I calculated my mix of oils in your advanced Soap Calculator. I noticed on the "Final Product" shows % of Neat Soap with dilution levels from 10% to 30%. Please explain this feature. (I'm liking that I get the percentages for production.) What do the percentages represent in the thickness of the final liquid?
Water Dilution
Tue, 05/24/2011 - 12:56pm
#1
Water Dilution
Thu, 06/16/2011 - 6:22pm
#2
Dear Steve - you seem to be the Liquid Soap Guru! I am not yet fluent in LS, but just tried my first batch yesterday.
I have a recipe that I put thru your calculator. Superfatted at -8.0%. Weighted the paste at 5.28lbs. I'm having problems with dilution. At first I started with 35% and put that water to sit in the pot with the paste overnight. Started up again today and brought that amount up to 30%. Didn't realize for the first hour that I should have covered the pot. I kept it at a low simmer. I've been eventually adding enough water to the point that I am now at a 25% dilution. I still have a skin and a few clear solid blobs. Does it make sense at this point to quick and turn it off and see how it looks in the morning? Not sure what to do yet. Already seems pretty thin.
Thanks in advance - Merilyn
Thu, 06/16/2011 - 7:23pm
#3
Not knowing what oils are used, I wouldn't know how readily it might dissolve. If something like shea butter was used (beyond just a bit), it might not be possible to eliminate the "skin" on top. Best advice mght be to try a dilution percentage & keep notes for the next time. You could also skim off the "skin" to leave a clear solution.
Why did you use -8% superfat setting? Using our calculator, that would imply a considerable excess of alkali in the result (our calculators are already adjusted for the water content in KOH flakes). I'd suggest setting our calculator at 0% superfat until you get more experience with various batches of different formulas.
Re "thin" aspect... expect thin. Thickening is tricky. Get a handle on making thin liquid soaps first.
A 15% soap concentration in a final product, put into a foamer jar makes a nice end-product.
Fri, 06/17/2011 - 1:16pm
#4
Steve - I used in descending order - apricot kernel oil, coconut oil, castor oil and alittle palm oil. I duped a recipe (1 of3) that I was given when I attended a liquid soapmaking class. The other two recipes were superfatted at 0%, just this one was factored at a negative 8%.
I thought if I replicated the class batch it would jog my memory as I went thru each process...but here I was with a pot of stuff and no clue! I have gone through many of your posts, but I'm guessing I won't begin to fully understand all of the ins and outs until I deal with the little liquid soap gremlins.
It seems to me after going through the heating and cooling stage of the batch a few times that continual skin forms when the batch is warm but seems to dissipate when it's cold. Why is that? My ph was initially 12. My instructions said to neutralized with a 1:2 borax to hot water solution. Even though the water was boiling, I never got the borax to fully dissolve. The batch did neutralize to between 7 and 8.
I persevered, added 5% glycerin and 2% fragrance and now I have it sequestering. Let's see. I'm a CP soaper, but would really love to add liquid soap to my repertoire. So I'll try again next week.
Your advice throughout the site is enormously helpful. Thank you! Merilyn
Fri, 06/17/2011 - 2:38pm
#5
Hi again.
Ingredients look good
Superfatting is a touchy thing with liquid soaps. You'll find other notes from me in our Forum regarding this, but the short point to be made is that almost all of the available online soapmaking calculators will give you an incorrect result for potassium hydroxide (KOH) to be used. This is because an ounce of KOH flakes contains less than an ounce of pure KOH because the flakes contain crystals that are themselves part KOH and part water. There is always a water-content in KOH flakes. The net result is that most calculators, while one inputs "0%" superfat, are actually returning a result that is around 10-11% superfatted! The user then ends up with clouding, separating soap solution and doesn't know why.
This is probably why the recipe formula you used specified "-8%" - to counter some of the flakes' water content.
Our SBM soapmaking calculators already take the water content in the KOH flakes into account, so the correct starting point when using our SBM calculators is to set superfatting at "0%"). Doing this, you can use the borax amounts shown in our advanced calculator version to 'neutralize' your soap solution, if you follow the rest of the calculator's soapmaking procedure. Borax won't dissolve to more than a 5% concentration at room temperature or about 20% in hot water, so your experience with a "1:2" solution (which would be 33%) is not surprising.
The lowest pH figure one can attain for a liquid soap differs somewhat according to the oils used to make it. Most oils make a liquid soap that wants to be around 9.4 pH, while a pure coconut oil liquid soap can be carefully brought down do around 8.5 or so. If the pH is brought down too low, the soap begins to break up into free fatty acids and gets cloudy and possibly oily-on-top. I made a lot of different one-oil liquid soaps and used an electronic pH meter to measure the results when I was programming our advanced soapmaking calculator to verify its accuracy. Phenolphthalein (Phenol P) is a good guide to get liquid soap to around 9.4 pH, so It's a good thing for general use. More delicate measurements require an electronic meter. pH measuring papers are not accurate enough to work any better than Phenol P.
Sat, 06/18/2011 - 7:30am
#6
Steve - Thank you! Your comments are invaluable and the more I read and re-read, the more I start to understand. I'll retry the recipe this week and input it in to your calculator at 0% and will look in to better PH guides.
