Ill place this under the top comment. If you redissolve the final product in a minimal amount of hot water and let it set in a cold environment you could precipitate out clear crystals.
My Dad was a Nebraska farm boy. He said Saturday was wash day. Grandma Josie would make soap sometimes. Dad said she's cook it outdoors and it was smelly. She'd stir a big pot until the soap was set. I suppose she used ash lye as she was on a budget during the depression. So now, I get to carry on the tradition. I've bought sodium hydroxide and made soap, but since hubby has taken to cooking outside the ashes have built up. I have collected all the grease and animal fat from our food. I have a whole freezer full, so there will be a lot of soap coming out of this!
That awesome but NaOH, sodium hydroxide, is different from KOH, potassium hydroxide. Potassium hydroxide is from wood ashes, usually hardwood ashes. Potassium hydroxide generally makes soft/liquid soaps. Just keep that in mind.
@@jhan1217 You can convert the potassium hydroxide from wood ashes to sodium hydroxide by adding table salt(sodium chloride). The chloride ion in the table salt switches places with the chloride ion in the potassium hydroxide. You end up with sodium hydroxide and potassium chloride.
@Peter Kropotkin There's probably another element that can be added to the solution that will bond to the Potassium Chloride making it heavier/lighter than the Sodium solution separating the two in a jar at which point you can pour off one of the solutions.
Only 50 seconds in, but I already want to comment to thank you for talking about the science as you go on. I've always been chemistry-illiterate and now that my wife and I are starting to look at making our own bathroom products I'm trying to learn more about the chemistry and natural processes behind what people have been doing for millenia.
See nilered channel, a very indepth breakdown of chemical change process, proper terminology and over educational. Its important to note that this "lye" is really kco3. Koh is far more caustic.
I was laughing my *** off towards the end. I can remember how many times I used kitchen utensils to make my chemical concoctions. From mom yelling at me for destroying her pans to my wife yelling at me for dissolving pots/spoons/knives. Seeing you break down the crystals at the end with the serving spoons reminded me of those times. Cool video though! And the Merciful Time Lapse was appreciated. (especially when the final bit was evaporating from the pan at the end)
mr. SparkyMcBiff Hello. who better to ask a question of this nature than a chemist. Is this the kind of lye people used in the old days to cure olives? about a decade ago my dad cured some olive with lye from the store. They came out excellent. Was curious if this was the same form. kind of like vitamins there is edible chromium but one wouldn't want to lick a bumper for daily nutrition. you know? lol look forward to your reply.
when he's boiling the lye water.... are the fumes toxic or is it just vaporized water? I've always seen people boil the lye water outside... is that necessary? 💖🌞🌵😷🎅
@@suzisaintjames I'm pretty sure the steam is not caustic, because people are constantly stirring, and as someone else said, the caustic minerals shouldn't evaporate, being too heavy. However, many people have said that making wood ash lye is an incredibly stinky process, which would very much explain why many people do it out of doors.
If you get any lye solution on your skin you want to rinse thoroughly with water first. You always want to flush with water first when dealing with skin because if you just pour vinegar on there the exothermic reaction can cause a very nasty burn and since that's what we are trying to avoid....flush with water. Only use vinegar on surfaces or after lots of flushing with water to neutralize any remaining lye that might react.
Perhaps our world has getting unnecessarily off track and the basics are still valuable. It seems to me, that some of the basics should always be in style, like non-polluting products, such as soap, garden food, and good.
Thanks, this was a great video! You give a nice layout of going from dry ash to dry lye in a way that seems like just about anyone with patience and care could do it. Truly timeless content!
You have a great sense of humor. The time lapse comments made me laugh. Thank you for sharing this video. I wanted to learn how to do this. Thanks again.
You're quite welcome... and thank you! It can be done more cleanly than I did it by filtering or letting the sediment settle out more completely but I just wanted to "get it done" to demonstrate the process. Either way, the result will make soap, clean hides or clean drains! For soap recipes you'll have to experiment with the lye quantity because its strength will vary. I hope you give it a try and have success!
I remember watching my mom make lye soap this way back during the depression, just lye and any fat or oil. She collected the ashes from the fire she had outside under the kettle she boiled the laundry in. This was in the late 1930s. Things were different then.
I've been wondering if I could use the bacon grease I've been saving in the fridge. Even if it worked, I'm guessing the soap would smell like bacon, but am not sure.
