Which LED candles are the best?

With their soft, cozy glow, candles are beautiful decor pieces. Unfortunately, they can leave puddles of melted wax on your furniture and pose a fire hazard, particularly if you have children or pets at home. LED candles are a smokeless, flameless alternative, so you can safely enjoy the ambiance of glowing candles.

LED candles are available in a variety sizes, shapes and colors. Enpornk’s top-rated candles are a great pick because the set includes nine realistic-looking candles with adjustable brightness levels and a flicker setting.

What to know before you buy LED candles

Shape and size

First, determine what shape and size of LED candles fit your needs and style. LED candles come in classic shapes, including tea lights, votives, tapered and pillars. The specific diameter and height measurements can vary from brand to brand.

Most LED tea lights are 2 inches tall and 1.5 inches in diameter, while LED votives are usually 1.9 inches tall and 1 .5 inches in diameter. LED tapered candles are generally 9 to 12 inches in height, and LED pillars are often 4 to 9 inches in height and 3 inches in diameter.

Sets

Some LED candles are sold individually, but others come in a set. Smaller candles like votives and tea lights are often available in sets of 12, 24 or 36. Larger candles like pillars can be sold individually, but some come in sets of three to nine. Tapered candles are generally available in sets of six to 12.

Appearance

All LED candles are designed to look like real candles, but the appearance of the flame can differ. Some LED candles produce flames with a warm white, amber or gold color. Many have a solid flame, while others flicker. Some candles even hide the flame for a more subtle look.

Most LED candles are made of plastic, but you can also find some with a genuine wax interior that gives them a more realistic look. Some larger LED candles are also shaped to look like they’re partially melted.

Controls

Many smaller LED candles, like tea lights, votives and tapered candles, feature an on/off switch on the bottom of the candle. Pillar candles also have a switch, but they often come with a remote control as well. Some LED candles also have a timer.

Some LED candles even allow you to control the appearance of the flame. By using the remote or moving a switch, you can change from a solid, steady flame to a flickering light.

Batteries

Smaller LED candles like votives and tea lights usually come with small buttons or cell batteries that can be replaced. Larger pillar and tapered candles typically run on AA, AAA or D batteries.

Some small styles offer 25-50 hours of operation before needing new batteries. Larger LED candles sometimes provide 300-500 hours.

Weatherproof

If you want to use LED candles outside on your deck or patio, be sure to purchase ones that are waterproof and weatherproof. Solar-powered LED candles, which are specifically designed for outdoor use, are a good choice for a waterproof option.

What to look for in quality LED candles

Flame

LED candles can feature either exposed or hidden flames. Exposed flames are usually made of small pieces of plastic in a flame shape that reflects the LED light. Some exposed flames are actually caps that sit over the LED bulb. Hidden flames sit behind a waxy shell, so they’re not actually visible. Instead, you only see the glow from the interior of the candle.

Dimmer

Some LED candles allow you to control how bright the light is. There’s usually a dimmer button, so you can dim the light to soften its brightness when desired.

Color changing

Most LED candles are white, beige or ivory in color. Other models are color-changing, so you can choose a color or have the candle rotate through colors for special occasions.

Remote

Some sets of LED candles include a remote to control the candles. The remote can adjust the settings on all of the candles, even if they’re not in the same room. In addition, most remotes have a 15 or 16-foot range, so you can control the candles from across the room.

Scented

If you are reluctant to give up traditional scented candles because of the delicious aromas they produce, you can actually find scented LED candles. Standard scent options include vanilla, cinnamon and rose.

Rings

Tapered LED candles sometimes come with latex rings that fit on their bottoms. These rings help the candles fit more securely in standard candle holders.

How much you can expect to spend on LED candles

You’ll usually pay between $7-$19 for LED candles. Those that range from $7-$10 are typically sets of 12 to 24 LED votive or tea lights. For $10-$19, you can find some single LED pillar candles, scented LED candles and other LED candles that come with a remote. You’ll spend more than $19 for larger sets of LED pillars or tapered candles.

LED candles FAQ

Do LED candles get hot?

LED candles, including their bulb, usually stay cool. That makes them a safe option to use inside a pumpkin, luminary bags or other decorative containers for special occasions.

How long do LED candles usually last?

Duration varies from candle to candle, but the bulb in most LED candles can last for up to a year. Of course, you may have to replace the candle’s batteries during that period.

What’s the best LED candle to buy?

Top LED candle

Enpornk Flameless Candles, Set of 9

What you need to know: This large set of realistic LED candles can create the perfect ambiance for your home.

What you’ll love: It contains nine flameless candles that resemble traditional candles and a remote. The user can control the candles’ brightness and flicker. They’re also made with real wax, which makes them look more realistic.

What you should consider: The glow the candles give off is very orange. They’re also all only one height.

