What am I missing here?

[Susie]

I have been looking to reformulate my laundry soap recipe to use NaOH as well as KOH to thicken it up a bit. I have looked up every laundry soap online and in my books and have run them through SoapCalc and SBM3. I could not find any that called for both NaOH and KOH.

Then I looked at liquid dish soaps using KOH and NaOH. The cleansing, conditioning, hardness, etc numbers all fell within a fairly close range.

What is the difference? is there truly anything different between the two? Or is most non-body soap pretty much the same thing with a different label?

 

[new12soap]

I'm not sure, but I think dish soap may be more conditioning because your hands are in it. It may also be more bubbly because a lot of people have HE machines and don't want suds in the laundry soap.

If you want to use a mix of NaOH and KOH, you can use something like summerbee's advanced calculator and blend them, I would start with a smaller percent of NaOH and see how that works, but I am not sure it will give you a thicker soap or just add snotiness (the technical term) to it.

Another option if you want something thick and creamy can be found in this http://www.soapmakingforum.com/showthread.php?t=4479&highlight=mikeinpdx thread. The original poster took the recipe off the first page, but if you work your way allllllllllll the way thru it, some others post the recipe and I believe there is even a youtube video of how to make it.

HTH

 

[Susie]

Thank you! Your reasoning makes sense to me, but those numbers are so very close! Yes, I am using SBM3, but there is no handy chart listing qualities there. So, I am comparing them on SoapCalc just to get the numbers.

 

[Seawolfe]

Im my wanderings about the intarwebs I found this calculator that lets to use a combination of NaOH and KOH at any percent: http://www.soapguild.org/Certified-Lye/lye-calculator.php