First attempt and Soap is gloppy

[karismakingsoap]

Hi Everyone! I am very glad to find this forum.

Well I have a unique situation. My brother and sister in law run their Ford Extursion on veggie oil. Not biodiesel, strait veggie oil. Their suppliers are several local restaurants that allow them to buy their used fry oil at a very low cost. They process this oil and one of the byproducts is glycerine.

We have recently decided to try to make useful products out of this byproduct instead of disposing of it in the environment. So I have become the official soap maker of the family. i have found many biodeisel forums that give soap recipes using only glycerine, water and lye. It is very important to me that it is a pure glycerine soap, not mixed with other oils. That would defeat the purpose.

So I made my first batch yesterday. I will post my recipe and maybe someone can tell me what went wrong...

1 gallon of purified glycerin
1 quart of water
5 oz. Lye (weight measurement, not fluid oz. )

We heated the glycerine to around 149 degrees F. and the water to 100 deg.F. Introduced the Lye to the water and allowed to disolve. Then added the Lye solution to the glycerine stirred with a paint stirring attachment to a chordless drill for ten minutes maintaining the heat. Mixed another 10 minutes after turning off head. Added some purple and white crayola crayons for color at about the 10 minute mark and Added Lavender and peppermint essential oils at about the 18 minute mark.

At 20 minutes my soap had the consistentcy of curdled milk. I though this might be trace...haven't been able to find anything that explained what trace was supposed to look like...so silly me thought this was trace. I poured it into my molds. it has set outside over night in the cool air and it has only firmed to the point that glycerine does when it is cool. It is by no means hard and if I turned over the molds I would get a gloppy mess.

what did I do wrong and can I rebatch and save this soap????

Wish I hadn't wasted some of my expensive essential oils in my first batch...

Any help you can offer is much appreciated. Sorry post is so long...

Karis

 

[surf girl]

I am not a chemist nor a very experienced soap maker, but my understanding of soap-making leads me to think that you can not saponify glycerin, as it is already a by-product of soap-making (or of the biodiesel-making process). I don't know what you get when you mix lye with glycerin, but I don't think it is soap.

What references did you use to obtain your recipe?

Lemme do some more research and I will get back to you.

 

[surf girl]

OK here ya go. If your terminology is correct and you were using pure glycerin, you added your lye (NaOH) to an alcohol (glycern=glycerol). Saponification is what happens when you add a base (usually NaOH, sometimes KOH) to a fat, kind of splitting the fat molecule and creating a salt of that fat (Na + some of your fat) and glycerol.

You would not create soap by adding NaOH to your glycerol.

(As I understand it).

 

[carebear]

Surf - Bio diesel glycerin actually has some unsaponified fatty acids in it - it's not the pure stuff we use in B&B products. Same name, different stuff.

Karis - Most of us here don't know much about making soap from bio diesel byproduct. We work with oils with a known SAP and add exact lye amounts - and this is something you cannot do because of the nature of your glycerin (you don't know exactly what is in it, unless you do some specialized analysis). We don't know the SAP (so we don't know if you used the right amount of lye), we don't know what other materials might be in your stuff (I am assuming the methanol is all out??? it's toxic you know) like contaminants, water, what-not - and even if we did we probably are not knowledgeable enough about bio diesel soaping to guess what the impact of those impurities would be, etc.

I think there is another thread or here on bio diesel soaping with some links to places that specialize in it - so perhaps a quick search of this forum will lead you to a resource that is more helpful.

 

[surf girl]

carebear - thanks for the info re unsaponified oils still being present. It was making no sense to me!

 

[carebear]

I only learned we were talking basically about two different things after a seriously heated argument with a biodiesel dude. I was absolutely convinced that I was correct and he was nuts. Not to say he's not nuts - he is, but it turned out we were BOTH right. Just speaking different languages.

I still say his stuff isn't glycerin, but they insist on calling it that anyway.

 

[karismakingsoap]

Thanks for your prompt responses. Just to clarify, we do not process biodiesel, their car runs on strait veggie oil. No ethanol or methanol catylists are used in the process. So no worries about toxicity. They simply heat and filter their oil to remove any impurities. And you are right, it is not pure glycerin, but contains a good deal of unsapponified fats. My reference to biodiesel was that I got this recipe that I used from a biodiesel producer that maked hard bar soap from his byproduct glycerol.

Here is a theory... I think that the measurement for the lye, which he listed in ounces, and I assumed meant standard ounces, not fluid ounces, may have been measured in a Fl Oz measuring cup, even though the lye is not in fluid form... That would mean that I significantly undermeasured the lye.

If I should attempt a rebatch, does anyone have any advise for me.

Karis

 

[karismakingsoap]

PS Carebear, the stuff sure burns like glycerine, you can make awesome firelogs out of it by mixing it with sawdust and compressing it in a log shaped mold. It burns for hours and hours.... Just a wee little bit of useless information for ya!!

