Antizer Flameless Candles: An Honest Review

The first thing I noticed about the antizer flameless candles was not the light. It was that my husband Gary walked past the mantel twice without asking whether I had left something burning. In this house that counts as a compliment. I bought the nine pack in September two years ago and they have been through two falls and two Christmases since, all nine of them lined up on the living room mantel. I am not going to tell you they are the same as real candles, because they are not. What I will tell you is the part the listing leaves out: which pieces of the real wax look hold up when your sister-in-law is standing three feet away, and which ones will have worn on you by the second January.

Before these, I burned real pillars on that mantel every December. I liked them and I still do. What I did not like was scraping wax off the wood the year one of them leaned and let go down the side of a holder. I also never felt easy about walking into the kitchen with a flame still going in the other room, and I did that more nights than I want to admit. Nothing dramatic pushed me toward flameless. No fire, no scare, no close call. I just got tired of the cleanup and the watching, and I wanted the room to look lit without me being in charge of it.

What Nobody Tells You About Real Wax

The candles are wax. Not a wax colored shell, not a plastic pillar with a waxy feel to it. That is the whole reason they read as objects on a shelf rather than as decorations, and it is also the reason they need handling like something that can be marked. Mine stay on the mantel now and I dust around them, because the two I lifted down and set on the brick hearth came away with small flat spots along the bottom edge where they met the stone. Nothing broke. But if you are the sort of person who stacks decor loose in a bin in the basement, real wax is going to pick up dents that a plastic candle would shrug off.

The light is warmer than I expected, and that surprised me more than anything else about the antizer set. It is not that flat white glow you get from a bulb sitting behind a plastic flame. On the mantel at dusk, with the tree in the window behind them, they give the room a low amber wash that makes people drop their voices without noticing they did it. There is a slow movement to the light rather than a steady glare, and at a distance that movement is what sells it. Up close I can tell the flame is not fire. From the sofa, from the doorway, from the kitchen pass through, I cannot, and neither can anyone who has come through this house in the last two years.

Nine candles is more than it sounds like. In the box it looks like a small crowd, and the first December I had all nine on the mantel I took two off and moved them to the dining table, because the arrangement was too busy for my eye. Two 4 inch, two 5 inch, two 6 inch, then a 7, an 8 and a 9. Building a stepped row like that one candle at a time would have been more trouble than it is worth, and I say that as someone who buys a piece or two a year and never redoes a whole room at once. Buying nine and using seven is, as far as I can tell, how most people end up doing it.

How I've Used Them, Two Falls and Two Christmases In

They went up with the fall decorations the last week of September two years ago and they have not spent a Christmas anywhere but that mantel since. In the fall they sit with three of the small foam pumpkins from a set I bought the following September, leaves scattered between them. From the weekend after Thanksgiving they sit with the tree in the window behind them and nothing else on the wood. That is the entire system. One mantel, one arrangement, changed twice a year, and no bins of extra candles to sort through.

Fall is when they get the most use, oddly enough, because the evenings are still mild and we come back in from the porch to a room that is already lit. In December they are background to the tree. The tree is the only lit thing in that window and I want it that way, so the candles stay low and steady and do not compete with it. If you have a big lit tree and a small mantel, that is worth thinking about before you buy nine pillars. They are at their best when they are the only light on that wall.

What I use them for is the hour before dinner and the hour after. I switch them on with the remote when the light starts going and I do not think about them again. Some nights I use the timer on the remote so they take care of themselves and I am not walking around the living room at ten at night pushing buttons. That is the thing I did not expect to care about and now would not give up. With real candles, the evening ended when I remembered them. With these, the evening ends when I go to bed.

They get packed away the first weekend of January with everything else, back in the box they came in, and the box goes on a shelf in the unfinished basement. Two pack aways, two unpackings, and all nine still light. I have had decorations that did not survive one trip down those stairs. That is not a dramatic claim, it is just the truth of it, and it is the reason I have not gone looking for anything else.

Gary has walked past that mantel for two Decembers without a single word about them, which is the review I trust most. He would tell me if something looked off. He has said plenty about decorations over the years, including a wreath I still hear about. Silence from that man is the highest rating available in this house, and the candles have it.

From the sofa you cannot tell they are not burning. From two feet away you can, and I would rather you hear that from me now than find it out in December.