Top LED candle for the money

Homemory Battery Operated Tea Lights, Set of 12

What you need to know: Homemory makes a realistic set of LED tea lights, which provide warm white light and feature a partially melted look.

What you’ll love: The set comes with 12 tea lights. Each tea light offers a battery life of more than 100 hours and is guaranteed to work out of the box.

What you should consider: The tea lights are made of plastic, which may not look realistic.

Prices listed reflect time and date of publication and are subject to change.

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This article was originally published on August 24 by Deceleration, a nonprofit online journal producing news and analysis at the intersection of environment and justice.

Deceleration Editor’s Note: On Thursday, August 22, 2024, a 46-year-old woman died on a sidewalk in the Five Points area of San Antonio in the midst of a brutal heat wave—an apparent victim of the day’s extreme temperatures. While the official high that day reached 106 degrees Fahrenheit, those temperatures are taken on the northside at San Antonio International Airport. Due to inequitable development patterns in urban areas and lots of heat-absorbing asphalt and concrete, temps across many more central neighborhoods are frequently much higher than what is recorded there. For example, Deceleration recorded heat index temps as high as 130 the day before in the downtown area. A family member confirmed to Deceleration that the woman was Jessica Witzel, a detail that has since been reported by other media. Deceleration Co-Editor Marisol Cortez had been supporting efforts to get Witzel, a family friend, off the streets and into medical care and stable housing. As Cortez writes here: Witzel’s death, much like that of Albert Garcia last summer, follows a pattern of lethally slow response time by local officials to the intertwined crises of climate, housing, and healthcare access for disabled people. — Greg Harman

Jessica Witzel was already at Bulverde Elementary when I arrived in 2nd grade, a new kid from San Antonio in a bizarre middle-of-nowhere rural landscape.

Jessica played flute in middle school band with me. She wore layers of black and purple lace and Wiccan necklaces and painted her fingernails black. She wore black T-shirts with the names of alternative bands on them: The Cure, Skinny Puppy. She was older and wiser, intimidatingly cool. She’d seen Morrissey live. What had he sounded like? I wanted to know. I was impressed. 

His singing was impeccable, she said. He hit every note pitch perfect. Sounded just like his albums. 

Jessica was a year ahead of me in high school. We were never close friends, but she hung out with kids I hung out with: the weird kids, the band kids, the art kids, the smart but troubled kids. She lived in a trailer with her younger sister Jemmy next door to one of my best friends in high school, a tall kid named Chris with a bowl haircut and preternatural artistic ability. It was Chris who introduced me to the kid who much later would become my older son’s dad, then my ex. But before that, Jessica was Miguel’s first love, his first real girlfriend.

Later, we lived above Jessica in a rented fourplex on E. Courtland, across from San Antonio College, where I moved right after college. She worked as an exotic dancer, which had intrigued me enough to interview her for a feminist theory class. She had exotic pets. A ferret, a parrot. Her apartment was cluttered and packed with stuff, an early sign of the hoarding struggles she would later develop. 

“It really was her house, on some level. On some level, she was just trying to go home. “

Jessica was married, briefly, to a guy who was half Mexican and half white like us. I remember seeing their wedding photo, Jess in a long purple velvet dress holding her pregnant belly like she would a globe, with glitter on her eyelids and shoulder-length bob dyed red. She looked beautiful. 

Jessica lived in different apartment complexes around town after she moved out of the fourplex, and sometimes we’d visit her. She spoke too fast and often so much it was hard to get a word in edgewise. She said she had been diagnosed bipolar, that she was taking medication. 

Jessica wasn’t married long, but from that marriage she had one son, Antares—named for the brightest star in the constellation Scorpius, spoken with the Spanish pronunciation. Once we visited from California and hung out with Jess and another high school friend. Antares was about 18 months then, shy and sweet. I had never been around babies much as an adult and was enraptured with him. I followed him around and around the restaurant as he explored, feeling for the first time like I could imagine having a child of my own.

When we moved back to San Antonio from Kansas, Jessica was living on Blanco with Antares, then seven or eight, in a small two-bedroom duplex just south of Hildebrand, near the traffic circle. On returning to Texas, my ex moved in with Jessica temporarily while he looked for his own place, and when our four-year-old was with his dad, he’d stay with Jessica and Antares too. The duplex was small and crowded with stuff, like her other places had been, but the kids seemed happy. I remember going over and watching them play with a litter of kittens they’d named things like Black Shadow and Orange Ninja. Jessica’s son had a video game where you placed figurines from The Last Airbender on top of the console and the characters would magically appear on screen. 

Eventually my ex found his own place, but Jessica remained a family friend until the end of her life—a sister to my ex, an aunt or godmother to my child. I was never as close to Jessica as they were, but I’d gone to school with her, I’d grown up with her. 

