We burn lots of candles around here. Almost all day in several rooms of the house. Apparently, we make a lot of odiferous clouds. When my Niece Annie moved in, she brought a candle warmer. I had always thought they were silly devices that couldn't possible produce the aroma needed to make our house a welcome haven of sweetness, so I had never considered purchasing one, until I smelled Annie's room. Her room always smelled like a freshly baked pumpkin pie. So, I broke down and bought a couple of candle warmers. I placed one on the bar behind the sink, as this is a central area and one place we always had a candle. It worked perfectly and the house smelled like Christmas, thanks to some candles bought during a school fundraising effort. I was converted. There was no flame and a much slower loss of candle wax. I candle that would previously have lasted 16 hours being burned, was still emitting strong aromas after several days. I was both happy and grateful.....................until Sam happened.
In all fairness to my youngest child, he had no idea that he was about to thrust our family into the world of candlemaking and all things wax related. He simply wanted fistfulls of candy from the Halloween cauldron that was perched on the bar above the sink. As he and a little blond haired friend, who shall remain nameless, pawed through the plethora of candy, they inadvertently pushed the cauldron against the candle warmer, knocking it down into my sink.
Sixteen ounces of melted wax can cover quite an area.
In fact, it can completely encase an army sized crockpot. My sparkling white and shiny clean crockpot had been drying in the sink. Now it was covered with light green wax which had filled every scalloped crevice around the edge of the pot. I stared at it as the wax quickly congealed and wondered how I was going to remove all the wax. So much wax covered the pot that I hoped very little had gone down the drain of the sink. I checked the drain in the sink bottom and there was very little wax there, so my hopes soared. I had avoided a serious mishap. Or so I thought.I removed the crockpot and began scraping the hardened wax from the sides of the sink. Though no inappropriate words escaped my lips, a few may have rattled around in my head as I envisioned the torture I would like to inflict upon my son and his cohort, who were happily eating candy and rocketing around the room joyously. Scraping the wax was not producing an acceptably clean sink, so I turned to the internet to research a better method.
The first advice I found screamed that adding hot water, in an effort to melt the wax and push it through the pipes, would doom me to a life of washing dishes by hand and carting water to and from the bathtub after my sink became nothing more than a drainless washing tub. Luckily, I knew somewhere in my subconcious that water was a bad idea and had not run the tap. I still needed to dewax the sink and crockpot though. The next advice I found, complete with a video for the disbelieving, touted using a hair dryer to melt the wax, which was then easy to wipe right off of any surface, from white shag carpet to aluminum sink.
I ran to get my hair dryer and paper towels and started to work. It worked just as promised. The ironic part was that the melted wax covered my hands, as I struggled to find clean areas of towel, and acted like a salon wax, leaving me both soft and fragrant while I toiled like a washer woman in an 18th century castle. Finally though, the job was complete and both the sink and the crockpot were returned to their previous wax-free states.
The real fun began when I realized that the sink was indeed blocked as I washed my hands. No water was leaving the sink through the pipes. After a few groans and a wee bit of teeth-gnashing, I shlepped back to the computer to research clearing a sink clogged with wax. The directions were clear. I gathered my tools and buckets and went to work under the sink. May the blessings of heaven rain down on the man who invented the plastic nut that connects PVC sink pipes and can be loosened without any tools beyond the hands God gave me. I quickly disconnected the pipes and then, along with the water gathered in the sink, out popped a perfect candle the shape and size of my sink pipe. I was shocked to see how much wax had actually made it down the drain, but more surprised to see that it had hardened again as soon as it hit the water in the trap.
Problem solved, meltdown averted and plumber's fee avoided. I now know how to clean a sink trap and make a cool candle. I threw that wax back into the candle on the warmer and it remelted just fine. Christmas scents were restored.............................with a bonus. It only took me a few days to realized that the smell of burnt chocolate was coming from the candle. As it turns out, the small amounts of chocolate left on utensils during candymaking and washed down the drain during cleaning, had also gathered near the trap and were secretly incorporated into my candle. There in the melted wax on my candle holder were small particles of melted chocolate.