What are your thoughts about the skin issue being more prevalent when the diluted batch is warm vs no skin reforming when it's cool? Do you think that this was just a particular issue due to my -8% superfatted condition? Or is this part of the process?
One more question: I never see recipes or mentions made about making liquid dishwashing soap from the liquid soap process. How would I go about doing this? Or is is a matter of "market-labeling"? Liquid soap and Liquid Dishwashing soap are one and the same?
Merilyn
Sat, 06/18/2011 - 5:10pm
#7
Re the skin-when-warm issue... I think you might be seeing the effect of a localized higher soap concentration at the top of warm solution due to water evaporation there while warm.
Re dish soap... I have not used LS for dish soap (though I don't know why not!) I would think it might work fine if largely coconut oil based (to keep any 'filming' down). Mostly a 'market labeling' thing, I suppose.
Wed, 07/06/2011 - 7:34pm
#8
Steve -
Just wanted to get back to you...I made a batch of soap with a very high coconut oil content and it's bubbling up beautifully! I do believe I've hit on a nice liquid dishwash soap formula!
Am also excited in that I had the time to experiment and just let the batch sit overnight as I added my distilled water dilution...while timely - no soap skins! YAY! Also happy to say that no neutralization was necessary as I used your calculator at 0%...so, all's good.
M
Sat, 06/04/2011 - 1:24pm
#10
Essentially, yes. Different oils mix formulas act differently when diluted, so be sure to keep notes.
Tue, 05/24/2011 - 2:11pm
#11
The "Final Product" section allows consistent dilution of your LS base paste to make your finished liquid soap at any of the soap dilution percentages shown.
The prerequisite to using the "Final Product" section accurately and consistently is that one follows the process and measures the batch contents along the way to arrive at a 'standard' 50% soap content base paste. If the paste's concentration is constant, the final diluted product's concentration can be constant.
As to thickness of the final liquid soap: Thickness of the finished liquid soap is generally unrelated to the concentration of soap in the solution. The "thickening problem" is therefore the 'Holy Grail' of liquid soapmaking...
Liquid soap is different from solid sodium soaps in that it tends to cling to itself as a sticky, gooey mass unless fully dissolved. When dilute and fully dissolved, it's watery. When concentrated to just past its limit of solubility it doesn't get thick - it suddenly precipitates out a goopy, gluey flating 'skin' or clumped mass. There is little or no in-between state.
The physics behind thickening with borax is that borax, being a large, long & tangled molecule, tends to form a kind of loose "gel" in the presence of some types of soaps. The key phrase here is "some types". Larger, heavier soap molecules will interact with borax and result in added viscosity - saponified palm oil, for instance - and sometimes all the more so in the presence of some added alcohol content. Smaller, more soluble soap molecule types won't thicken at all with borax - such as saponified coconut oil soap. There's an inherent trade-off here in that too much palm oil soap content will result in a cloudy soap that tends to 'clump' together, whereas nice, clear, dissolvable coconut oil soap stays watery. The art is in the formulation and dilution. Once you have a formula and dilution that you're happy with, WRITE IT DOWN and do it consistently for future batches.
One can also thicken liquid soaps by creating a blended mix of potassium soap and a small percentage of sodium soap. The sodium soap component more easily creates a thicker final soap when diluted by reducing the overall tendancy to precipitate soap out as a 'clump' when it is made more concentrated. The trade-off here is that sodium soap content usually results in a cloudy or opaque final product (actually not a bad look if one adds a bit of mica for color). Our SBM Advanced calculator is the only such available that lets you accurately create a calculated blend of potassium and sodium liquid soaps.
A "quick & dirty" way to achieve an approximate, but maybe sufficient, similar end-result is to add salt to hot, diluted liquid soap. (Note: Do NOT use "iodized" table salt, as its iodine content can have unwanted effects on soap) The dissolved sodium ions from the added salt will replace some of the potassium ions in the liquid soap and create a blend of potassium/sodium soap. The measured science is lost in this approach, though & and the sodium/potassium replacement takes heat and/or time to accomplish. Potassium soaps are inherently less soluble in salt solutions, too, which makes the liquid soap solution behave as if it is more concentrated. Again, if you try this and it works for you and your soap formula, WRITE IT ALL DOWN and duplicate it as exactly as you can each time to get similar results.
Another way to thicken diluted liquid soaps is through use of natural carbohydrate "gums", such as xanthan gum, carrageenan gum, etc. This method of thickening is widely used in prepared, packaged food products. The physics of exactly how various gums interect and with what is actually quite complicated.
I've researched and experimented a lot with this with sometime good and sometimes surprising results. For instance, a specific mix ratio of dry, pure xanthan and [another] gums in the presence of a specific concentration of a particular type of salt, added to liquid soap and heated above a specific temperature and allowed to cool slowly works perfectly, but it's way too exacting. Adding the same to a mix of water and ethyl alcohol in a specific proportion, then heated and cooled (to see if I could get it to thicken similarly to gel hand cleaners) unexpectedly created a disturbingly realistic (yet fully edible), clear "snot"! - Useless for thickening soaps, but great for disgusting one's friends. (did I mention it's fully edible?)
:)
So, I guess I just have to dilute the different percentages to see what I get; is that what you are telling me?
LaNita