Jessica died on the street in the heat on August 22, 2024. She’d been homeless for more than a year by that point, after losing the duplex on Blanco where she’d lived for years. She hadn’t been able to hold on to housing: she’d developed schizophrenia and had started lighting fires inside the house.

When I heard from my ex that she was on the streets, I asked him to connect me with Jess’ sister Jemmy. Maybe she knew where Jessica was. And if we could find her, maybe we could help. 

So I reached out to Jemmy, hoping that what I’d learned from other mutual aid work I’d done with unhoused folks could possibly help Jessica too. Jemmy responded right away: Jessica was in Bexar County Jail, she said, where at least she was alive and off the streets and eating. But Jemmy was in hell, she said. For a year she had been calling and writing what felt like hundreds of people trying to get help for her sister—mental health services, shelters, attorneys, probate court, Adult Protective Services, 211, hospitals, jails, police. All to no avail.

She sent me pages and pages of documents, emails she had sent to county officials, jail officials, police. She sent me pictures of what Jessica had looked like before she became unhoused, after six months on the streets, another photo just before she was jailed in June. She’d dropped fifty pounds, Jemmy told me. She’d been raped on the streets, beat up, hit by cars. 

The night Jessica was last arrested and jailed, she showed up at her old house insisting she owned it, that her mom, very much still alive, had died and given it to her. She threw clothes over the fence, pulled the fence down to enter the yard, collected things off neighbors’ porches and put them into a roller dumpster, took a hose and watered the neighbors’ houses. The neighbors called SAPD on her for trespassing and property damage, but to me something about these actions, distorted as they were through the filter of psychosis, carried within them some trace of the ordinary and domestic. It really was her house, on some level. On some level, she was just trying to go home. 

(Courtesy/Deceleration)

Jemmy sent me Jessica’s rap sheet, the long list of prior charges that had accumulated in the time she’d been on the streets: sitting down in a right of way, camping in a public place, smoking outdoors where prohibited, littering. Reading them over, my heart sunk. Those weren’t crimes, not really. They were crimes like Jean Valjean stealing a goddamn loaf of bread to feed his starving family. Jessica wasn’t hurting anyone. 

Jessica was ill. She needed immediate rehousing, food, the right kind of medical care so she could stabilize enough to stay safely housed. And nobody in any of the agencies her sister emailed and called for more than a year seemed to really give a fuck. While held in Bexar County, Jessica was supposed to have a psychiatric evaluation prior to her release back to the streets, which could have hastened her being deemed incapacitated and qualified her for guardianship, but it never happened. Jemmy called and called the court appointed attorney to follow up on this, but he never called back, she told me.

I’d reached out to Jemmy when I heard that Jessica was on the streets, because for a brief while we’d had some success getting our neighbor Albert Garcia housed. He’d lost his feet and part of one leg living unsheltered during Winter Storm Uri, and he would eventually die under a highway overpass in our neighborhood around this time last year, during a similar weeks-long stretch of triple-digit days. But for a time, neighbors and radical street medics, working together with determined people on the inside of institutional power, got a double amputee with a lifetime of heroin use off the street and sober for 18 months. 

So I reached out to Jemmy. As with Albert, we started the process of applying for the Bexar County guardianship program that had saved Albert’s life for a time. I reached out to constituent services for District 5, where the jail was located, and later District 1, where Jessica hung out after release from jail, to request a meeting to discuss an emergency plan of action for connecting Jessica to resources and services. I reached out to mutual aid groups in the hopes street medics could establish regular check-ins with Jessica until guardianship came through. I tried connecting Jemmy with NAMI family support groups. We put together a direct aid request to raise funds.

Eventually, after several weeks of email follow up, District 5 politely declined to convene a meeting. There wasn’t really anything they could do, they said. Really it was on the County, they said, putting us in touch with Judge Oscar J. Kazen, who presides over Bexar County’s mental health court. I knew Kazen—he’d helped us with Albert, and he’d called us with his condolences when he heard Albert had died.

On the phone, Kazen was kind. He told us he would do what he could but that we needed to be realistic. It used to be there were public hospitals where unhoused people with serious mental illness could go to stabilize and rehabilitate, but those days were long gone. The only thing left was contract beds and voluntary care—of little help for people with schizophrenia, who frequently lack insight into their own condition and refuse treatment. If you really want to help, he laughed wryly, tell the City and County to build me a real psychiatric hospital.

Still, within a couple days of our conversation, Kazen’s office emailed Jemmy a legal document stating that Jessica had been assigned a guardian ad litem to represent her in court. Her case was moving. And for a couple days, we were hopeful. 

Then the heat dome hit. And as with Albert when he returned to the streets last year at this time, the City and County moved too slowly for the pace and scale of the crisis we’re living. 

