First soap attempt!

[James Handley]

Hello all!

My wife has been wanting to do soaps and lotions for a while now. We have already done chapstick before. So finally thought I would give it a go.

I have my own bee hives and so wanted to use my own bees wax.

I tried to find pure lye but that seems to be a problem in Oklahoma. So I thought I would try making soda ash from the ashes of a lot of burning I did the other day. Most of the wood was pecan wood.

It took two days of soaking ashes, boiling it down. Rehydrating the potassium carbonate and potassium hydoxide mix and filtering through coffee filters and dehydrated back down. I ended up with 35g of off white looking powder.

I have been collecting bacon grease by filtering the lard right after slow cooking bacon through coffee filters.

I used a soap calc and came up with a recipe of 40% lard, 40% coconut oil, 10% bees wax and 10% grape seed oil. (80g, 80g, 20g, 20g) Calc said to use 60g water and 28g lye or sodium hydroxide.

I used the whole amount of soda ash since I know it has a PH in solution closer to 10.5 where as sodium hydroxide is closer to 13.

Used crock pot method. Melted wax and solid fats first. Added liquid fat and then mixed water and soda ash. Not all of it dissolved. The soda ash would not dissolve in the crock pot so I pored it into a blender and blended on high for a minut or so.

Right now I am at about 10-15 min into it sitting in the crock pot and it is not setting up like most videos show. I think it is the trace I am looking for.

Let me know if my soda ash and or recipe seems to be way off and I am in a hot mess.

Over 50 minutes into it and it does not look set at all. Looking close it almost seems as if there is some separated fat. And it smells of bacon grease. I am tired of the smell and will go to bed. I'll check in the morning and see what it looks like. Leaving the crock pot on low.

 

[CaraBou]

Welcome to the forum, James.

I don't know much about the process you used or whether you truly got "lye" in the end, but I do have a couple thoughts and questions.

One, processing wood ash leads to making potassium hydroxide (KOH), not sodium hydroxide (NaOH). KOH is used to make liquid soap and NaOH is used in bar soap. So, looking for trace with whatever you have may be inappropriate.

Second, it is not the pH that dictates how much KOH or NaOH you use in a recipe. Don't just guess - use a lye calculator with KOH plugged in for a liquid soap recipe (assuming you have KOH).

Next, did you dissolve the "product" in water before you added it to your fats? I got the impression you may have just dumped both in to your oils at the same time without dissolving the lye in water first.

I'll also mention that seems like an awful lot of beeswax for a soap recipe. Most of beeswax is not saponifiable so there are some other effects that you are not accounting for. You also have to process bacon grease more than just filtering before you truly have lard.

I think you have more research to do. Good luck though, it's an interesting experiment.

 

[msunnerstood]

I wouldnt leave it cooking while you sleep. if the lye kicks in and it volcanos you could wake up to a real mess.

 

[BattleGnome]

I don’t have any advice but can I ask for a link to the resources you used to process your ash? An “everything from scratch” bar is on my to do list.

Knowing your resources will also help us to know your full method start to finish. Someone may be able to spot something that’s giving you trouble. One question I have is what your order of mixing was. Did you add your water to your fats then add you ash mixture or did you add the ashes to the water and then to the oils? The second method is considered proper for soap making (and using caustic in general). If you did the first you mixed up what molecules are available to react and things may take longer. I’m not sure how that would effect the final product

 

[Soapprentice]

All I can say is I admire your patience!

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

Recipe-wise, I'm not sure that you would be happy with 40% coconut. You might be, but few people would be.

While making from scratch is interesting, if you want to make soap then I think buying lye (people here can advise you where to find a good price near you) would be the best, as well as learning a bit more about what makes a recipe good, bad, or indifferent. Not to mention using a lye calculator

 

[earlene]

If you live near a Tractor Supply Company (TSC), of which there are a few in OK, you can buy this drain cleaner which is 100% sodium hydroxide. I have used it many times. If you have a Farm & Fleet
Some hardware stores carry it, as do some Walmarts. If you live near a Walmart, you can often order online and they will deliver to your local Walmart where you can pick it up (sometimes no extra charge).
You can also buy lye online. There are several vendors online where you can get a good price on NaOH, which is the lye used for bar soap. See this thread for more info on where some of our members purchase lye at local stores. One of them might work for you.
Also this recent post at The Spruce has some links for where to buy lye online:
https://www.thespruce.com/where-to-buy-lye-516799

Finding a source for sodium hydroxide will make your soapmaking experience so much easier. I have not tried making my own lye, and don't plan to either, but I kudos to you for making the attempt!

 

[SaltedFig]

Hello James,

From my calculations, your superfat is going to be very high - over 15%, if your KOH purity is at 100%, which it is (without a doubt) not.

So ... you have too much fat for the amount of caustic.