Thanks for the DIY; I almost feel guilty for buying my lye crystals now. I will certainly be acquiring some assistance from my mate to try this one. [ side note: He whistles while he teaches as well. Love it ]
Since you put a lot of work into making your potassium hydroxide, you might want to maximize what you collect and minimize the work. That means filtering out the coals first is very very very helpful. Avoide breaking up your coals as you try to filter them out. Burn the coals you filtered. Collect and combine all your ash. Not only will not having coals make less work mixing the ash water slurry, but will help ensuring water gets to, reacts with, and dissolves all the potassium into the water as potasium hydroxide rather than getting stuck in the pores of highly porous charcoal. No charcoals will help when straining the ash water slurry through a tshirt, it would not hurt to wash and strain the ash slurry once more, and save the weaker concentration of potasium hydroxide for the next batch of ashes. If you let the second filtered lye solution sit and dry till next year, it will probably form potassium carbonates that can be thrown in to a hot fire turning it back into potassium oxides that when dumped into water makes a more concentrated potassium lye slurry this second round. For clarity, it helps to keep the coals out. After filtering, one should let it settle for a day and cover it with plastic wrap to keep CO2 out. Then decant the clear potassium hydroxide.
If you take these crystals and mix them with Lemon juice, green dye, finely ground black pepper and a 50/50 of butter and lard you will have a big freaking mess.
If that was hard wood ashes that you used to make your lye from, when you threw out the solids, you threw out perfectly good charcoal. You can dry it and mix it with new charcoal the next time you want to cook out. I bar-b-q with hardwood charcoal, not briquettes. When I'm finished with the fire, I drown it and re-use the unburned charcoal the next time I cook.
Since he's leached alot of the alkaline materials from it, it would also make great gardening bio-char. Bio-char is used to add carbon back into the soil which improves the quality of soil substantially. You can use wood ash without leaching it, but it takes nature a year or two to neutralize the PH. (It will kill anything in the area you put it, and prevent growth until the ph has become neutral, but after-wards you'l get amazing garden plants in that soil.)
@@jscixnobody1510 and they say there is to much co2 in the atmosphere when in actuality there is almost not enough. without co2 the plants would die and so would we. we are being duped by the so called social scientists who have no clue what they are talking about. they also would hate the fact that we want to make our own soap and other things. I am really glad I watched this video. now I know I won't have to buy this stuff to make my soap and can make it all myself. We will be totally offgrid power water soap laundry soap everything. this is what we should all be doing so the gov has less of a hook in our lives. just like the old days. we need to go back to that time so the modern society doesn't destroy our brains like they have so many of the kids that are in university now. good vid man really appreciate it. keep doing the good work.
Just to be prepared, it's good to know this. Pure Lye drain cleaner, and the cheapest crico- type white shortening makes a pretty good soap. Once that runs out, this is gonna be the thing people do if they bathe. Good tip: if your solution will dissolve a feather, it'll make soap.
The left over chunk of Charcoal you can do 2 things with it Crush it and put in garden to help the soil or let it dry and burn it in the wood stove/pot belly stove. The other left overs items we all way put in the compost pile and let it sit for the year along with the other items then after the pile sat for the year it went to the garden area. We ran 2 pile's and empty the one that sat for a year in the fall in to the garden before tilling the soil for winter. BTW the soil was hard clay and took 3 years before we got it broken up where it was real good for planting.
When I had a garden (in an apartment at present 😐), I had to really work the soil. I almost enjoyed the preparation more than the harvest. I'm in L.A. (hoping to get out), and the soil is mostly sand! Btw the time I was through, our back yard was rich, dark soil, with loads of earthworms! We grew all kinds of things, even corn and some beans, little potatoes, and rhubarb once, but the Mediterranean climate here favors tomatoes, squash, peppers, and eggplant, which gree in abundance. (The squash blossoms attracted nice, big carpenter bees, too! The kids were able to experience some nice bits of nature.) I had small, sugar pumpkin vines trailing up in the trees. It was really a wonderful time. I know this isn't apprapos of soap making, but utilizing compost! I got carried away.
black color is only because it wasn't strained or sieved (carbon colored water) I did a test on Australian iron bark ash (you Americans have never seen hardwood) and after fine mesh sieving and adding rainwater the pH was above 8! - Used much more water so solution wasn't over saturated with potassium - Evaporation stage begins now - then in a couple of days we'll boil down the remaining filtered liquid and see what the result is - Thank you for sharing mate
Great video. Thanks! We make soap at home and I love to know that I can make my own ingredients. I really appreciate your patience, which you must have since you seemed to have not burned yourself with your product. Also the patience it takes to inform us lurkers. You are cool!
When you boil the mixture place a spoon or glass rod in the pan. This will prevent super heating, super heating is what causes the splatter. Lye is much more active at high temps you do not want that stuff splattering on you when your boiling it. Also use 2 5 gallon buckets with same amount of ash and a lot more water, hot water and stir for 2minutes every 10 minutes for an hour then let it sit for 12 hours minimum and the potassium and sodium carbonates will still be in solution while the insolubles will have settled the the bottom. Siphon the water off and it’s much much cleaner and the final product will shine. And one last thing. Get a terra cotta, glass or steel vessel to mix it in as it will react to plastic and contaminate your potash.
