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I work in property claims in insurance. I can tell you that for personal property, i.e. anything you take with you when you sell your home, we have zero coverage for mold. Most homeowners and rental property policies out there have zero coverage for personal property affected by mold. Some...

Anything that contains water and a source of nutrients will be colonized by microorganisms. The deepest mines in the world have bacteria growing within the pores of solid rock. Yellowstone's color patterns in the hot springs and geysers are bacteria growing in the equivalent of boiling battery...

My store bought commercial soap is mango. Big fan of that fruit. I'll add some for sure now.

After reading some notes here on how much better soap gets with age, I thought it would be neat to make a few batches for long term storage. One Castille batch, and maybe a few of my own concoctions with EDTA added to ensure DOS doesn't drop in to poop on my soap party. I was thinking of...

We had a regular customer at a restaurant I used to manage that bathed in patch it seemed. I had no idea what that horrendous smell could be until one of the bartenders clued me in.

My apologies, I didn't mean to sound obtuse or contrary to the advise given. It was more along the lines of "Huh, I wasn't so crazy to think a vacuum might somehow be useful in some small way."

In college I had a 125 gallon extra-high tank set up for saltwater. Marine biology major. Started off as a reef tank, ended up as a predator tank. The power in San Marcos Texas was notoriously bad. Middle of the day for no reason at all power would go out for 6 or 7 hours. That much time with...

Where might that be listed? I'm loving the amount of information to learn from here.

Made my seventh batch of soap, been doing one a day since I got all of my supplies in. Tonight was a coffee soap. Lye and coffee solution temp never went over 127F, but it still smells yuck. Soap smells fantastic though. Per pound of oil I put in two tsp of coffee seed oil and then another...

Thanks for the replies everyone! Interesting that DeeAnna's post mentions that commercial soaps are processed by vacuum drying.

Also thanks y'all for the replies. Very informative both for immediate application and long term education as well!

Has anyone ever tried using a vacuum chamber to speed curing on a CP soap? I'm curious because I have a 15 gallon vacuum chamber sitting under the table where I have my bars curing right now. If no one has tried it I'll put a few bars of each in there and see what happens. It might be...

Timing is impeccable, I was just coming on to do a search for trade off oils, then just look at general soapcalc numbers, and then ask the same if I didn't have a solid answer. Would RBO work? The Oleic and Linoleic are a lot different, but roughly close otherwise. Maybe Grapeseed? Lose the...

Oils by themselves are pretty safe. It is their vapor that causes the fires as in when they spatter from cooking and hit an open flame. This is the cause of a lot of Thankgivng and Christmas house fires from people deep frying turkeys. Olive oil has one of the lowest flash points, about 410...

I just used Walmart EVOO for a few batches. Guess I'll have to keep a close eye on them to see what happens. Costco is right down the street so that might be the go to source from now on. Color me highly cynical but when a supplier puts out a test showing only their product works compared to...

Hmmm. I probably should make another batch with cocoa butter for a side by side comparison. Did the cocoa butter sister batch about an hour ago. Everything the same except the fragrance, lemon tea cake for this new one, and no colorants.

Unmolded the first batch, released fine. Tried cutting and it sticks to the blade. Going to give it another 24 hours and try cutting again.

I believe I'm going to make it this weekend. Half will be just the base, other half with some AC thrown in for fun. Just went into the mold. Made it with the saltwater mix from Zany's No Slime Castille, so there's that. Did it all Poppycock because I'm not feeling the blending of colors and...

Tinkering around tonight. For some reason known only to the me that existed at the time I was shopping, I picked up a pound of Sal/Shorea butter a few weeks back. I can't seem to find too much about it. I swear I read it's good for oily skin, but I've slept since then as well. Anyone know...

I checked the notes, I did use 2:1 based on the numbers. I whipped up another batch tonight. Changed to EVOO rather than the OO I bought from BB and Bulk Apoth because I can get EVOO at $0.14 an ounce locally versus getting 35 pounds from BB at $0.29 per ounce with shipping. 48% savings and...