Water discounts

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Do you discount your water and if so, how much?

  • What is water?

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 5%

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 10%

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 20%

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • 30%

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • I don't add water, so I don't have to discount it.

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    1

jarvan

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Since I can't find a way to rephrase the poll, I will retract it. Thanks for the input. I was reading about water discount (and that was the term I plugged into google) and came up with several articles. I got the impression from reading that some soapers will take their water for lye solution (whatever the starting quantity) and do an automatic discount to instantly know they will have a harder bar to start with because of less to evaporate. It sounds like a potentially dangerous thing to endeavor in since the lye proportion would be more concentrated. I probably have everyone confused, so this poll will be deemed a "fail". See what happens when I am tired? That is why I don't soap at night.
 
Are we talking discounts or lye solutions? I like talking in terms of lye solutions over the term 'water discount' because water discounts are quite a hazy, inconsistant animal in comparison to lye solutions for me. For instance, if someone is discounting their water by 30%, I would have to ask, "30% off of what?" Depending on which lye calculator you are using, you'll get very different answers to that question, and hence very different results soap-wise. Lye solution strengths, on the other hand, are consistant across the board no matter what lye calculator you are using.

I personally use a 33% lye solution strength, although I vary it at times when the recipe and FO warrant it.

IrishLass :)
 
IrishLass is right.

Water Discount isn't a very useful term, Lye solution ratio or percentage makes much more sense.

I usually soap with a 40% solution (40% lye to 60% water, aloe, other liquid) a ratio of 1:1.5.
 
what they said. I don't know your starting point, so I've no idea how much I'm "discounting" it.

(as it, you can't say how much you've paid at a 10% off sale without knowing the starting point!)

my lye concentrations vary between 33% and 40% for the most part - with exceptions for new FOs (lower) or 100% OO soaps (higher)
 
I have to agree with the others - water discount isn't a definate term in soapmaking. Can you rephrase the question? :wink:
 
I like to go by 'water as percent of oil weight'. SoapCalc defaults to 38% which is an unusually high amount and I didn't know this until AFTER I made my first batch and saw how gooey it was. Since then, I've been slowly discounting my water and have gone down to 31%. My next batch, I'm going to go down to 29%.

Sounds confusing, huh? When you do it my way, the lower the percentage, the more of a water discount. But when you do it the way IrishLass explained, then it's the opposite. The lower the percentage of lye solution, the less of a water discount.

I don't throw all of this at your confuse the situation but to demonstrate that it's important to understand all the different ways people reference how much water/liquid they use so that you understand that saying something like "I use a 34% water discount" could be interpreted several different ways.

I was so confused on this until IrishLass explained it all in another thread. Here is a link to it if you want to read that one too: http://www.soapmakingforum.com/forum/vi ... php?t=9402

zeo
 
I also go the lye solution rate, I am so thrown off when I read a recipe & it refers to a water discount rate. How would you know for instance what a
20% water discount is(from a salt bar recipe I was reading).
I totally agree with IrishLass on the lye solution term.......
 
Apparently, I am not awake now anymore than when I posted my tired little poll. It was written poorly and thank goodness I wasn't being graded. Was I? I retract this thread and thank you. Come again. :wink:
 
im confused by the whole thing, % and all, i DO use less water than the recipes call for.
 
I work with different lye solution strengths depending on what oils are being used in my recipe, what fo I am using, if i want swirls or if I am adding any other things at trace, for instance if using clay I generally work with a 33% solution to allow for the water that the clay absorbs.
 

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