I got the call yesterday. Between choking sobs, Jemmy read me what the news had reported about her sister, our friend. The day before, a 46-year-old woman, presumed to be unhoused, had been found unresponsive on a sidewalk in the Five Points neighborhood. Jemmy’s mother later confirmed with local authorities that the woman in the news reports was her daughter, Jessica Jill Witzel. 

Initial reports of Jessica’s death state she died of natural causes resulting from heat-related illness. She died of what now? That’s like saying someone who lived below the levees and drowned during Hurricane Katrina died of natural causes.

The day before Jessica died, Deceleration’s heat monitoring downtown showed the heat index hitting a high of 130 degrees. According to Climate Central’s Climate Shift Index, this level of heat was made five times more likely because of anthropogenic climate change—meaning, essentially, this particular heat event was impossible but for the burning of fossil fuels and eradication of global forests that serve as carbon sinks. More simply stated, climate change is driving the extreme heat that killed Jessica. Climate change pulled the trigger. But institutional abandonment of the unhoused and disabled loaded the gun.

So no, it’s not underlying conditions that explain why someone like Jessica died in the heat, as some media reports of her death have suggested—even if, as an official cause of death is determined, this emerges later as a factor. It’s not the wrong kind of paving material, as suggested in a KENS 5 news story. Yes, how we build our cities matter. Which neighborhoods have access to shade and water matters. But big picture: It’s climate change. It’s deep histories of inequality. It’s systemic neglect of the most vulnerable.

We did this, in other words. We are doing this. But guess what. That means it can be different. That means it must be different.

Right problem, wrong solution. It’s one of the most familiar stories in politics.

Thanks to inflation, every American is paying higher prices for groceries and housing than before the pandemic. But politicians’ proposed solutions would make those problems even worse.

The right solution is to attack inflation’s root cause, a money supply that ran amok during COVID. When the amount of money grows faster than the amount of real goods and services, you get inflation. Conversely, inflation stays low when money and goods grow in sync.

In September 2024, we’re most of the way back to that point, but keeping inflation low for the long haul means reducing deficit spending, which neither party will do.

Instead of fiscal and monetary restraint, Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris pledged to enact a grocery store price gouging ban “to make clear that big corporations can’t unfairly exploit consumers to run up excessive corporate profits on food and groceries.”

A problem with this is that the industry average for grocery store profits is 1.6 percent. This leaves little room for price gouging. For context, the stock market averages an 8% return.

This is a perfect example of the right-problem, wrong-solution dynamic. Price controls have failed everywhere they have been tried because they aim at symptoms of inflation and not its root cause.

Since COVID-19, grocery prices have risen at about the same rate as overall inflation. Inflation is the culprit here, not a sinister CEO cabal. Over the last year, grocery prices have gone up slower than inflation, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. While overall inflation was 2.9% over the last year, food prices rose 2.2%.

Housing prices also have a right-problem, wrong-solution story. Unlike groceries, housing prices are going up faster than inflation. But even here, price controls and price gouging laws will not make housing more affordable. The best way to make housing more affordable is to build more housing.

Instead, President Joe Biden floated a plan to cap rent increases at 5% annually. Harris endorsed the plan soon after becoming the nominee. Rent controls create shortages. They reduce housing construction. They reduce the maintenance of existing housing. This has been the experience everywhere, from San Francisco to Minneapolis.

There just isn’t much the federal government can do here. Zoning laws and permits are mostly set at the state and local levels. Modernizing local codes and taking on NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) activists in city council meetings is a city-by-city project for which presidential candidates can’t take credit.

Harris’ rent control proposals are about virtue signaling, not substance. On an issue with little federal role, Harris is letting voters know she still hears their problems and wants to do something about it. That is a good message, but Harris supporters should not be defending price controls on the merits.

There are a few things the federal government can do. It can speed up federally required environmental reviews, which can average 4.5 years to complete before construction may begin. Removing tariffs on building supplies like steel and lumber can save thousands of dollars on homebuilding costs.

Instead of those helpful things, the administration is up to something else highly unhelpful.

The Justice Department has sued RealPage, which uses AI technology to comb through comparable real estate listings in various markets and suggest rents to landlords. This price-fixing lawsuit will do nothing to increase the housing supply.

It could actually keep rents higher for longer. RealPage’s algorithm brings price signals to markets faster than going through listings manually. If housing supplies do increase and rents go down, it will take longer to show up in market prices without algorithmic help, and landlords will collect higher rents for longer than if RealPage were allowed to operate.

Republicans are no better. Donald Trump’s proposed 20% across-the-board trade tariff would cause at least as much damage as Harris’ price controls. New tariffs would pile onto existing steel and lumber tariffs.

Both parties have identified the right problem — rising prices — but have proposed the wrong solutions. Our best hope is that these Harris and Trump policy promises are empty campaign rhetoric.

Ryan Young is a senior economist at the Competitive Enterprise Institute. He wrote this for InsideSources.com.

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