is the reaction of the burning candle giving off heat or absorbing heat
Exothermic process Simply stated, after an exothermic reaction, more energy has been released to the surroundings than was absorbed to initiate and maintain the reaction. An example would be the burning of a candle, wherein the sum of calories produced by combustion (found by looking at radiant heating of the surroundings and visible light produced, including increase in temperature of the fuel (wax) itself, which with oxygen, have become hot CO2 and water vapor,) exceeds the number of calories absorbed initially in lighting the flame and in the flame maintaining itself. (i.e. some energy produced by combustion is reabsorbed and used in melting, then vaporizing the wax, etc. but is (far) outstripped by the energy produced in breaking carbon-hydrogen bonds and combination of oxygen with the resulting carbon and hydrogen).
Heat of combustion There are two kinds of heat of combustion, called higher and lower heating value, depending on how much the products are allowed to cool and whether compounds like H2O are allowed to condense. The values are conventionally measured with a bomb calorimeter. They may also be calculated as the difference between the heat of formation ΔHof of the products and reactants (though this approach is somewhat artificial since most heats of formation are calculated from measured heats of combustion). For a fuel of composition CcHhOoNn, the (higher) heat of combustion is 418 kJ/mol (c + 0.3 h – 0.5 o) usually to a good approximation (±3%),[1] though it can be drastically wrong if o + n > c (for instance in the case of nitroglycerine (C3H5N3O9) this formula would predict a heat of combustion of 0[2]). The value corresponds to an exothermic reaction (a negative change in enthalpy) because the double bond in molecular oxygen is much weaker than other double bonds or pairs of single bonds, particularly those in the combustion products carbon dioxide and water; conversion of the weak bonds in oxygen to the stronger bonds in carbon dioxide and water releases energy as heat.[1]