Your wax warmer is not working. Here is the order to check things.

If the warmer is warm and the wax is liquid but the room does not smell of anything, the warmer is working perfectly. The wax has given up.

Fragrance oil evaporates out of the wax long before the wax stops being melted. The melted wax stays in the dish looking exactly as it did on the first evening, which is why this reads as a hardware failure rather than a consumable one. It is the single most common thing behind "my warmer stopped working".

Test it in thirty seconds: swap in a fresh cube. If the room smells within twenty minutes, nothing is broken. For why this happens and how to spot the point where wax is done, see why you cannot smell your wax melts.

There is a second version of this that is not the wax at all: olfactory adaptation. Your nose stops registering a constant background smell within minutes. Everyone walking into the room can smell it and you cannot. Same page covers it.

On any bulb-heated warmer - a lamp, a plug-in, a bulb dish warmer - the bulb is both the heat source and the only consumable. Two failure modes:

• It has gone. Obvious when it is the only light in the body, because the warmer goes dark. Less obvious on a lamp where a second bulb is still lit.
• It is the wrong bulb. This is the sneaky one. A replacement with the right base and a much lower wattage, or an LED, will light up and produce almost no heat. The warmer looks like it is running and nothing melts. See the bulb guide for why LEDs specifically do not work here.

Unplug, let it cool completely, and check what is actually in there against what the warmer is rated for.

A candle warmer lamp heats by radiating down. Radiant heat falls off quickly with distance, so a head set two inches too high can be the difference between a proper melt pool and a warm surface with a solid cube sitting on it.

This is very common with a new lamp and a jar it was not sized for. Wind the head down to the minimum the lamp allows, give it thirty minutes, and see whether a pool forms. Where the maker publishes a range - Marycele publishes 3 to 7 inches - use the bottom of it while you are diagnosing.

Counter-intuitive and real. Overfilling a dish means the heat has to raise a larger mass of wax, so it takes much longer to reach temperature and may never get the top layer properly hot. A deep pool also traps fragrance below the surface.

Happy Wax publishes dosing that scales with warmer size for exactly this reason: one to two shapes in an outlet warmer, two to three in a standard one, five to eight in its largest. Note that even the biggest is not "fill it".

If you have three big cubes crammed into a 3.5 inch dish, take one out. See how many cubes to use.

If a fresh cube in a correctly loaded dish on a warmer with the right bulb at the right height still does nothing, then something has failed. At that point:

• Test the outlet with something else. Switched sockets and tripped circuits account for more "dead" appliances than dead appliances do.
• Check the in-line switch if the warmer has one. The Candle Warmers Etc. Milk Glass lamp puts its switch on the cord, and a switch on a cord is a thing that gets knocked off.
• Look at the cord and plug for damage. If you find any, stop using it - do not repair a molded appliance cord.
• Contact the seller. Where a maker publishes a warranty and asks you to register the product, that registration is worth doing on day one rather than at the point of failure.

A warmer that gets hot but smells of burning, discolors around the element, or trips a breaker should be unplugged and not used again. That is a different category from "not working" and it does not have a home fix.

Old wax does not stop a warmer working but it does mute it. A build-up of spent wax underneath fresh cubes dilutes what you just added.

The clean way, on a removable silicone dish: let it cool completely, flex the dish, and the disc pops out in one piece. On a fixed ceramic well: run the warmer for a couple of minutes until the wax is soft rather than liquid, switch it off, unplug it, and lift the softened wax out with a paper towel. Do not pour melted wax down a sink.