Effy's Liquid Soap Experiments

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

I think that would help. I also wonder if larger batches produce more heat which helps things along, too?

By way of update, both have no excess liquid going on. I left the gly batch in the oven overnight so it is slightly thicker than the soaped batch. I will look at diluting one of them either tonight or tomorrow

 

[Susie]

Probably. I did not think of that until you called it to my attention. I usually make batches no smaller than 500 g of oil. Even the test batches are 500 g. I don't have a mini SB, you see, and anything smaller than 500 g is too small to use with my current SB and tub.

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

I also read in another thread that when you use the glycerin you count it as part of the water - I missed that and used the amount of water AND the glycerine, so no wonder I was a little bit wet to start with.

Thanks for holding my hand through all this. It's great fun, if a little bit scary

 

[DeeAnna]

I'm with Susie ... trace in LS is different than trace for CP NaOH soap. More like the point when an HP NaOH soap hits gel stage. If ya can stir it easy, it ain't there yet.

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

Well, both were a wee bit harsh for my tastes, after I diluted a little bit at the ration 2 parts paste to 1 part water. I did use normal tap water rather than distilled water for the dilution, but not sure it would make such a difference to the feel of it.

I am going to leave the pastes for a while and come back to them.

 

[Susie]

Liquid soap does not have the higher superfat that bar soap does. You end up with a layer of oils sitting on top of the soap that you then have to add something like polysorbate 80 to bring it back together. It also has a higher percentage of CO typically than bar soap does. Both of these contribute heavily to that harshness.

I stopped diluting my 100% CO dish soap a while ago. I just put a dab(I now put the paste in 0.5 oz tubes) on the cloth or brush and scrub away. If I do need liquid soap, I just understand that it will be thin. It also does not suds up like syndets do. However, our ancestors did fine without high sudsing soaps, so it won't hurt us either. The commercial "soap" manufacturers have us convinced that suds=effectiveness just because it is easier to show on advertisements.

100% CO liquid soap does wonders on laundry without adding those syndets. I use the paste as stain removers or 100% CO as stain sticks. Works a charm. It would be good for cleaning up baby clothes without adding chemicals...just saying.

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

So, latest news!

I took two samples of each batch for dilution - one with plains distilled water, the other with a 20:80 salt:distilled water solution.

Dilution ratio was 2:1 paste to liquid. Here are the results:

Paste with soap as the trace-maker, water only dilution


Paste with glycerine as the trace-maker with water only dilution


Paste with soap as the trace-maker, salt solution dilution


Paste with glycerine as the trace-maker, salt solution dilution


So when using a salt solution, it appears that you need a lot more of it!

At this point the lather was pretty similar between them all, but I think if I added in more solution to the pastes the salt might inhibit a little bit at least

 

[Susie]

At this point the lather was pretty similar between them all, but I think if I added in more solution to the pastes the salt might inhibit a little bit at least

That was my experience. Salt just is not my friend in soapmaking. I like my bubbles.

 

[IrishLass]

So when using a salt solution, it appears that you need a lot more of it!

Just be careful how much salt you add because it can also have the opposite thickening-effect if too much is added to liquid soap. I added just a titch too much once and instead of my soap getting gradually thicker as it had been doing as I was adding the solution drop by drop, it all of a sudden thinned right back out. I guess that one last drop was just too much! I found that putting my thinned-out batch in a pot and heating it with the cover off to encourage evaporation helped to thicken it back up.

[Edited to add- I don't normally use salt in my liquid soap- it was just that one time.]


IrishLass

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

Okay, well something interesting happened - one of the salt water dilutions had just a load more water added, as I said, just to see what would happen:



An actual liquid soap consistency! I will do some more experiments with various salt levels and water amounts to see what sort of results we can get, but it looks promising. It lathered well enough as there was no more salt added that originally, so it might well have a chance.

Once more in to the breach!

 

[LBussy]

@ Susie- now that you are on the Dish, you can read through the awesome thread that got me started on my liquid soapmaking journey: http://www.thedishforum.com/forum/index.php?/topic/146547-glycerin-method-liquid-soap/?hl=glycerin I gotta warn you- it's very long (but so cool). It starts slow, but then it builds into a giant avalanche of exciting experimentation. The posts by 3bees~1flower and Lily2 were especially of tremendous help and encouragement to me.

The video that 3Bees posted was so good that I only (!?) got through page 32 before trying it myself. It may have been the easiest soap to make yet. The paste is going to sit overnight before I dilute.

