Ok very new to this...

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CiCi said:
That's reassuring Mandy. My problem is that when I look at the numbers, they don't have any meaning for me. An analogy would be that it is like picking up a foreign newspaper and all you see are the letters of the words, but the words do not mean anything because you do not understand them. Once you understand what the letters are forming, the words have meaning. I'm just trying to understand what the numbers are telling me. Once I can understand that, I'll be ready to soap. I'll go play with SoapCalc. Thanks for the info.


Those numbers had no meaning for me either when I first started soaping.

What I did when I started out was to find a recipe that sounded good to me (Kathy Miller's site has tons of recipes); type it into SoapCalc and print out the page; make the soap; cure it; use it; compare the feel of the soap with the quality numbers on my printed SoapCalc page; and then tweak my recipe to be either more conditioning, or bubbly, etc.., by using those first ever numbers on that page and my finished soap as a foundation to work from in order to improve upon my next batch, and so on and so forth until I got a soap that I really liked.

Once I came up with a recipe that felt great to me, I kept the numbers handy not only for duplicating future batches of the same recipe, but also for using as a reference point to birth other recipes from. That's the only way those numbers have made any real-life sense to me.

One of my favorite recipes that I use as a regular base recipe has these numbers (it's a Castile-type with 60% OO):

Hardness: 31 (this might seem low, but in reality, it's a nice and hard bar because of the high OO amount. One of the quirks of SoapCalc is that it doesn't figure in that OO is really a hard oil instead of a soft oil)

Cleansing: 16

Conditioning: 65

Bubbly lather: 24

Creamy lather: 23

Iodine: 64

INS: 135

It makes for a hard, conditioning bar that cleanses me without drying me out, and has abundant lather with a good ratio of bubbly to creamy.


Just keep on trying and experimenting until you find that perfect formula for you. Once you do, you'll be so excited that you'll never want to stop soaping, ever. Trust me! :)



IrishLass
 
Thanks so much for this hijacked thread. I too am fairly new at this and this soapcalc calc severly confused me. I don't know much about oils and their properties and NOTHING about the lye to water ratios and such (in the top right hand corner) so I don't know what to do with that section. When I tried inputting a recipe into the calc it told me that I had to enter this lye/water info to continue (or that it was extremely OFF and notified me). So I'm still clueless what to put there. Without that info can you use the rest of the calculator "test" recipes? Excellent thread!
Thanks.
 
jadiebugs1 said:
Thanks so much for this hijacked thread. I too am fairly new at this and this soapcalc calc severly confused me. I don't know much about oils and their properties and NOTHING about the lye to water ratios and such (in the top right hand corner) so I don't know what to do with that section. When I tried inputting a recipe into the calc it told me that I had to enter this lye/water info to continue (or that it was extremely OFF and notified me). So I'm still clueless what to put there. Without that info can you use the rest of the calculator "test" recipes? Excellent thread!
Thanks.

Sharon,

When you were calculating your recipe in SoapCalc, did you happen to change or delete any of the numbers that were already there in the upper right corner? I ask because SoapCalc automatically figures those percentages out for you by default, and if you delete them and leave them blank, they will warn you with one of those pop-up boxes. You can go ahead and use whatever default numbers they alread have typed in there in the upper right, but as you grow in your soaping confidence and experience, you'll soon discover more and more to be able to plug in your own ratios that you are happier with.

I used to use the default pecentages when I first started out, but now that I have more experience under my belt, the only boxes I mess with in the upper right corner now are the Superfat/Discount percentage box and the Lye Concentration box. Depending of the effect I'm after in my soaps, I set the Superfat/Discount box anywhere from 5 for some soaps, and all the way up to 20 for others. I usually set the Lye Concentration box to 33%. I like soaping with a 33% lye concentration. Those 2 boxes are really the only two boxes anyone has to worry about or do anything with. You can also just leave them alone and use whatever is already there by default.

When I use SoapCalc (which I do for every batch), I personally ignore all the other boxes in the upper right as if they are not there, except for the Superfat/Discount box and the Lye Concentration box, because when you type your own figures in those 2 boxes, SoapCalc automatically calculates everything else out for you in the other boxes. Oh, when you want to plug in your own lye concentration, just rmember to click the little box that says 'set', and then it will allow you to set your own number there.

