar limit. Candle Warmers Etc. is the only maker in our index that publishes one, and it does it in both dimensions: 22 oz or smaller and up to 6 inches tall. Height is the constraint people miss - a tall narrow jar can be inside the weight limit and still not fit. Lamp picks.

It publishes a wattage, and it has no bulb.

Of the ten warmers we index, the four with a published rated power are all dish or plug-in models. Not one of the five candle warmer lamps publishes a wattage, which means their running cost cannot be computed by anybody. On a site whose whole argument is that its numbers are checkable, that is a meaningful difference.

And the plate models have no consumable at all. No bulb to identify, none to source, none to fail. Combined with a 10 W rating - about $3.72 a year at six hours a day and 17 cents per kilowatt-hour - that makes a plate warmer the cheapest thing in the category to own.

A plate warmer also gets hot faster and throws harder for its power, because it conducts heat straight into the dish rather than radiating it down. The mechanism.

• You own jar candles you have stopped burning. Lamp. It is the machine for that.
• You want an auto shut-off on a nightstand. Lamp - the only format where a published timer is normal.
• You are buying wax melts and want the cheapest correct thing. Low-wattage plate warmer.
• You want the strongest throw for the power. Plate warmer.
• You want the object to look like furniture rather than an appliance. Lamp.
• You never want to hunt for a bulb again. Plate warmer.

And if you want both behaviors from one object: a lamp plus a small dish covers jars and melts, at the price of an unpublished wattage and a bulb. All three types side by side.