Lye is used in silver refining to convert Silver chloride into silver. I’m going to try this to produce lye instead of buying it. Hope it works! Yet another use for ashes.
You need to use a screen to get rid of the bits of charcoal. It absorbs a lot of your lye and once you have the slurry duct tape a coffee filter over a piece of PVC and dump it in that to filter out over a pan. This will save you time and get you a very clean product. Great vid all in all though! Knowledge is key to to thriving rather than just surviving.
@@Countercommie Can use use cast iron to reduce your lye water? I'm ASSUMING you can as that's probably what people would've used up through the 1800's.
@@American-Plague Good question! Cast iron is absolutely safe for lye. It will eat away any seasoning that happens to be on the pan, but it won't harm the pan in any way. In fact, a strong lye bath is often used by cast iron aficionados as part of their restoration process for old pans. They will leave the pan in the lye sometimes for days before sanding and re-seasoning.
@@Countercommie Awesome! All I've ever used in my life is cast iron. Once they're seasoned well they transfer heat better than anything and are just as non stick as a Teflon coated pan, not to mention food seems to taste better/cook more evenly and have a better sear. Plus they'll last 500 years with minimal care! To top that, it actually has been shown that women who cook in cast iron are FAR less likely to suffer from anemia. I refuse to use anything else. Lol! Thank you very much! I wasn't expecting an answer that promptly! 😎👍
You can use it as a liquid, too. You cook it down until an egg will float in it, with about a quarter sized part of it above the liquid. When the egg floats, it's soap worthy. Crystals would take up less room, of course. But when you make soap you dissolve the crystals in water to make a liquid, so this saves a step.
Nice to see some old skills have not died, I have done the same for years. University and no cash is a great impetus to learn. Best wishes from the UK!
A long time ago, I worked in a factory where we used Potassium Hydroxide (Potash) and Methylene Chloride to strip paint on bad paint jobs. We used full positive pressure (SCBA) face masks, because the 300-F tank would off-gas fumes that would, over-time, destroy the linings of your lungs (emphyzema). I wouldn't do this inside, without a chem lab chemical hood! As for the 'clarity', before your 'first reduction', double-stack some coffee filters in a funnel and pour a warmed mix (160-200 F) through it. Your remnant will then look like water, and your crystals will be clear-white in the end.
Glad to hear it! Please add to your process some of the suggestions of others; exclude the charcoal from your ashes and filter your liquid or wait a long time for solids to settle, for example. This was just a down and dirty experiment to show how it can be done. At the time I made the video there really weren't any better, but I think there are now. Best of luck in you effort!
Home made soap is great for your skin and it feels wonderful. You can probably find a local brand to see for yourself. It takes a little practice to get the right balance of lye/oils. Too much lye and you'll get a drying soap that can make you itchy; too little and you'll be oily. Write down your recipes down each time you make a batch and you'll arrive at the perfect ratio. I don't recommend using home made lye for regular soapmaking though; it's strength is not consistent so you can never quite get a perfect batch of soap.
Good vid! Thx. The char cole particles settle on the bottom of the pan, cause they get wet inside so they dont float anymore. You would aceive the same effect if you just let it sit in a bit more water for a week or two. You can then filter it with a coffe filter. To get really clean Potash you can then dry it like you did, then heat it, dissolve it again in water and cristalise it. There a lots of videos on how to (re)cristalise. The amount of water is not crucial, cause you wont make a saturised solution. It is important though that the water is low in minerals. Distlled water works best.
I found that if you just take a plastic bottle and cut the bottom off and put a paper towel folded up into the mouth so that it's jammed in there so tight that barely anything can get through if you pour the solution into that and have that so that the mouth of the bottle fits a Gatorade bottle because the mouth will fit into them perfectly you could just go about your business and it will do it all by itself and you will have a very white crystal solution, that is to say it will appear as water in your collection dish, but it might take a day, depending on how well you jam the paper towel in the mouth of the bottle and how well you kept large ash out of solution. Good job, and thank you so much. I just ran out of Naoh and would like to test an ash based lye.
Thanks for adding this idea, David. I like the soda bottle/Gatorade idea. Others have suggested filtering my solution before evaporating and if I ever make wood ash lye again, I will certainly do that. I run a small soap company and I buy my lye from a U.S. manufacturer. This video was just an experiment to see if I could do it! What do you do with your lye?
My pleasure! It's fun to do. I did make a batch of soap with the lye made in this video. It was tan/grey in color and pretty good, but a tiny bit too greasy. You really have to guess at the strength/purity of homemade lye. It might be 75% as strong as store bought, I suppose. I originally guessed 80%. Next time, I'll use about 10% more lye in the recipe and it should be better still. It's been 3 1/2 years but I still have a jar of this very lye! When I finally get around to it, I will make more soap and a video and post it. If you subscribe, you'll be notified when I post a video. Thanks for watching!
