Antizer Flameless Candles Review

For twenty-four years, the mantel in our living room is the spot I fuss over most. It is the first thing you see when you come in off the porch, and it is what the family looks at on Christmas Eve with the tree lit in the window. For a long time I had real wax pillars up there, and for a long time I was scraping dripped wax off the wood every January with a butter knife and a dish towel I did not mind ruining. The last straw was not a fire and not a scare. It was standing in the kitchen one evening, able to see the flame out of the corner of my eye through the doorway, and not liking the feeling of it burning while I was in another room. That is when I ordered the antizer flameless candles, a 9 pack of real wax pillars with a remote, in September two years ago. They have been on that mantel for two falls and two Christmases since.

I want to be plain about what these are, because the listing photos had me expecting something flimsier. They are nine wax pillars, not plastic shells with a wax coating. Two are 4 inches tall, two are 5, two are 6, then one each at 7, 8 and 9 inches, and every one of them is 2.2 inches across. They run on batteries, they turn on with a remote or a push button on the bottom, and each holds a warm LED that does a slow flicker. That is the whole of it. Nothing here talks to a phone, nothing needs an app, and I would not want it to. The set weighs about 3 pounds, so picking the whole arrangement up to dust under it is a one-hand job.

How I've Used Them for Two Falls and Two Christmases

The candles live on the mantel and nowhere else. They go up the last week of September with the fall things, they stay through Christmas, and they come down the first weekend of January with everything else. Our mantel is 62 inches across and about 8 inches deep, and the nine pillars take up a little over 20 inches of it the way I group them, which leaves the rest for the pumpkins and a couple of framed photographs. The tallest three sit at the right end where the mantel meets the wall, stepping down 9 to 8 to 7, and then the matched pairs go left in loose twos. Nothing is glued down. I move them around every few weeks the way I move furniture, and the wax has never chipped at the base from being handled.

The first September I put them out, I ran them every evening for two weeks straight just to see whether the flicker would get on my nerves. It did not. What I noticed instead was how much less often I looked at the mantel, because there was nothing to monitor. A real pillar burns down and you watch it. These just sit there being lit. By the second week I had stopped registering them as a thing I had turned on, which is exactly what I wanted from them and not something I expected.

The timer is the part I use most and the part I would miss most if it went. I press it once at the start of the season and the candles come on in the evening and go off on their own. I tested it in the first week because I did not trust it, sitting in the living room with a book, and it did what it said. Now I do not think about it at all. That is the whole point of a timer, and it is worth saying out loud, because a lot of things that claim a timer make you press a button every single night anyway.

Only I touch the remote. Gary has never once picked it up, and that is fine, because he is not the one who cares whether the candles are on when the family pulls in the driveway. The remote lives in the drawer of the side table next to my chair, and it works from there without my standing up. That sounds like a small thing until you have walked across a room in December to switch off nine separate candles one at a time.

What Comes in the Nine Pack, and Why the Heights Matter

A matched set of nine identical candles looks like a store display. A set with a height spread looks like a person arranged it. That is the reason to buy this pack instead of nine of one size, and it is the reason I would buy it again. The two 4 inch pillars are the ones I use least on the mantel and most everywhere else, because they disappear behind the taller ones. If you only have a narrow shelf, the 4s and 5s will do the job and the tall ones will look like a lamppost.

Before this set I bought three pairs of cheap flameless candles from a big box store, one pair a year for three years, and every pair had a plastic shell with a wax coating that peeled at the top by February. The light on those was a hard white dot and the wax coating flaked onto the mantel. The antizer pillars are wax through the body, and the difference shows up most in the two 4 inch candles, which are short enough that you see the top surface straight on when you are sitting down.

At 2.2 inches across, they fit a standard holder. I have two old brass candlesticks from Gary's mother that take a pillar this size and the candles drop in without wobbling. If you have a holder sized for a taper, these will not fit it, and no amount of wanting will change that. I checked before I ordered, because I had already made that mistake once with a pair of taper holders I bought at a craft store and never used.

The Flicker, the Timer, and the Remote

The flicker is slow. It does not strobe and it does not pulse like a battery indicator. From across the room, with the lamps low and the tree lit, I cannot tell the difference between these and the real pillars I used to burn, and I am not a person who says that lightly about a fake candle. Up close, within a foot, you can see the light source sitting at the top of each pillar and you can see the flicker is regular. Nobody sits within a foot of my mantel. Your guests will not either.

