Safekeeping & Storing Lye

[Lankan]

I recently had an experience that the NaOH purchased about a month ago gained approx 6% weight and the KOH partly turned into watery substance. all these happened while I've kept it well closed container. Since I was working on a bar soap I adjusted the NaOH purity and everything went well. With regard to KOH, i had to discard it after mixing with veniger.

I'm thinking of the possibility of dissolving the NAOH/KOH in distilled water as soon as buying it and storing in gallons. Will this result in degradation of the lye.

Anyone has prior experience in doing this, or are there any other ways to safe-keep the lye.

 

[Donee']

apparently lye does degrade if youpre mix it - but the thoughts on this seem varied.
I just put those little sachets of dehumidier thingies into the sealed bucket - I save them up from medicine and vitamin bottles.
But I dont buy more than 2Kgs at a time. I know its more expensive but it works for me. Once I up my CP then i will look at going and buying bulk.
But I think lye is great - there are so many uses for it.
Drain cleaning - premix a strong batch
Getting scale off the toilet - premix a strong batch otherwise it clumps together at the bottem of the loo (lesson learnt)
I also mix a small strong amount in a special spray bottle to spray on the grass growing inamongst the pavings outside.
Waste not, want not

 

[SaltedFig]

Susie wrote about her double-bucket "kitty litter" method a few years back, on this thread discussing storing lye:
https://www.soapmakingforum.com/threads/bulk-koh-naoh-purchases-storage-ideas.55392/#post-531867

Personally I don't like to have too much pre-mixed lye solution around at any given time - in liquid form it is the most dangerous to store, whereas dry storage (once the moisture is controlled) is safer and consumes less space.

So, the lye in a sealed container, on a bed of kitty litter, inside a bigger sealed container ... the kitty litter picks up any moisture that manages to get into the big bucket, before it gets much chance to get into the smaller buckets.

dixiedragon wrote (also years ago) about taping up 1 gallon plastic containers (yoghurt I think, so probably sturdy #5 plastic - which is PP, or polypropylene), and I'm not sure whether they went into another bucket, but apparently the lye was good for a decade!

So into buckets, tape the buckets, buckets on kitty litter inside a bigger bucket and just your working amounts in liquid (masterbatch) form perhaps?

 

[shunt2011]

Storing it appropriately is certainly key. I master batch 4-6 lbs at a time of 50/50 lye mixture. It will last a long time. I store it in well cleaned out laundry containers. Irishlass has had her pre mix last a long time. This has been discussed many times here. Storing the lye containers in a buck with a gamma lid helps a great deal.

 

[IrishLass]

I'm thinking of the possibility of dissolving the NAOH/KOH in distilled water as soon as buying it and storing in gallons. Will this result in degradation of the lye.

Anyone has prior experience in doing this, or are there any other ways to safe-keep the lye.

Hi Lankan. I don't know how on earth I missed this thread, but anyway, pre-mixing lye with distilled water is a very good way to store your lye. I do it all the time, mixing my lye 50/50 with distilled water, and it has never, ever degraded on me, not even when stored for 2+ years and counting (I have experimental bottles of my 50/50 solution that I save and test out periodically). My long-term storage lye solution soaps up perfectly fine for me just as if I had made it only moments before. You need to make sure that you store it out of the heat in the proper type of plastic container with a tight-fitting lid, though. For what its worth, I store mine in reclaimed laundry detergent bottles made of HDPE #2 plastic with tight-fitting lids and keep them in a room whose ambient temp never gets above 85 degreesF/29C. Hope that helps!

Edited to add.....I should mention that I do not have young, curious children or pets running underfoot who would accidentally gain access to my lye solution, so you'll want to make sure you store it in such a way that little ones cannot gain access to it.


IrishLass

 

[Lankan]

Thanks @IrishLass for the advise. I make soap in small quantities. when I made CPLS base this weekend, I resized the batched to use up the entire pack of KOH (250g), so I didn't have to manually handle the lye too much. This was a suggestion I had when the SMFSoapCalc was built. unfortunately it didn't get implemented - so I had to resize it manually.