15:58 OMG, This is a LOT of work for so little product at the end! Who came up with this? Kudos to you for having patience! This is something I would have never thought of in my wildest dream!
I like that you took it clear down to crystals although I wonder if that is necessary for some uses. I tested my solution (used rainwater) after I filtered it through coffee filters, very clear brownish solution, and it is highly alkaline. I'll test pH later and boil if necessary or simply evaporate.
So what would be the "proper way" of disposing of the unused portions from the pan? You mentioned you poured some of it into the woods early in the video. Obviously you wouldn't want to wash this down a drain, at least in my situation... we have a septic system. How hard is it to clean those utensils when you are done using them for this process? Hand washed outside or dishwasher? Does it stick to the pan at all? Great video. Thank you!
I basically live in the woods so I can safely dispose of this stuff "out back". The residue is no different than the runoff from an outdoor fire pit when the rain falls. Some of it could be put down the drain, it's basically drain cleaner such as Drain-O, but my leftovers contain a lot of solids like ash slurry and chunks of burnt wood which wouldn't go down the drain. While it can cause burns in high concentrations, this lye isn't poisonous in small amounts; Latin cultures use it to remove the husks from corn kernels in the production of 'hominy' or 'masa'. None of this stick to the utensils; it rinses away very easily and won't damage stainless. Don't use aluminum though; lye is brutal on Aluminum.
The potassium does burn, you get K2O which is potassium oxide, the potassium oxide reacts with water to make KOH and OH- ions, which is the basic part that gets used for soap. also oxygen gets produced in the reaction but it shouldn't be noticeable.
+Mohamed Sabra where? I'm not trying to be a typical annoying twit, i'm curious. The potassium should have turned from to an oxide salt from a chloride or whatever organic complex it was bonded to in the heat of the flames, then by adding water you should be hydrating it to turn it into hydroxide ions
Suggestion:- a} Use a seive or a piece of steel mesh to filter out the large solid pieces from the powder. b} Use a mortar and pestle to reduce said solid pieces to powder. c} Add said powder back in to the other lot, and then mix it with water after that.
Thanks for the video! I am in the process of making soap at the moment myself. It has worked well (except for the fact that the Teflon from the muffin tray I used has stuck to the soap muffins I have made). Extracting Lye is another process I am hoping to master! Appreciate it heaps! I will be tagging this video straight to my journal!
Glad you like it. Drying it to crystals is really the only safe way to store the stuff. Hopefully you can use the info and make it more efficient, purer, etc... Thanks, vet!
You won't have to keep letting it settle and pouring off the top if you strain it through paper towels. Paper towels will catch much more particles than the tee shirt did. If I were you I would use the tee shirt to strain it, then strain through paper towels. I have salvaged a lot of deep fryer oil with paper towels, so it will strain very fine particles.
you can separate the impurities after you have recovered the lye water by rinsing the solution with a nonpolar, immiscible solvent such as ether, gasoline, toluene, etc. The water layer will still have the negatively charged hydroxide ions in solution - without the organic impurities.
back in the old days they had a wooden crib lined with straw. you dumped your ashes in the crib and collected the clear lie water from the rain water and filtered through the straw. If you want a better quality just strain it through a couple coffee filters then boil it down.
When boiling it, instead of boiling it to dryness, when it starts to form crystals, get chill it to close to 0ºC, the KOH and NaOH will precipitate leaving lots of impurities dissolved. Then filter it, and you can get a whiter purer product. You can also filter it using a cofee filter before it starts to form crystals to remove the smaller non soluble impurities that go throught the cloth. This way you can get a pretty pure product. Howeer for soap it doesnt really matter
Thanks for showing this process in detail. Do you know the chemical composition of the end product? I would guess it isn't pure KOH, but i am wondering about the concentration. I want to try to dissolve silicates with KOH from hardwood ash for geopolymerization and I am pretty sure I will need a high concentration. I'm planning to test this with both fine clay and sand.
You're more of a scientist than I! I can only guess at the strength; it's probably about 75%. You could certainly do better. My purpose was to experiment with how I might make my own soap with wood ash if I lived in the wilds in 1850 and to find a way to safely store the KOH as a crystal rather than a liquid.
@@Countercommie theres likely potassium nitrate in there as well along with other trace salts...listen, make your life easy..screen out your charcoal before water, it absorbs a LOT of your desired product...your first filtration after the cloth use coffee filters or a fresh t shirt. should remove most of your particulate. with the remaining solution, when you get to just syrupy, try cooling it. im just guessing here but i think your lye will precipitate out from your solution, it may need a "seed crystal" so scrape just above the surface of your container ehere thrre should be a few that formed via evap.. hope this helps.