The timer is also why the set stays out for four months instead of two. When the candles were real, I lit them on Christmas Eve and maybe three other evenings, because lighting nine of them and blowing nine of them out was work. Now they are on every night from the last week of September through the first weekend of January, whether anyone is in the room or not. The house feels different for it. I come down the stairs in the morning, the room is dim again, and it smells like coffee instead of the smoke I used to get from a wick I had blown out the night before.

The remote is infrared, which means it wants to be pointed. It reaches the full width of my living room when I aim it, and it gets grumpy if I wave it around from the hall. There is also a push button on the bottom of every candle, so if the remote goes missing in a drawer, you are not stuck. I have used that button exactly twice, both times in the first week before I found a home for the remote. It is a good thing to have and a bad thing to rely on, because getting down on the floor to reach the bottom of a 9 inch pillar is not how I want to spend an evening.

Two falls and two Christmases, and not one of the nine has failed, flickered wrong, or needed replacing. That is more than I can say for the wax pillars I used to burn.

How They Look in Daylight, Which Is the Real Test

Most flameless candles are reviewed at night and judged at night. The harder test is a Tuesday afternoon in November when the sun comes through the front window and hits the mantel straight on. These pass. The antizer pillars are real wax, so they have the slight surface variation of wax and not the uniform sheen of molded plastic. The finish is smooth and catches a little light along one side of each pillar. You can tell they are not burning, obviously, because they are not burning. You cannot tell they are inexpensive, which is the thing I actually cared about.

There is a visible seam at the top of each pillar where the light sits, a thin line you can see if you are looking for it. In two seasons it has not bothered me enough to mention it to anyone standing in my living room, but it is there, and if you are the kind of person who notices a seam, you will notice it. I put the three tallest at the back of the arrangement and the seam stops being a thing you see from the couch.

Two Years In: What Held Up and What I'd Change

Nothing has broken. Not a candle, not the remote, not the timer. The wax has a couple of light scuffs on the two 4 inch pillars from being knocked together in a drawer one January, and one of the 6 inch pillars has a small dent near the base where I set it down too hard on the mantel. In daylight, from standing height, you would have to hunt for either one. The finish has not yellowed and the wax has not gone tacky in the summer heat, which was my real worry, because the upstairs of this house gets warm in July and the candles sit through it.

Packing them away is the part nobody writes about. In January I wrap each pillar in a sheet of newspaper I keep in the basement and stand them upright in a cardboard box that lives on the same shelf as everything else. Nine candles take about four minutes. The real wax pillars I used to burn took longer than that, because half of them had burned down to a stub by the end of the season and had to be thrown out and replaced the next November. Two seasons in, I am still putting away the same nine candles I bought, and that is the plainest argument for them I can make.

What I would change is small and it is about storage. The sizes are not marked anywhere on the candles, so every September I stand there with a ruler sorting nine pillars into pairs on the living room floor. A little number on the bottom would have saved me ten minutes a year for the rest of my life. The other thing is the remote. It is small, it is the same size as the remote for the living room fan, and I have twice picked up the wrong one. I put a strip of masking tape on the back of the candle remote and wrote on it, which solved the problem and looks exactly as nice as it sounds.

Who This Is For

This set is for the person with one surface to dress and a limited amount of patience for dressing it. If you have a mantel, a sideboard, a dining table, or a deep windowsill, nine pillars in graduated heights will fill it in one afternoon and you will not be shopping for a tenth candle in three weeks. It is also for anyone who has stopped burning real wax because of the cleanup, or because of a cat, or because of a grandchild who visits, or simply because they do not want an open flame in a room they walk out of. And it is for the person who wants the thing to look right in daylight, not just in a photograph taken at night with the lights off.

Who Should Skip It

Skip it if you want a candle you can smell. There is no scent here and there is not meant to be. Skip it if you are decorating a porch or a windowsill that gets rained on, because these are not waterproof and I would not push my luck. Skip it if your heart is set on a single tall pillar as a centerpiece, because you will pay for eight candles you do not need to get the one 9 inch one. And skip it if you want to control the candles from your phone, because they do not do that and I am glad they do not. Two years on, my honest summary is that the antizer 9 pack is the set I should have bought the first time instead of the three cheap pairs I tried before it, and I would put them on the mantel again this September without thinking about it.