Need help: Citric Acid in CP soap

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I want to add a chelator to my soap. Right now all I have available is citric acid.

So following @DeeAnna website I'm figuring: 1000g oils which is my usual recipe, should be 20g Citric acid on the high end of the scale. I'm confused on how much more lye to add to neutralize the citric acid.

I came up with 12.48 extra lye to add to my solution, is this correct?

And the site says to dissolve the citric acid in water...am I assuming correctly that that is batch water? And do you add the citric acid solution to the lye solution? AND do you add it when it is cool, like you do with sodium lactate?

I know, lots of questions in one post. I just don't want to end up with lye-heavy soap, while trying to correct my soap LOL
 
Yes to all except I don't add CA when the lye water is cool. When I used CA (have switched to sodium citrate now), I heated up a bit of the batch water because the CA dissolves faster when the water is warm.

Once it is all dissolved, you can add the CA solution to your warm oils, or dump it back into the rest of the lye water before or after adding the lye.

If you choose not to separate out and heat some water to dissolve the CA, then you must add it to the batch water before adding the lye. Lye is very selfish and doesn't share water well with anyone. ;)
 
I took it from my batch water and re-added it to my lye solution. Everything was fine. The only thing is that I couldn't keep the bubbles down in my batter. Is this normal? At first I thought it was my stick blending, but it wasn't that. I seemed to get bubbles just by letting it sit there lol. After a while I came to the conclusion that it was the CA. Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a volcano, just mostly noticeable at the edges of the pot.

Mixing it with a spatula for the rest of the time seemed to decrease the bath bomb effect. I measured it out, so it wasn't that I added too much. I added 20g.

Will be cutting my soap tonight, so I will see if it affected it. I don't think it did. It seemed fine when I poured it.

Why did you switch to sodium citrate?
 
I've never had bubbles from mine, but I can see where that could happen.

I switched to citrate because I'm math lazy, and no lye adjustments are needed with citrate. Plus, it does double-duty for making a fine cheese sauce (not that I can eat it, but I do make it for others).

Also, I MB my lye solution, and use the SMF calculator. The last I checked, the lye adjustments for CA or vinegar did not work correctly if you also checked the MB lye option. That required even more complicated math than the simple multiplication for CA with non-MB lye solution. It all made my head hurt.

So now the CA is for bath bombs and daily shower spray (for the shower, not the body), and citrate is for soaps and cheese sauce. :)
 
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