You really need a fire is when it’s wet and windy. When is it hardest to start a fire? Of course, it’s when it’s wet and windy. These fire-starters, Carton Candles, are robust and insistent enough to get your campfire started even in bad conditions.
One Carton Candle, ready for action. Pretty high-tech, eh?
Carton Candle fire-starters
My sister, a better outdoorswoman than myself, clued me in to these. She swears by them under even very nasty conditions. As I don’t want to pass along hear-say even from such a dependable source, I made some and tried them out so I could share the results.
Carton Candles fire-starters manufacturing is dead easy. You melt some wax and pour it into a cardboard egg carton. Cut them into individuals with big scissors and you’re done. I had an old jar candle to hand and set the jar inside a crock pot full of water. A few minutes on high and I was ready to pour (with the advantage of not having a bunch of melted wax near an open flame in the production process).
One cardboard egg carton, complete with freshly poured hot wax.
I tested under three conditions. The ideal situation is on the left of each picture and was a dry candle. The middle candle in each image is the ‘reasonably challenging’ scenario in which the candle was briefly wetted, to simulate either handling it in the rain or being exposed to high humidity. The candle on the right on each image is the ‘something went very wrong’ condition. As you can see in the first picture, the ‘very wrong’ test let the entire candle soak in water right before the test.
Dry on the left, briefly wetted in the middle, soaking in water on the right. Ready to test!
The first test: Trying to light each candle with a single match’s worth of flame exposure.
One match worth of flame exposure: ‘Dry’ and ‘wetted’ candles immediately afire, ‘soaked’ melting and hissing but no flame yet.
The next test: Will the soaked one burn? I gave it about four seconds worth of being held in the flame of its neighbor. That was enough; even the candle just pulled out of the water caught and started burning enthusiastically.
Even the soaked candle burned with a few seconds of flame exposure, and you can see they burn with vigor once started.
Once lit, these candles burn for several minutes with significant flame. That gives them the chance to first dry out then set alight whatever soggy tinder may have been available. (I aborted the test after about a minute when my board was threatening to catch flame; the candles looked to have about 85% of their wax left at that point.
The Bottom Line
These fire-starters were very easy to make and worked well even when wet. They last a lot longer than some other fire-starters (such as my favorite cotton with petroleum jelly) so give you a much better shot at starting a decent fire with nasty wet tinder. I just packed some to leave at The Place, in fact.
