The other night I lit a candle on my glassed-in patio. It was 18 degrees F, and the lighting took longer than usual. It stayed lit, but not very well. In order for a candle to stay lit, the flame has to melt and evaporate some of the wax. Surely, there’s a point where the ambient cold wins, and the wax just won’t melt. Does it happen at a point where humans go, such as Chagrin Falls, or Vladivostok, or Point Barrow, or Rekyavik?
In still air, of course…
Just wanna say that this is the Second Best General Question I have ever seen (after the Giant Cockroach thread). 
All I can find so far is that they do have candles in Siberia, although presumably they’re being burned inside a house that’s not that cold.
http://www.theage.com.au/news/2001/02/17/FFXKX1UQ8JC.html
And I found this, although it’s not clear whether it was too cold for the candle to burn, or too cold for him to move his stiff fingers to manipulate the match.
I tried lighting…err…something I won’t specify while skiing once. The flame from the lighter was going right at what I was trying to light and nothing happened (no ignition).
Just an anecdotal piece of info but there for what it’s worth.
I should note it was pretty darn cold when I tried this. Been a long time now but I’m positive it was under 10 degrees farenheit if not sub-zero.
I could be wrong, but IIRC, isn’t temperature one leg of the “combustion triangle” (for lack of the proper name of this triangle)? The other legs represent the amount of fuel and the amount of oxygen, respectively. So, I suppose it is possible where the temperature is too cold for the fuel to NOT promote combustion. In the case of the candle, I’d say it cold be too cold for the wick to take the flame…even before the wax could begin to melt. Or, in the very least, it is bery possible you could notice that you have to hold the match (or lighter) to the wick longer to raise it to some threshold temperature to support combustion.
To support my argument about temperature’s role in combustion, one example come to mind. I was always taught,when building a fire, the purpose of igniting the kindling and tinder first is to heat the main fuel (i.e.: the big logs) to a high enough temperature to support combustion. - Jinx
There are probably different formulations of wax that will work better in colder ambient temperatures.
Haj
Sorry for the typos in my post above…I’ve been drinking beer through my fingers like Mork, and now my fingers and numb for the rest of the night! …zzzzz 
- Jinx
See? Oh, Magoo! You’ve done it again! - Jinx
Well, once you apply the match to the wick, the temperature of the wick is sure to go up.
I’ve lit candles at 40 below.
Hmm… what you would need to know is how much energy burning wax gives out, how much energy it takes to vaporise the wax and also how much of the heat from the candle is wasted on not heating the wax.
Sorry for a sidetrack, but this reminds me of the old joke: “it was so cold in Alaska that the words came out of our mouths as pieces of ice, and we had to fry them to hear what we were talking about”…
Well, sure,Shalmanese, but I want the answer in human terms. Is there a time in human experience, even those Antarctic outposts, when a candle won’t stay lit in still air? It’s not so much a technical thing. I want to know if there’s a place on earth where a human can live that a candle cannot maintain a flame. Maybe there’s a person in the teeming millions who has been in a place cold enough to snuff a candle in still air.
Is that too much to ask?
A half dozen voices shout, “Yes!”
Well, maybe that’s it, then.
I do hope I didn’t misspell the capital of Iceland too badly.If I did, then, (makes a French gesture where the thumbnail snaps forward off the front teeth.)
Well, it is currently -5° outside my door right now; shall we do a little empirical research and settle the question? I have candles, I have a lighter, what do you want me to do now?
::stuyguy’s heart pounds wildly as he clicks open this thread. After reading the posts in a panic, he is overcome by anxious dread and screams, “OH NO. NOT AGAIN! WILL THE BEAST NOT DIE?!?!”::
Okay, enough with the drama. It’s just that about 2 years ago I got enmeshed in a tusslefilled thread about whether heat was REALLY a necessary ingredient to combustion. My contention was that anything that was hot enough to burn was hot enough to keep burning.
I made a reasonable argument (among many) that the old fireman’s explanation that he adds water to a fire to cool it – and therefore kill – was hogwash. What he is doing is turning fuel (say, rags) into non-fuel (say, wet rags).
Anyway, the arguments and counter-arguments raged back and forth for a week or so – basically me vs. 99.9% of the population of Dopertown.
IIRC, long after the dust settled, someone pulled out an old science parlor trick to prove that, yes, combustion needs heat to burn – the one where you boil water in a paper cup over an open flame and the paper does not burn. Of all the suggested “proofs” that was the one I could not dismiss.
If you want to check out the thread, do a search for “smurf” and “flame.” (Yes “smurf.” Don’t ask.) I’d post a link myself, but this thread is painful enough for me.
OK, so I didn’t shout. I did say no.
A couple web searches say that it reached nearly -130 F at Vostok. I’m sure it would depend upon the candle, if there were candles that wouldn’t stay lit in such temperatures.
But if that’s all you want, I have some candles that don’t stay lit, at room temperature. My wife calls 'em nails, but we keep 'em around just in case of natural disaster.
A friend told me it was so cold the flame of the candle froze and they couldn’t put it out. They had to actually heat it so they could put it out.
I don’t know if I should believe him though.
“smurf and flame”. Right. The “how small can a fire be?” thread.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=27102