LS taking 3 days or more to cook

[peace-love-and-suds]

I've made 2 batches of LS now. The first took 1.5 days to cook. I finally got tired of waiting and turned up the heat to 185-190 to get it to finish. I was cooking at 160-170 before that. In both formulas below I am calculating for 90% purity of KOH.

The second batch is going on three days now and I'm just now starting to get gel in very small parts of it. I have also turned the heat up to 180 on that as well.


Batch 1:

70% coconut
10% olive, castor, hemp
5% superfat (I can get away with transparency on 3%) though I don't care so much about transparency.

Batch 2:

23% coconut
52% olive
10% castor
15% hemp

3% superfat


What is taking this so long?

 

[FGOriold]

What are you KOH and water amounts for each batch?

 

[peace-love-and-suds]

219g KOH (taking in to account 90% purity and 3% superfat
658g Water
1000g oil

 

[Lindy]

What makes you think it is taking that long? It should be ready within a couple of hours to sit and go to paste overnight. Then start your dilution.

 

[Susie]

What Lindy said. If it were me, and I was in doubt over whether a batch was cooked or not, I would turn off the crock pot, go to bed, and check it in the morning. Then I would go by some sort of test other than vaseline stage. Pheolphthalien(sp?), pH, zap, something.

*EDIT*

I ran that recipe through SoapCalc using KOH 90%. I got 380 g of water.

 

[peace-love-and-suds]

What makes you think it is taking that long? It should be ready within a couple of hours to sit and go to paste overnight. Then start your dilution.

The soap is not passing to translucent gel phase. It's stuck in mashed potato phase. Small parts (real small) have passed into the gel phase but most has not.

 

[peace-love-and-suds]

There is no reason it should not be in gel phase unless I did something wrong. I used all the same oils as the first batch and that first one turned to gel. How can it possibly be done?

 

[peace-love-and-suds]

The major change in my second formula is the increase in olive and decrease in coconut. Failor says that if the soap isn't passing in to translucent stage after 3 hours it could be excess Alkalinity. I don't know how this is possible though since I actually superfat 3%.

 

[Susie]

Did you run your recipe through a lye calculator? The modified recipe. Not the original.

 

[peace-love-and-suds]

yes. I also use soapmaker3

 

[FGOriold]

I see your 1000 gram batch - summerbeemeadow shows a koh of 211 grams and water of 632 grams.

 

[peace-love-and-suds]

I attached a picture of it. This is after 3 days and nights of cooking at 160

 

[Lindy]

I checked it and your numbers are right. Try just turning off the crockpot and walk away until the next day.

What are you using to stir? Personally I think it's overcooked.

 

[Susie]

I, too would turn it off and wait for the next day. Then I would test it. I think it is done, just never going to get to the translucent stage.

 

[peace-love-and-suds]

any ideas why it isn't turning translucent? Is this normal? :-(

 

[peace-love-and-suds]

I checked it and your numbers are right. Try just turning off the crockpot and walk away until the next day.

What are you using to stir? Personally I think it's overcooked.

a metal utensil and I stir thoroughly (cooked in crockpot with temperature control)

 

[peace-love-and-suds]

to my amazement I diluted 1oz of paste to 2oz water and it is perfectly transparent and thick (without any thickening agents or neutralizers). Amazing. I guess the lesson here is it doesn't have to be transparent gel to work. I wonder why the last batch became transparent and this one didn't.

 

[Susie]

If you can answer that, you are WAY ahead of some of us. I just keep putting notes on my recipes so that maybe one day it will all make sense.

But remember that the clarity test only tests for unsaponified oils. It will not tell you if that batch is lye heavy. You still need to check for that.

 

[FlybyStardancer]

My first LS paste didn't want to get transparent either. My thought was that I was mixing too much air into it, and that was causing it to look like mashed potatoes, even after it had reached the 'transparent' stage.

 

[peace-love-and-suds]

I noticed after first adding the water for dilution the soap immediately turned gel like and transparent (before it diluted). Could the reason its not going through the transparent gel stage is that it is lacking the water to do so?