Your video is informative. My comment would be to make safety a priority as you make lye. Your suggestion to keep vinegar nearby is a good one for neutralizing spills. Long sleeves, gloves and goggles are also a must. Lye fumes are very dangerous to people, children, and animals. Be sure to turn on your stove fan and make sure there is very good air flow in the rest of your work area.
You can actually clean up the end result by washing it with alcohol, it should dissolve most of the organic compounds that give it color, leaving you with a better product.
I'm a little confused, wouldn't it be discolored because the organic compounds are dissolved into the mixture? To remove the impurities wouldn't they need to be precipitated? Or maybe they dissolve in the alcohol and evaporate with it? Can you confirm if it's the latter?
I found that if you calcine your brown salt, rehydrate, filter and calcine numerous times, you get a white salt, it has a greasy feel and stains your hands black. I'm not sure it's KOH though, Maybe K2CO3. It's time & fuel intensive work for the amount you get out.
***** Leaching ash & decanting is the first step. This year I used snow melt. Then there's the long wait of evaporating what's in your buckets (boiling uses too much energy for me), an aquarium bubbler can speed things up a bit. Then calcining those brown crystals left at the bottom, rehydrate, filter, calcine; repeat till your salt is white.
They say not to use tap water b/c of minerals....and varying pH, etc, etc. They usually say use rainwater or distilled water or maybe some spring water as long as it doesn't have certain minerals in it. I had also read that you are supposed to take the same solution after it has leeched through the ashes....and add more ashes to the old and pour the same water back through and do it again and again and again (like 6 or 7 times) to get the right pH or strength or whatever. They had set up 55g drums or an old sistern or something....lined it with lots of clean straw on the bottom for filtering...and put a spicket at the bottom.
My tap water is well water which is essentially spring water on my property, and is very low in minerals according to testing I've have done. See my video on "the spring in my backyard" to see what I mean. As far as using the traditional "leeching" method with straw and all of that: I'm shooting for a quicker and slightly more scientific method: In the old days, folks were making "lye water", and they wanted to achieve a certain strength which was determined by floating things like eggs in the solution or dissolving things (like a feather) with it. I tried all of this initially, but I was never convinced of the strength of my solution. Turns out, old-time soapmakers really weren't that sure either, and as a result a lot of folk lore and superstition came to the craft. People thought that the moon phase or the weather or the utensils used could make or break their soap. Really, it was just inconsistent lye water strength all along! If we stop at "lye water", we can't know it's real strength without a hydrometer because the largest variable in it's strength is the amount of water that remains in the solution. Instead of increasing the strength of the solution through repeated leechings, I am instead evaporating the water. Though my method is not perfect, if the solution is brought all the way to crystals, I have some idea of it's strength because there is NO water... In my soap recipes, I will assume that it is 90% pure. There may be 10 percent ash, minerals, and salts of different types. But at least I know the product is pretty consistent from batch to batch so my soap recipes will perform consistently. It can be stored safely for an extended period, weighed and reconstituted in a known amount of water.
Countercommie So regardless of how much water you use in the beginning the lye dust / crystals you end up with at the end is all the same strength? Is that right, or did I miss something? Thanks for the demonstration! Scarlett
I use like three five gallon buckets the bottom of which has only one brick and a tee shirt the second or middle bucket will have about two inches of gravel then a tee shirt then the top bucket will have straw and a tee shirt the top two buckets will have small holes drilled in the bottom and the bottom bucket has a spout made into the bottom into it
A nice video but I couldn't help adding my two cents worth in the form of a couple of tips for when doing this: When pouring , if you do it with the pot that you are decanting from held above the back of the receiver pot and pour towards yourself, you won't need to be holding your head over the fumes as you pour. When working with chemistry always use gloves, safety-glasses and a splash-proof apron. Keep a weak solution of boric acid handy should you accidentally get some of the lye in you eyes.
let it sit for a week or so and it should turn the color of iced tea - float an egg on it and if it floats up to the size of a quarter its perfect. then you can add tallow, make sure its rendered down and perfectly clear tallow. its pretty simple - you don't need all that fancy oil and color stuff. its just soap
I agree. Why go to all of the trouble of boiling it down to crystals? Grandma's way was probably the right way. Slowly percolate a small amount of water thru a barrel of wood ash. Filter the water by putting a lot of straw into the bottom of the barrel. Test the water with an egg. If the material is too weak use less water and more ash. Only boil the mixture as a last resort. A little slower but a lot easier and safer.
Great video! One thing... Would you please do a tutorial on the "merciful time lapse" for all that make videos and don't grasp that concept? For the love of all that's hoLY PLEASE MAKE THAT TUTORIAL! LOL
You're pretty smooth with the pouring. But why not pour through filter paper? Does that cause some kind of undesirable reaction, or filter out too many constituents that you want to remain in the solution?
