It is liquid paraffin. That one fact answers most of what people ask us about burning it indoors.
We sell refined liquid paraffin. Kerosene is a different fuel: cheaper, dirtier, and it smells. In an outdoor lantern that hardly matters. In a closed living room it decides whether the lamp gets used twice or every evening.
We refine ours to strip out the aromatic compounds behind the smell and most of the soot. Ultra-Pure is our 99% grade, and it burns without soot, smoke or odor. That is what lets you run it next to a sofa.
The trade-off is cost per hour. Paraffin costs more than kerosene and always will. For a lamp lit a few nights a year during outages, the difference across the lamp's whole life comes to less than the lamp cost.
Ultra-Pure is our main line and the one to burn indoors. It comes as 60009 in a 32 oz bottle, 60003 in 64 oz, and a 100 oz jug that works out to three quarters of a gallon.
Medallion, our 60005 in 32 oz, is the other clear paraffin, with the same easy-pour neck. Both work in the same lamps with the same wicks.
Neither is scented. Scented lamp oils exist from other makers and are a matter of taste, but they put compounds back into a fuel whose whole point is having none.
Work it out from the reservoir, not from the bottle. Our chamber lamp 110 holds 11.8 oz and burns up to 20 hours on a fill, so a 32 oz bottle is roughly two and a half fills, somewhere near 50 hours of light.
The Ellise holds 19.5 oz for up to 28 hours, which makes the same bottle about one and a half fills. Each lamp in our emergency kit holds 5 oz and runs around 15 hours.
Two things follow. For a lamp that only comes out in a storm, one 32 oz bottle covers several nights and buying more is money sitting in a cupboard. For a lamp lit most weeks, 32 oz is a month at best, and that is who we make the jug for.
Black smoke almost always means too much wick is showing, not bad fuel. We get this question more than any other. Trim the wick flat across the top, light it, then turn it down until the tips of the flame stop going dark. A correctly set flame is shorter than most people expect.
Soot on the inside of the chimney comes from the same cause. Let the glass cool completely, then wipe it out. Cleaning a hot chimney is how chimneys crack.
If a lamp smokes with the wick set low and trimmed, check the wick itself. A carbonized or too-short wick draws unevenly and will not settle no matter how you adjust it.
Paraffin does not go off in any practical sense, and that is most of the argument for our lamps as emergency lighting. A sealed bottle bought this year works in five. Batteries in the same drawer will not.
Keep it cool, closed, upright, out of sunlight, and away from where children can reach it. Store the bottle with the lamp and a spare 3-pack of wicks in one container, and the kit still functions years later. Store them in three different places and it does not.
Only fuel sold for wick-fed lamps. Not gasoline, not alcohol, not camp-stove fuel, not lamp oil substitutes improvised from anything in a garage. These have different flash points, and a wick lamp is not built to contain what they do.
Mixing brands of paraffin is fine. Mixing paraffin with kerosene gets you kerosene's smell in exchange for paraffin's price, so there is no reason to do it.