A 200gram recipe is hard to control, with the very best commercial ingredients. I suspect that the combination of extracting a lower purity potassium hydroxide from the white ashes of your burnt wood, in combination with an imprecise recipe (based on a conversion from NaOH that wasn't quite correct) ...

Has led to too much fat for the amount of caustic.

The recipe itself ... drop the beeswax slightly (10% will make a tacky bar of soap), and maybe lower the coconut (it can be irritating to skin at 40% for most people, but not all)

*excuse the water in the following ... I didn't adjust it back from the NaOH version.



*edited to add ...
Welcome aboard, congratulations on the most marvelous extraction and magnificent work ... give it another go and I reckon you'll get it!.

 

[James Handley]

Ok thank you all for the replies.

So for process I followed an online video.

Step one: melt solid wax and fats on low in crockpot.

Step two: about 20 min later, mix in grape seed oil.

Step 3: measure out water and add soda ash mix to it and stir. Water was hot from the tap.

Step 4: add solution to the oil mix.

Step next in failures.... this is where things started looking wrong. The soda ash did not fully dissolve. The un-dissolved ash was just chunky at the bottom so a poured it all into a blender and blended for a minute and added back to crock pot.

Step to follow: I stirred and watched for about another 20 minutes. The consistency did not change at all and looking closely I could see clear bits of fat separated it seemed.

Step probably a fault: thinking I did not have enough soda ash I went outside and had a pot on the grill with soda ash in solution that I did not fully cook down but crystals were starting to form at the bottom. I siphoned off 200 ml of the clearest liquid. And added 100 ml to the crock pot and stirred.

Step further mistakes I am sure: after about 5-10 min or so I added the other 100 ml hoping for some reaction.

Step final mistake: after about 55 min total after the oils melted the mix looked like it started to bubble a little but next to no other reaction and just as watery looking. I just went to bed and left it on low.

Result: looks like it fully separated and everything of color fell to the bottom. There was just clear oil floating on top.

I do have a tractor supply about 15 miles from me. I think I will head that way today and try and find some lye.

I will also look into processing bacon greas into lard and see if I need additional steps.

I only had the coconut oil as high as it was because I read Lard gives little to no lather and I wanted a more lathery bar of soap and so upped the coconut oil. Thinking the light grape seed oil would keep the bar from being harsh.

 

[lsg]

I think that potash makes what they used to call soft soap. Here is some info on potash and casutic soda: https://www.pssurvival.com/PS/Soap/How_To_Make_Soap-Potash_2008.pdf

 

[The Efficacious Gentleman]

Lard might not lather well alone, but it also doesn't stop the lather like other oils (Shea butter, for example, will hamper your lather) so you can happily go for around 20% coconut when using lard with no lather issues.

Hope the store brings good news

 

[MySoapyHeart]

Ok thank you all for the replies.

... Step 3: measure out water and add soda ash mix to it and stir. Water was hot from the tap.

Just a tip about using hot water from the tap: Some use regular tapwater, but it is usually not reccomended as it may be a trigger for dos. This because tap water has traces of minerals that reacts within the soap and can develop rancid soap. And you also used hot tapwater, which is not as fresh as cold water since it has been sitting in a waterheater for a very long time, and it may have even more contaminants.

I live in Norway, and distilled water is sooo expensive So I use de-ionized water, which is cheaper and I can get it in gallons. It works for soap too because it is being used to top off car batteries and have all had the metal traces removed. Have worked without a hitch for me, for 4 years

PS!
Our in-house chemist & soapmaker DeeAnna has a thread that may help you understand why different waters, and additives, can affect the soap. It is an excellent read.

https://www.soapmakingforum.com/threads/does-water-really-matter.52456/

 

[dixiedragon]

Man, you really wanted to make some soap! In the descriptions I have read, when the pioneers made lye, they dipped a feather in it and if the feather dissolved, then the lye was strong enough. Did you try that?

I would really recommend buying lard for your first few batches, so you have a reliable product and you can learn what it is supposed to be happening.

If you really want to clean your bacon grease, put your bacon grease in a pot with a roughly equal amount of water and a tablespoon of baking soda. Melt on low heat. You want it to be clear, not cloudy. Pour through a filter. A coffee filter is too fine. I use cheesecloth or even a paper towel. Let it cool at room temp, then put it in a fridge and let it cool overnight. The next day, lift out the solid circle of fat. Scrape any gunk off of the bottom of the circle. Discard the water.

Repeat.

I would clean bacon grease at least twice. The water should be clear and not taste meaty, though it will taste salty. Your lard should not taste salty.

 

[James Handley]

Thanks again all. I will look into cleaning the lard better as described.

I did the egg test of floating an egg in the soda ash water. However that is not a true test of the amount of dissolved potassium salts but rather total dissolved minerals.

At this point the lye making process is taking too much time being all day events for one ingredient. But I may try a different method for extraction in the future just to give it a shot.