The Sizes, and Which Ones Earn Their Space

The heights run from 4 inches to 9 inches and every one of them is 2.2 inches across, which matters more than it sounds. Because the width stays the same all the way up, they line up like a proper set instead of a jumble of different thicknesses. I put the 9 and the 8 at the back corners, the 7 in the middle, and the shorter ones stepped down toward the front edge. That arrangement has not changed in two years, because it works and I am not inclined to fix what works.

The two 4 inch candles are the ones people forget about. They disappear behind anything you set in front of them, and on a deep mantel they can look like stubs next to the tall ones. I use mine at the front edge, where the step down reads as deliberate. If your mantel is shallow, or if you keep a lot of other things on it, those two may end up in a drawer, and there is no shame in that. Seven out of nine earning a permanent place is a better ratio than most sets I have bought.

They are cordless, which is the quiet reason this set works on my mantel at all. There is one outlet behind the tree and nothing else within reach, and I was not going to run an extension cord across the brick. No cord means no tape, no tucking, no hiding a wire behind a picture frame. You set them down and you are done. If your mantel is anything like mine, that single fact is worth more than every feature printed on the box.

The Remote, the Timer, and the One Thing That Bugs Me

The remote works on line of sight. That means you point it toward the candles, and if you are around the corner in the kitchen aiming at a wall, nothing happens. I learned that in the first week. It is not a fault exactly, it is how this kind of remote works, but nobody says it in the listing, and it is the sort of thing that makes you think the batteries have gone when they have not. Point it at the mantel from the sofa and every candle answers at once.

Each candle also has its own push button switch, so if I only want the middle three lit for the afternoon, I can do that without hunting for the remote. I use that more than I expected, mostly in the weeks before Christmas when I am in and out of that room and do not want the whole row going every time. The timer is for later in the season, when the afternoons are short and I want the room already warm looking before I have finished in the kitchen.

What bugs me is small and it is not really the candle's fault. There is no scent. None. A real pillar in December puts a little beeswax and smoke into the air and I miss it, and no amount of warm light makes up for that. I have thought about setting a jar candle on the dining table and leaving the mantel to these, and I probably will this year. If smell is a big part of the season for you, know going in that you are getting the look and not the smell.

Where They Fall Short

The listing says they are not waterproof, and I would take that seriously. Mine have never been on the porch. Every fall I think about putting two of them out on the covered table by the front door with the pumpkins, and every fall I decide against it, because a covered porch in Ohio still catches driving rain and I am not going to find out the hard way. If you want this look on a porch rail or a windowsill that takes weather, this is the wrong set for that job.

Real wax means real marks. I said it earlier and it is worth saying twice, because it is the complaint I would have wanted to read before I bought nine of them. Dropping one of these on a hearth is like dropping a candle. It will take the hit. Store them loose in a bin with ornaments and the ornaments will win. Keep them in the box they came in, or wrap them in something soft, and they will look in five years the way they looked the day they arrived.

The flame will not fool anyone at arm's length, and I think that is fine, but you should hear it from a person rather than from a photograph. The light is convincing at a distance and the wax is convincing up close. The flame itself is the one part that reads as a component instead of as fire. It has never bothered me on a mantel, where you look at it from across a room. It would bother me in the middle of a dinner table with people staring straight at it for an hour.

And the plainest one: they are battery powered, so at some point you will be buying batteries. I have not kept a careful count and I am not going to guess at one here, because I would rather say nothing than hand you a number you cannot count on. What I will say is that two full seasons of near nightly use in the fall and through December have not had me standing in the hardware store aisle any more often than I expected to be.

Who This Is For

If you have a mantel, a shelf, a stair landing or a dining table you want to look lit without a flame in the room, the antizer set does that job and does it well. It suits a house where somebody is in and out of the living room all evening and does not want to think about what is burning. It suits anyone who wants a stepped row of pillars without buying five separate candles and hoping the heights work together. And it suits a person who decorates a piece at a time, because one box settles that shelf for years and you can spend the next two autumns on something else.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if the smell is the whole point for you. Skip it if you want candles on a porch that gets weather, because these are not made for that and I would not test it on my own house. Skip it if there are small children who handle everything on low surfaces, since real wax does not survive being played with and a candle that looks lit invites exactly that. And skip it if you need the flame itself to be indistinguishable up close, because it is not, and I have not seen a flameless candle yet that manages it.

I have bought decorations that looked wonderful in the store and became a nuisance by February, and I have bought a few things that quietly did their job for years without asking anything of me. This set is in the second group. It is not a real candle and I would not want it to be, but it has given me two falls and two Christmases of a lit mantel with nothing to watch, and that is what I was actually shopping for when I bought it.