I hope that I helped to answer your questions without confusing you even more, lol. I'm always happy to help anyone just staring out, so if what I just said didn't make sense to you, please don't hesitate to let me know and I'll try it from a different angle. :)



IrishLass
 
Thanks for the detailed info. I probably did delete something in that box. Lord knows....
I understand what superfatting is, but I don't understand the Lye Concentration. Is that what is meant by water discounting, or are they two different animals? It was (and still is) that Lye Concentration that has me confused. I better understand the calculator now, a little, I played with it some more last night. I can see how it would be (WILL be!) a super help when getting more involved in creating recipes. So far, (except for one) the CP soaps I've made the recipes came from books, etc. that I've run through a simple calc. (BBs) I've only made one pound batches (on average) so keeping the number of oils limited really helps, otherwise the divisions get too detailed (.0346 oz. for example, how am i supposed to measure that, lol!). Soon I will venture to maybe 3# batches once I've tried and found some I really like, then play with the "specialty" oils. This calc will help tremendously then!
Again, thank you. What you explained helped very much and if you'd care to explain what Lye Concentration means, it would be greatly appreciated.
 
Hi Sharon!

Lye concentration vs. water discount can be a very confusing topic. On the surface, they seem to be talking about the same thing, but they are actually two different animals when you get down to it.

When people speak of a lye concentration, they are talking about the strength of a solution that is made up of lye and water (i.e. how much lye is in the solution in relation to the water amount).

For instance (I gleaned this from another forum):

a 25% lye solution = 25% lye + 75% water (the water weight is 3 times the weight of lye)

a 33% lye solution = 33% lye + 66% water (the water is double the lye weight)

a 40% lye solution = 40% lye + 60% water (the water weight is 1.5 times the weight of the lye)

a 50% lye solution (only for the very experienced soaper) = 50% lye + 50% water (half and half)



What this means is that I'm taking the water amount of any given recipe and adding enough lye to it to bring it to a certain percentage of strength. When I tell someone I used a 33% lye solution, they know immediately that I used twice as much water as lye, no matter what recipe I happen to be using. It's pretty cut and dry and standard as compared to water discounts, which can be pretty nebulous.

For instance, if I tell someone I used a 33% water discount, they'd want to know what the foundational amount of water is that I am discounting from. Here's where it gets tricky because not all lye calculators on the net base their water amounts on the same criteria, even if it's the same exact recipe. A 33% water discount at So & So's does not give you the same water discount percentage as Whatchamacallit's because So & So's bases their water amount on oil weight, and Whatchamacallit's bases theirs on lye weight. It's not uniform across the board. A 33% water discount could mean one thing here and another thing there because they are both starting with different water amounts based on different criteria.

Lye solutions, on the other hand are very standard and mean the same thing across the board no matter what your recipe is. For instance, A 33% lye solution always means twice as much water as lye for every single recipe no matter how different it is from another recipe.

Hopefully, that makes sense. :)

Well, with that out of the way, you are now probably wondering what difference the various lye solutions make in your soap. Well, pretty much in a nutshell, the lower your lye concentration, the longer your soap will take to trace and the longer it will take to harden up and evaporate all the excess water out after unmolding. The higher the concentration, the faster things go and the faster your soap hardens and drys out after unmolding. The highest I've gone is 40%. It was for a Castile-type soap with 80% Olive Oil in it. I wouldn't go higher than a 33%, though, until you have a good feel for soaping and all of the curves it can throw you. Things move really fast the higher you go, so it's best to gain confidence at the lower levels first.

SoapCalc's default Lye concentration is set at 31%, I think. I like 33%. It's a nice middle of the road percentage. Not too low, not too high, and my soaps don't shrink much at all as they are curing in comparison to those made with a lower lye concentration. This especially comes in handy when making Castiles, because they can be quite soft at first if a low lye concentration is used. My very first Castile-type was done at a 26% lye solution, and it took a week for it to even be hard enough to unmold! Then it took at least 3 months more to harden up enough to use it without it completely turning to jelly! When I make the same recipe now, but use a 33% lye solution instead of 26%, I can unmold it within 12 hours and it reaches the same hardness at 2 or 3 days that it took my first batch to reach in 3 months! It's amazing!

Well, I hoped that helped!



IrishLass :)
 
Oh, it DID help! Thank you very, very much. I trust you and I'm believeing I need to keep things simple...I tend to make things more complicated than I have to. But just to see if I'm understanding this right here is the lye and water amount of the two small batches I made 2 days ago....
7.3oz. water - 2.9oz. lye = 25% lye solution?
7oz. water - 3.1oz. lye = 26% lye solution?
If I'm figuring this out correctly I have been using anywhere from 23 to 26%. And suppose I should stay there for now. I mean, even at these low numbers, making these small batches I get trace very quickly already. Certainly don't need to speed things up anymore!
Knowing they are two different animals, though, wouldn't discounting your water increase the lye solution percentage in a sense? Just not to specific proportions?
Ahh, anyway, thank you very much for the lesson. I do appreciate your help. But today has been dedicated to M&P :roll:
 
WOW! This was a great thread - it answered every single question I had about water percentages, soapcalc, lye percentages, olive oils soaps, and then some. Thanks so much to all you experienced folks for taking the time to explain all of this!
 
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