cp soap too soft

Hi,

so glad to find a forum, I hope someone can give me an answer. I've been using a recipe with basically 1/3 olive oil, 1/3 coconut oil and 1/3 mix of Avocado & castor oils. This has worked GREAT for me. Now i want to make more, so I doubled the recipe, verified it with a lye calculator online. But all 3 batches have been soooooo soft, they won't even come out of the mold.
This has been very disheartening and expensive.
Any ideas???

:headbanging:

When you scale up or down, you'll need to tweak your processing to adjust. What kind of mold(s) are you using? Did you verify whether the soap gelled or not with the different batch sizes?

Some thoughts -- I'd guess your soap gelled in the previous smaller batches, but did not gel when you scaled up for whatever reason. You have a lot of liquid oils in the recipe and, while that's not wrong, it does increase the tendency for the soap to stay soft if it doesn't gel. So next batch try soaping a bit warmer and/or insulate your molds so they stay warmer during saponification or use CPOP (put soap into a prewarmed 150-170 F oven, immediately turn the oven OFF, and let the soap stay in the oven for several hours or overnight). Another thing to consider is to use less water in the scaled-up recipe -- you didn't say what your lye concentration is -- because that can have a big effect on the outcome.

For the batches that you've already made, you can "CPOP after the fact" by putting the soap back in the mold or on a cookie sheet protected with parchment paper. Do the CPOP I just described, but leave the oven on for 60-90 minutes, then turn the oven off. This may get the soap to firm up if not-gelling is the problem with the soap. More info: https://classicbells.com/soap/cpopAfterTheFact.html