As a side note, has anyone else had difficulty dissolving the KOH in the glycerine. I have quite large flakes and I ended up stick blending it to try and get it to dissolve. It took over an hour in the crock pot to dissolve completely and even then I still wasn't totally happy with it when I added the oils.

I added the KOH to my cold (unheated) glycerin in the pot. I stirred that to break up clumps and then heated it over medium heat (elec stove). I stirred off and on the whole time; by the time it got to boiling it was completely dissolved. The liquid was maybe 320-330° F which is well under the boiling point of pure glycerin at 554°F so I assume that the boiling is driving off the moisture adsorbed by the lye. Maybe DeeAnna will swing by and let me know if my guess is right.

You said you used the crock-pot and assuming that's correct I don't think a crock-pot will get that hot.

I don't see why not. I use tetrasodium EDTA in my liquid soap as well as my bar soap, which helps with the same thing as Sodium Citrate.

Do you use the weight of the oils, finished paste, or finished LS as the basis for calculation?

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

With the ca I used? It was weight of oils

 

[IrishLass]

Do you use the weight of the oils, finished paste, or finished LS as the basis for calculation?

Speaking only for myself, I use the weight of finished liquid soap as the basis for my tetrasodium EDTA calculations.

Since I use EDTA in 39% solution form, I do a 2-part calculation to make sure I'm adding the correct amount of the solution:

1) I take the total weight of my finished liquid soap (in grams) and multiply it by .5%. The resulting answer tells me how many grams of powdered EDTA is required for my batch. But since I'm working with a 39% solution, I do the following extra equation....
2) I take the required amount of powdered EDTA and multiply it by 2.56. The resulting sum is how much of my 39% solution to weigh out for my batch (in grams).


IrishLass

 

[ngian]

Speaking of EDTA, I have found both trisodium and tetrasodium EDTA in powder form. Which one is "better"?

Is 4sodium more powerful than 3sodium and thus it needs lesser amount to have an effect? Or are they just different materials that are intended for different purposes?

Nikos

 

[DeeAnna]

Good question, Nikos. It comes as DIsodium EDTA or TETRAsodium EDTA. Use TETRA for alkaline products and DI for neutral to acidic.

So ... tetra is best for lye soap.

"...I assume that the boiling is driving off the moisture adsorbed by the lye. Maybe DeeAnna will swing by and let me know if my guess is right...."

I'm not sure on that one, Lee. You might well be right, but it's hard to find out much about this.

It seems this process of using glycerin rather than water to make soap started with busy pharmacists who didn't have a lot of time to hover over saponifying soap to make their medicated concoctions. It's drifted over, as far as I can tell mainly due to "Silver Doctor" at the Dish, into the handcrafted soap making sphere. There aren't a lot of grubby grad students getting grant money to study the process. :think:

 

[LBussy]

I'm not sure on that one, Lee. You might well be right, but it's hard to find out much about this.

About all I can find is that the melting point of KOH is 763° F and the boiling point is 2,421° F. That, plus the boiling point of glycerin being 554° F makes any water the likely culprit. I suppose one could distill the steam and test it.

If that's the case, at some point the boiling should stop; holding it at heat for a period of time may empirically prove (or at least lend credence to) this.

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

So last night I decided to look again at the fluke dilution that I made - I know that 20% salt at 50% of the paste weight is not good, but I know that a lower salt solution at a lather amount can result in a good consistency. The question is, how much?

So I made a 5% salt solution and made 3 testers - one at 50% paste weight, one at 100% and another at 150%. This should give me an area to aim for (less than 100% but more than 50%, for example)

Will keep "y'all" updated.

 

[LBussy]

Must do another liquid batch. As a very smart man once said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."

Is it better to go off on one's own and make mistakes, or to follow blindly? Just a musing, I do both rather well.

 

[Susie]

I was following the crowd there until the lazy beast in me decided that there had to be an easier way to make liquid soap. So, I researched and asked questions until I found the easier way. Then I tweaked that until it was as simple a process as I could make it, and still get liquid soap.

So, I think the answer is...both. Yes, you can learn from others, but might be able to make it better/easier/more efficient/whatever by going off on your own. I do learn from others what NOT to do better than I learn what I should do.

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

So, all of these are at 50% paste weight dilution, but with varying salt amounts -


5% salt solution - far too runny


10% salt solution - getting better but still rather runny


15% salt solution - a tad too thick!

So, next I'll try a 12.5% salt solution at 50% paste weight and see how it looks