A few other folks have suggested this too. A filter is a good idea but I didn't think of it at the time. I wasn't at all concerned with purity... I only did it to satisfy my curiosity. This isn't something I'd likely do again; it's too easy to buy Sodium Hydroxide instead! The stuff I made in this video would have Potassium rather than Sodium. To get hard bars of soap with it, you'd have to add some salt! Thanks for watching!
Use a decanter for wine to get sediment out. And you don't need to make crystal. Get a fresh egg and it should float halfway in and halfway out of the surface of the lye water. Then its a third lye water to two thirds lard.
Awesome tips , thank you . I don't copy one of the last step , i see you make boil the juice , then refresh , then you set the pan in a special position , and just after that you talk about vinegar , the transition is very "sharp" . There is a 3rd pan with liquid , have you added the vinegar ?? and how much , please ? and for how many times do you heat the juice at the end ?
One thing of note, storing your lye as water actually preserves it's strength vs storing it as crystals. Over time the crystals take in moisture and lose potency etc. If you've ever made soap in larger quantities like for your extended family then storing your lye still liquid is better in the long run
You'll note than when lye is sold commercially, it is sold as crystals in airtight containers. This includes hardware store lye and lye sold for the soapmaking market, such as that from Essential Depot. The airtight container prevents the absorption of moisture from the air. At home, this can be done with a Mason jar. I've kept my lye crystals in these air-tight jars for years without any problem. I am also pretty sure that the crystals don't lose potency (become less alkaline) over time.
Thank you . From an old man who used to make soap with his Grandmother over 60 years ago. All the best.
If you add a bit of water to the bucket before adding the ash it will help prevent a whole bunch of dry ash clumping at the bottom.
Also hot water helps get a higher yield.
Ill place this under the top comment. If you redissolve the final product in a minimal amount of hot water and let it set in a cold environment you could precipitate out clear crystals.
You people are so smart. Good pro tips👍
my question is this...does it matter what kind of wood we get the ashes from?
@@MrUhnonimess ty
My Dad was a Nebraska farm boy. He said Saturday was wash day. Grandma Josie would make soap sometimes. Dad said she's cook it outdoors and it was smelly. She'd stir a big pot until the soap was set. I suppose she used ash lye as she was on a budget during the depression. So now, I get to carry on the tradition. I've bought sodium hydroxide and made soap, but since hubby has taken to cooking outside the ashes have built up. I have collected all the grease and animal fat from our food. I have a whole freezer full, so there will be a lot of soap coming out of this!
That awesome but NaOH, sodium hydroxide, is different from KOH, potassium hydroxide. Potassium hydroxide is from wood ashes, usually hardwood ashes. Potassium hydroxide generally makes soft/liquid soaps. Just keep that in mind.
@@jhan1217 You can convert the potassium hydroxide from wood ashes to sodium hydroxide by adding table salt(sodium chloride). The chloride ion in the table salt switches places with the chloride ion in the potassium hydroxide. You end up with sodium hydroxide and potassium chloride.
what measurements do you use? By that, I mean: how much lye and how much fat?
@@charlesaanonson3954 Well now... never thought high school chemistry would come in handy! Thank you
@Peter Kropotkin There's probably another element that can be added to the solution that will bond to the Potassium Chloride making it heavier/lighter than the Sodium solution separating the two in a jar at which point you can pour off one of the solutions.
Only 50 seconds in, but I already want to comment to thank you for talking about the science as you go on. I've always been chemistry-illiterate and now that my wife and I are starting to look at making our own bathroom products I'm trying to learn more about the chemistry and natural processes behind what people have been doing for millenia.
chemistry and physics are too fun
See nilered channel, a very indepth breakdown of chemical change process, proper terminology and over educational. Its important to note that this "lye" is really kco3. Koh is far more caustic.
I was laughing my *** off towards the end. I can remember how many times I used kitchen utensils to make my chemical concoctions. From mom yelling at me for destroying her pans to my wife yelling at me for dissolving pots/spoons/knives.
Seeing you break down the crystals at the end with the serving spoons reminded me of those times.
Cool video though! And the Merciful Time Lapse was appreciated. (especially when the final bit was evaporating from the pan at the end)
I'm a chemist (as well as a "survivalist") and this is a great video.
Very well done Countercommie.
what do you think about my run off hypothesis i posted as a comment here?
mr. SparkyMcBiff Hello. who better to ask a question of this nature than a chemist. Is this the kind of lye people used in the old days to cure olives? about a decade ago my dad cured some olive with lye from the store. They came out excellent. Was curious if this was the same form. kind of like vitamins there is edible chromium but one wouldn't want to lick a bumper for daily nutrition. you know? lol look forward to your reply.
when he's boiling the lye water.... are the fumes toxic or is it just vaporized water? I've always seen people boil the lye water outside... is that necessary? 💖🌞🌵😷🎅
@@suzisaintjames i don't think there should be any minerals in that vapor
@@suzisaintjames I'm pretty sure the steam is not caustic, because people are constantly stirring, and as someone else said, the caustic minerals shouldn't evaporate, being too heavy. However, many people have said that making wood ash lye is an incredibly stinky process, which would very much explain why many people do it out of doors.