The method I used was mixing ashes with about 5 gallons of hot water in a larg plastic bucket. About 5 shovel full scoops of ash sifted through a coarse strainer to get bits of charcoal removed. Mixed the solution every 30 minutes for 3 hours. Then rubber band a thin t-shirt to a 5 gallon bucket and slowly strain the ash water into the bucket. Then place the water in a stainless steel pot on cook until the water is gone. I then cook it for another 20-30 minutes but never got it hot enough to melt the salts.

Scraped all the salts out and rehydrated a little and got a black water. PH strips o have are for hot tubs and only go to 8.3ph but the solution was over the scale of 8.3.

Filtered the black solution through coffe filter and got a yellow liquid. Then boiled that down back into crystal salts.

That all looked so promising. So I have no clue as to what went wrong.

Another method just has you create a filter of hay, sand and stones and you put ash on top of all that. Let the water soak for 3-6 days and then open a tap and let it drip out over a day or two and then boil to concentrate the liquid. That may be my next attempt at the soda ash in the future.

I went to tractor supply and they don't have any lye right now but confirmed they do carry it. So they have me a rain check recipe and will hold a bottle next shipment they get and call me when it gets in. I will use that on my next soap attempt.

 

[earlene]

That's great that you live so close to a TSC. When I first started making soap, I couldn't fine lye at the Farm & Fleet in town and the nearest TSC was about 75 miles round trip. The cost of the Roebic there is not cheap, but every store I find around the country that sells 100% lye crystals drain cleaner, which works fine for making soap, charges around $13.95 to $15 per 32-ounce bottle. It's great when you don't want to wait for online orders to be delivered, or when online orders are just not an option (which is the case for me when I travel and want to make soap.)

I whole-hardheartedly agree that using tap water is asking for trouble when making soap. I've done it and regretted it. Distilled water usually costs no more than $1.25 most places, and often less than a $1.00 per gallon. Unless you are going to make tons of soap, a gallon of distilled water is usually sufficient for several batches of soap.

 

[CaraBou]

Also look at Ace Hardware for 100% lye (probably Red Devil brand) - mine carries it for $4 per pound.

Glad you're open to a more modern start. Get some success under your belt and you'll be in a much better position to troubleshoot the old methods!

 

[MKLonestar]

James, if you have an Ace Hardware store near you, they carry the bottles of lye over in the plumbing department. I am not certain where in Oklahoma you are located, so I don't know what all is near you, but check out your local hardware stores. There are also several online soap suppliers that have very reasonable prices and will ship to you.

As for water, be sure and use distilled water. There are so many impurities in the water supply sources in Oklahoma (depending on what lake or river it is coming from) that using straight tap water can mess with the process of your soap. Take it from this ex-Okie whose MIL always tried to use straight tap water and then couldn't figure out why it didn't work right.

Good luck on your next batch.

 

[artemis]

My Lowe's carries lye, too.

 

[DeeAnna]

You made potassium carbonate K2CO3, not potassium hydroxide KOH, by leaching wood ash. If working with pure K2CO3, you'd need about 2.5 times more by weight to chemically equal a given weight of pure potassium hydroxide, KOH. Since you're working with impure material, you'd need something more than that to compensate for the impurities. So your 35 g of dry material isn't nearly enough.

Saponification with a carbonate alkali isn't nearly as easy as saponifying with a hydroxide such as KOH or NaOH (sodium hydroxide). Carbonate saponification requires a long period of heating, because the carbonate cannot break the fat into fatty acids without the help of extra heat and time.

Measuring pH is not a useful nor accurate way of determining concentration. You have to increase the concentration by a factor of 10 to increase the pH by 1 unit, speaking strictly from a mathematical point of view. From a chemistry point of view, the relationship between pH and concentration are not necessarily linear -- in other words, if you increase the concentration by 10, you might see the pH rise by only a fraction of 1 unit.

I'm glad to see you're looking for NaOH in your local stores -- I think you'll have more success with that.

 

[amd]

I think the ingredient questions have been accurately addressed - clean the bacon grease or use lard, amount of coconut oil, and using the correct lye. However, I didn't see in your posts about your combining lye solution to oils process - if I missed it, I apologize!

When you combined the lye solution with the oils, did you just stir a bit with a spoon or did you bring it to trace with a stickblender (immersion blender)? Typically we stir/stickblend the oil and lye solution together to get an emulsion and then a little further to a state that we call "trace". This "trace" is when drippings from your stir method will rest on top of the surface of your batter rather than fall back into the batter unnoticeably. With a stickblender, this may take a few minutes of short burst blending and hand stirring with the blender between bursts (depending on your recipe, the power of your blender, etc. some of my recipes will go to trace in 2 minutes, some take 4 minutes - but that is personal to my recipes and equipment). If you are only hand stirring with a spoon, it will take longer, possibly 20 minutes to an hour of continuous hand stirring. I'm not sure if the additional heat from the crockpot would speed that up, so I am speaking from cold process method (no crockpot) - I've not tried using a spoon for either method.