 

[carebear]

THAT is not useless!! Thanks so much! (my sister heats her home with a wood burning stove...)

 

[carebear]

in attempting a rebatch the first thing you need to know is - add more lye? or add more oils. I'd start with touching a tiny tiny bit to your tongue and see what you get - if it zaps then too much lye and not enough oil. If not, well then at least you know it's not too much lye!

thing is, I can't tell you how much oil to add, so you might end up doing it over and over, costing you more in time and energy...

I've read about making soap with an excess of lye and salting it out, but I do not know how that works.

But I'm confused - if you are not pressing biodiesel, where are you getting the glycerin???

 

[surf girl]

Oh, if you are using filtered veg oil, then you are using oil, not glycerin, as far as I can tell! Or is something done to the oil to get a mix of oil and glycerin?? I can see where the confusion would arise.

What I would suggest (and again, I am not a soap-making guru) is that you identify the type of oil you are using (when you say veggie, is it corn? canola? a combination of oils? etc), weigh it, and use those bits of information in a lye calculator to determine your correct amounts of water and lye. All the oz measurements should be weight values, not fluid values.

 

[surf girl]

Woops, carebear said it first.

 

[carebear]

i type fast

 

[karismakingsoap]

I am no chemist myself, but I am told by people who process veggie oil for their cars that this is glycerine with unsaponified fats. What happens is that during the process of heating the oil for filtration that the heavier glycerine falls to the bottom of the processing units and forms almost a solid mass that when melted is a great mix of glyerine and oil.

Thanks for the info on rebatching. I am sure that there was not enough lye. I will try to find out what kind of oil I am dealing with and use a lye calculator. We will see what happens. Thanks for all your help.

 

[bslotto]

Oh, if you are using filtered veg oil, then you are using oil, not glycerin, as far as I can tell! Or is something done to the oil to get a mix of oil and glycerin?? I can see where the confusion would arise.

What I would suggest (and again, I am not a soap-making guru) is that you identify the type of oil you are using (when you say veggie, is it corn? canola? a combination of oils? etc), weigh it, and use those bits of information in a lye calculator to determine your correct amounts of water and lye. All the oz measurements should be weight values, not fluid values.

http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_g ... l#separate

 

[surf girl]

Oh, if you are using filtered veg oil, then you are using oil, not glycerin, as far as I can tell! Or is something done to the oil to get a mix of oil and glycerin?? I can see where the confusion would arise.

What I would suggest (and again, I am not a soap-making guru) is that you identify the type of oil you are using (when you say veggie, is it corn? canola? a combination of oils? etc), weigh it, and use those bits of information in a lye calculator to determine your correct amounts of water and lye. All the oz measurements should be weight values, not fluid values.

http://journeytoforever.org/biodiesel_g ... l#separate

Woah. The instructions for making soap from the biodiesel byproduct sound pretty vague - kind of a hit-and-miss dealio. The OP said the fuel is straight vegetable oil, not biodiesel. Is there any difference in the byproduct? How on earth do these folks sort out how much lye is enough, how much is too much...??

 

[7053joanne]

My question would be...How do you know haow much of the unsap'd product you have in the glycerine? Because you would need to know this to calculate how much lye you needed.

Please keep in mind I have no idea about this topic.....

 

[karismakingsoap]

you are right, surfgirl, the byproducts are probably not identical, because I use no lye or alchohol chatalyst. One more reason that I know that I underestimated the lye. The biodeisel processors already have added some lye at the beginning of the process.

This is probably going to be a longrunning experiment for me to find the right levels of Lye. I guess I will be like the old fashioned soapmakers who didn't have fancy lye calculator spreadsheets but relied on intuition and years of experimentation. I will keep you posted on how I am doing.

it is really important to me that I am using this byproduct for something useful, because we are all about having as little waste as possible. It will be really satisfying someday to be running our cars on used fry oil (already a wasteproduct in the US) then cleaning ourselved and everything else with the soap we make from the byproduct and in the winter heating our homes with firelogs that we make from sawdust (another waste product) and crude glyerine. This is how we can make a difference in the environment.

 

[surf girl]

Yes, hats off to you for being so environmentally conscious. You're doing a great thing.

 

[freesoul]

karismakingsoap- they are making biodiesel if you are getting glycerin from them. Folks who use straight veggie oil have no byproduct like this.

First and foremost you need to recover the methanol from the crude glycerin first! It has 12% methanol in it. You can either boil it off (OUTSIDE AND DON'T STAND DOWNWIND) or use a still- much more environmentally friendly.

You also need to know if they are using KOH or NAOH to process the oil.
KOH can make liquid soap, NAOH can make bar soap.

You should get the soap guide from Luc in Canada http://www.blackcrownsoap.com/

Tell him Wash Tyme sent you

PS- stay away from Journey to Forever, they have some poor info