If you get any lye solution on your skin you want to rinse thoroughly with water first. You always want to flush with water first when dealing with skin because if you just pour vinegar on there the exothermic reaction can cause a very nasty burn and since that's what we are trying to avoid....flush with water. Only use vinegar on surfaces or after lots of flushing with water to neutralize any remaining lye that might react.
Good advice, thanks!
A@@
Wouldn't mixing water with vinegar (say 3 parts water, 1 part vinegar) also work?
There is something satisfying about making things from basic ingredients from nature.
Absolutely right!
Perhaps our world has getting unnecessarily off track and the basics are still valuable. It seems to me, that some of the basics should always be in style, like non-polluting products, such as soap, garden food, and good.
Thanks, this was a great video! You give a nice layout of going from dry ash to dry lye in a way that seems like just about anyone with patience and care could do it. Truly timeless content!
Wow, thanks! *blush*
One can sieve the ashes, first, too: makes the slurry more refined and easier to stir, and saves a step or two.
You have a great sense of humor. The time lapse comments made me laugh. Thank you for sharing this video. I wanted to learn how to do this. Thanks again.
You're quite welcome... and thank you! It can be done more cleanly than I did it by filtering or letting the sediment settle out more completely but I just wanted to "get it done" to demonstrate the process. Either way, the result will make soap, clean hides or clean drains! For soap recipes you'll have to experiment with the lye quantity because its strength will vary. I hope you give it a try and have success!
I remember watching my mom make lye soap this way back during the depression, just lye and any fat or oil. She collected the ashes from the fire she had outside under the kettle she boiled the laundry in. This was in the late 1930s. Things were different then.
That's impressive
Different or better? Or both?
I've been wondering if I could use the bacon grease I've been saving in the fridge. Even if it worked, I'm guessing the soap would smell like bacon, but am not sure.
@@peterson6824 Use coffee or tea for the lye water solution.
Thanks for the DIY; I almost feel guilty for buying my lye crystals now. I will certainly be acquiring some assistance from my mate to try this one. [ side note: He whistles while he teaches as well. Love it ]
Since you put a lot of work into making your potassium hydroxide, you might want to maximize what you collect and minimize the work.
That means filtering out the coals first is very very very helpful. Avoide breaking up your coals as you try to filter them out. Burn the coals you filtered. Collect and combine all your ash. Not only will not having coals make less work mixing the ash water slurry, but will help ensuring water gets to, reacts with, and dissolves all the potassium into the water as potasium hydroxide rather than getting stuck in the pores of highly porous charcoal. No charcoals will help when straining the ash water slurry through a tshirt, it would not hurt to wash and strain the ash slurry once more, and save the weaker concentration of potasium hydroxide for the next batch of ashes.
If you let the second filtered lye solution sit and dry till next year, it will probably form potassium carbonates that can be thrown in to a hot fire turning it back into potassium oxides that when dumped into water makes a more concentrated potassium lye slurry this second round.
For clarity, it helps to keep the coals out. After filtering, one should let it settle for a day and cover it with plastic wrap to keep CO2 out. Then decant the clear potassium hydroxide.
this needs to be pinned up
If you take these crystals and mix them with Lemon juice, green dye, finely ground black pepper and a 50/50 of butter and lard you will have a big freaking mess.
schlaznger Haha, I got a nice laugh
LMAO!
lmaaooo
Lmao
I laughed so hard at this, too funny
If that was hard wood ashes that you used to make your lye from, when you threw out the solids, you threw out perfectly good charcoal. You can dry it and mix it with new charcoal the next time you want to cook out.
I bar-b-q with hardwood charcoal, not briquettes. When I'm finished with the fire, I drown it and re-use the unburned charcoal the next time I cook.
I was wondering about that. I know burning wood for charcoal was a regular industry back in once-jolly old England.
Since he's leached alot of the alkaline materials from it, it would also make great gardening bio-char. Bio-char is used to add carbon back into the soil which improves the quality of soil substantially. You can use wood ash without leaching it, but it takes nature a year or two to neutralize the PH. (It will kill anything in the area you put it, and prevent growth until the ph has become neutral, but after-wards you'l get amazing garden plants in that soil.)
@@jscixnobody1510 Are you saying wood ash can be used as a herbicide?
@@jscixnobody1510 and they say there is to much co2 in the atmosphere when in actuality there is almost not enough. without co2 the plants would die and so would we. we are being duped by the so called social scientists who have no clue what they are talking about. they also would hate the fact that we want to make our own soap and other things. I am really glad I watched this video. now I know I won't have to buy this stuff to make my soap and can make it all myself. We will be totally offgrid power water soap laundry soap everything. this is what we should all be doing so the gov has less of a hook in our lives. just like the old days. we need to go back to that time so the modern society doesn't destroy our brains like they have so many of the kids that are in university now. good vid man really appreciate it. keep doing the good work.
