Burning Candles

My science that I chose was do scented candles burn faster than unscented candles. I chose this topic because I love scented candles and I wanted to figure out the time length of how fast or slow it burns. I predict that the small white unscented candles are going to burn faster because it doesn’t have that much chemicals inside of it so it won’t have to burn all that.

First thing that I did for my experiment is, gather everything I need to test for my experiment. Next I bought two different kinds of candles, got a lighter to light the candles, and a ruler to measure how much they burned down. Then I tested the candles every 15 minutes to see how far they burned. I used the ruler to measure how many cm have burned. Finally I am going to record my data on a new spreadsheet and gather all my data, and bar graph.

The first test I made was on the scented candle the data I got was 9 inches long and went down 1 centimeter. I lit the candle and let it burn for another 15 minutes. After 15 minutes I blew out the candle and measured how far it burned. About 1 inch got burned off every time I lit it for 1 minutes. Since the candle gets bigger as it burns down it took longer for the most of it to burn off on both candles. The candle length for each candle, scented and unscented, started to be a little shorter than an inch. The reason for that is because the fire had to burn more of the candle because of the weight of the candle. I continued this process five times for each candle.

My hypothesis that the unscented candle would burn faster than the scented candle was correct. I know my hypothesis was correct because I said the scented candle had a lot more products and chemicals in it that would take longer to burn. While doing my experiment there were several distractions that may have influenced the data. If I were to do this experiment again I would use the bigger sized candles instead of the stick candles because the bigger candles would be easier to measure.