Teach Soap

Hi Everyone,

I have been making good progress in understanding the soap making process. I now understand saponification values and how to determine how much lye to use in relation to saponification (not sure if I said that correctly). I now understand how to discount the lye from a formula. Now I am trying trying to understand 3 things.

Question 1. How do I determine how many ounces of water to use to make the water/lye solution? How do I manually calculate this?
Example: If I am making a 1lb recipe with coconut oil (.190) with a 5% discount (.152), what numbers would I use to determine how many ounces of water to use. (Of course I would never make a recipe with using just coconut oil.)

Question 2. I see lye water ratios referred to as 1:1. What does that mean? - One part water one part lye?

Question 3. When I superfat, how do I figure out how much of the oils to add to superfat?
Example: if I want to add a 5% oil to superfat, how would I manually calculate this?

Thank you in advance.

Instead of doing this manually and getting it wrong by chance, I would run your recipe through a lye calculator. Calcs like the one at The Sage will give minimum to maximum water and it will also give you a range of how much to superfat.
1:1 ration of water to lye is not recommended. The water will become saturated and some of the lye will precipitate on the bottom. I would go with a 38% lye solution.

BTW. Superfat and lye discount are the same thing. You can make all coconut soap with 20% superfat. It makes for a very nice, hard soap with plenty of bubbles.

_________________
Irena
Closed minds are like faulty parachutes; they refuse to open.

Thank you soapbuddy. I wanted to calculate manually to ensure that I understand how much lye to use with oils . I do plan on running my recipe through a soap calculator, but I also want to understand the basic math behind determining how much lye to use with oils.

Thanks for clearing up the superfat. I was thinking that discounting and superfatting were the same, but wanted to make sure.

The 1:1 ration, I don't understand what this means. I only know it is referring to water and lye. I saw another ratio of 2:1. I assume that the number on the left refers to water and the number on the right refers to lye. Am I correct? So would 1:1 be 1 ounce of water to 1 ounce of lye?


Sorry for all of the questions. I also apologize for the terminology. I am trying to learn the language of soaping.

Thank you.

The problem with calculating manually is that each oil that is used in soap has a range of SAP values that varies from harvest to harvest and season to season. So you might have a batch from a particular oil that's fine. You buy another bottle of the same oil at a later date and that oil might have a different SAP value. Most online calculators use the mid range of that SAP value to be safe. It is hard work calculating manually. My mother and grandmother have done it. I followed their recipe til I came up with my own.

The 1:1 ratio means 50% lye to 50% water. 2:1 is twice the amount of water to lye.

_________________
Irena
Closed minds are like faulty parachutes; they refuse to open.

Got it. Thank you. That's an interesting fact about the oils, but it makes sense.

Hey Irena,

I know you always suggest using more than 1 lye calc and I see why. I went to look at the sage and it's great. I use soapcalc and really like it but will start using these 2 together always. You have a lot more info that way.

Thanks

_________________
Irena
Closed minds are like faulty parachutes; they refuse to open.