Too much lye in my LS!

[babydoll3156]

My third attempt at LS was a Castile soap. I have since found out it is 35% lye heavy. What are my options? How do I make this right? I used 48 ozs. of OO.

 

[galaxyMLP]

Ok, don't panic! You've got this!

Could you post your recipe with weights for us as well as your KOH purity? That will help us troubleshoot and let you know how to proceed.

Since you already know you have a 35% lye excess, you will probably be recommended to add the amount of OO you are missing back into the paste so it will neutralize the lye excess. However, without knowing the exact weights I don't want to recommend that just yet! It could be a math error or something else. It happens!

 

[babydoll3156]

48 ounces
6.9 ounces KOH
4.2 ounces NaOH
33.3 ounces dh2o


I wish soaping taught me patience! As of yet, nothing has been able to achieve that! I'm almost 60!!!

 

[galaxyMLP]

Ok, took me a little longer than expected since its a mixed soap! It looks like you actually needed 64 oz of OO to get a 0% superfat. Your water content is fine so don't add any more.

You need 16 more oz of OO to get this recipe right.

Here's what I did:
In soapee I got that this was a 51:49 KOH:NaOH soap with KOH purity at 90%. (I had to play with it to figure that out)

I set superfat to 0%

Then I played with the oil amount to get the lye amounts listed. The one that gave me the closest result was 64 oz of OO.

 

[babydoll3156]

Castile

I added it and it worked! Feels like heaven! Thank you!