Wow! How great for you! I would have loved to have gone! Is it possible for you to give m report or would it be too much info to transcribe? Maybe the highlights for us poor country-bound folks?
Also what shop are you opening this month?
I'll try to do that, PJ. I think Dr. Dunn's topic was very interesting. It was about checking the purity of your NaOH. Sometimes you don't know if your NaOH is "good" or "bad" and you're afraid to use it in your soap. Or maybe you got a "bad" batch from your supplier, but have not way of knowing for sure. He taught us how to figure that out. You need some anhydrous citric acid, distilled water, phenolphthalein and your NaOH. Basically, you put the water in a clear jar, weigh out some citric acid and add a few drops of the phenolphthalein then start adding the NaOH until you get the solution to turn pink. When it stays pink, divide your weight of citric acid by the weight of the NaOH then multiply that by some number that I forget off of top of my head right now and that gives you the purity of your NaOH. The experiment was done twice, once by his "assistants" and once by me. We both ended up with a close 98. I think the first one was 98.17 and mine was 98.06 or something like that.
The point of the exercise was to determine how much water your NaOH might have absorbed. That's really where it might come in handy. If you buy a new 10 pound batch of NaOH and test the purity the day you open it and then compare that to a test on that batch when it is half empty you can see if it has absorbed any moisture from the air. If so, you can adjust your water in your recipe to take that into consideration. If your initial purity test was 100%, to make a 33.333% solution you would use 100 grams of NaOH to 200 grams of water. If your purity test six months down the road ends up 95% you would have to increase your NaOH to 105.26 grams, because it would have absorbed 5.26 grams of water. (If you used 100 grams, it would be 95 grams of NaOH and 5 grams of water.) However, you could decrease your water to 194.74 grams because the NaOH has already absorbed the 5.26 grams from the air.
Dr. Dunn did mention the reason for the lye testing was because a "company" (he didn't say which one) sold some "bad lye" and a woman had asked him to test the purity of the lye for her. He wanted anyone to be able to check the purity of their lye easily. The manufacturer or distributor should have a purity fact sheet available that lists any contaminants (mercury for example) but it will not be able to list water because that will depend on how it is stored. If the purity is 90% or below when you purchase the product, you've got a bad product and should get your money back or an exchange. However, if you test it six months after you bought it, that's pretty much your problem because you have no way of knowing when the moisture got into the product.
He also said the way to test your citric acid to make sure it is the anhydrous kind is to tare a piece of aluminum foil and then weigh some citric acid onto it. Put the citric acid into the oven on 200 degrees for one hour. Let it cool then weigh it. If it did not lose any weight, it is anhydrous. If it did lose weight,
you have just made it anhydrous (it should be about 91% of its former weight). Put that in an air tight container and don't make bath bombs with it; just use it for experiments. (He's a funny guy.)
ETA: I was going to open Howling Hounds on facebook, but I'm no where near ready to do that. So I'm going to keep it on the back burner and just make soap. I'll eventually open the shop, but I've still got way too much to learn and product to make. I totally got ahead of myself. I think I let my friends' encouragement to "open a shop and sell this" get in the way of my common sense. I just need to continue doing what I'm doing and forget about attempting to sell this stuff any time soon. If it happens, it happens; but I'm not going to worry about it for another five years. 02/28/2022 to be exact.
- If you are at the after party, find the long braided old lady. That's me. Plus I have a name tag and it says Earlene. I
Great job on the demo!
Thanks! I was excited to meet him. I'm going to have to see if anyone got any photos of that. (I doubt it because I don't know anyone here.) I am looking forward to Clyde Yoshida's presentation tomorrow. He and Dunn are the reasons I came to the SoapCon.
I'll be at the after party. You can't miss me tomorrow. I'll have a pink T-shirt on that says "Weekend Forecast Soap Making with No Chance of House Cleaning or Cooking." I wore my blue one today. :mrgreen: