Water discounts (AKA woah that's a hard loaf of soap!)

[robertw98144]

Okay, I just had an interesting thing happen. I made some unscented & uncolored soap yesterday using OO, Palm & Coconut (equal %s of each) - but with a "water discount". In soapcalc, I used 27% Water as a percent of oil weight instead of the default 38%. So the water to lye ratio was 1.85:1.

When I attempted to cut the loaf today using my wire cutter, the loaf was so hard, I was only able to cut part way through because I was afraid of stretching & breaking the wires in the cutter.

Anyone have any experience with water discounts and wire cutters?? How soon after you put it to bed are you cutting it when you discount?

Any other heads up on water discounts that you can share?

Here is a picture of the cut soap:

Thanks,
Robert in Seattle

 

[CaliChan]

:/ thats about what i do and ive never had that problem... but at the same time i never wait 24 hours to un-mold and cut i think the longest ive waited is 20 hours. so that is probably why i dont have issues with cutting.

 

[VanessaP]

I just plugged 33% coconut, 33% palm and 34% olive oil into SoapCalc. 1.85:1 ratio works out to 35% lye solution, and 26% water as weight of oils amount. With that much palm and coconut, I'm not surprised your soap was hard to cut after 24 hours. The higher the amount of hard oils, the sooner you can cut your soap, I believe, especially when you're using that strong of a lye solution with those hard oils. It might take a little bit longer if you had more soft oils in there. I used 20% coconut and 38% tallow last night and I cut it at about 21 hours. It probably would have been a little easier to cut if I had cut it first thing this morning, but it didn't have any crumbling going on. I'm going to get a cutter soon so I can have uniform bar sizes LOL