Where’d you get that profile picture Captain Nemo
letting this set for several hours at each step would allow the reaction to fully take place and the solids to settle and make filtration easier.
Thank you! One of the best and most useful videos I have ever watched! I just wish you showed us how did you make soap out of it.
Just to be prepared, it's good to know this.
Pure Lye drain cleaner, and the cheapest crico- type white shortening makes a pretty good soap.
Once that runs out, this is gonna be the thing people do if they bathe.
Good tip: if your solution will dissolve a feather, it'll make soap.
or if a potato floats on it, instead of sink. ;)
You should filter it with a coffee filter... that'll get it cleaner quicker with less waste.
Wouldn't the paper react with the lye? I think it would just dissolve.
@@DiannaMad It works on fats more than paper , think bleach it is an type of soap ☺
edgeeffect less waste or less taste😄
The left over chunk of Charcoal you can do 2 things with it Crush it and put in garden to help the soil or let it dry and burn it in the wood stove/pot belly stove. The other left overs items we all way put in the compost pile and let it sit for the year along with the other items then after the pile sat for the year it went to the garden area. We ran 2 pile's and empty the one that sat for a year in the fall in to the garden before tilling the soil for winter. BTW the soil was hard clay and took 3 years before we got it broken up where it was real good for planting.
When I had a garden (in an apartment at present 😐), I had to really work the soil. I almost enjoyed the preparation more than the harvest. I'm in L.A. (hoping to get out), and the soil is mostly sand! Btw the time I was through, our back yard was rich, dark soil, with loads of earthworms! We grew all kinds of things, even corn and some beans, little potatoes, and rhubarb once, but the Mediterranean climate here favors tomatoes, squash, peppers, and eggplant, which gree in abundance. (The squash blossoms attracted nice, big carpenter bees, too! The kids were able to experience some nice bits of nature.) I had small, sugar pumpkin vines trailing up in the trees. It was really a wonderful time.
I know this isn't apprapos of soap making, but utilizing compost! I got carried away.
black color is only because it wasn't strained or sieved (carbon colored water) I did a test on Australian iron bark ash (you Americans have never seen hardwood) and after fine mesh sieving and adding rainwater the pH was above 8! - Used much more water so solution wasn't over saturated with potassium - Evaporation stage begins now - then in a couple of days we'll boil down the remaining filtered liquid and see what the result is - Thank you for sharing mate
Haven't seen hardwood? Like osage orange or screwbean mesquite?
Gammareign He made the comment with no forethought it seems.
Great video. Thanks! We make soap at home and I love to know that I can make my own ingredients. I really appreciate your patience, which you must have since you seemed to have not burned yourself with your product. Also the patience it takes to inform us lurkers. You are cool!
So far the best tutorial I have seen. Thanks
Thanks so much for the kind words!
When you boil the mixture place a spoon or glass rod in the pan. This will prevent super heating, super heating is what causes the splatter. Lye is much more active at high temps you do not want that stuff splattering on you when your boiling it. Also use 2 5 gallon buckets with same amount of ash and a lot more water, hot water and stir for 2minutes every 10 minutes for an hour then let it sit for 12 hours minimum and the potassium and sodium carbonates will still be in solution while the insolubles will have settled the the bottom. Siphon the water off and it’s much much cleaner and the final product will shine. And one last thing. Get a terra cotta, glass or steel vessel to mix it in as it will react to plastic and contaminate your potash.
Super-heating only occurs in purified substances. Wood-ash water is not pure.
Lye is used in silver refining to convert Silver chloride into silver. I’m going to try this to produce lye instead of buying it. Hope it works! Yet another use for ashes.
You need to use a screen to get rid of the bits of charcoal.
It absorbs a lot of your lye and once you have the slurry duct tape a coffee filter over a piece of PVC and dump it in that to filter out over a pan.
This will save you time and get you a very clean product.
Great vid all in all though! Knowledge is key to to thriving rather than just surviving.
I would enjoy seeing the finish soap, using this lye.....
Someday, I will do this. I still have some of this lye, and when I find the time, I'll finally do it!
Countercommie Did you make the soap yet?
@@Countercommie Can use use cast iron to reduce your lye water? I'm ASSUMING you can as that's probably what people would've used up through the 1800's.
@@American-Plague Good question! Cast iron is absolutely safe for lye. It will eat away any seasoning that happens to be on the pan, but it won't harm the pan in any way. In fact, a strong lye bath is often used by cast iron aficionados as part of their restoration process for old pans. They will leave the pan in the lye sometimes for days before sanding and re-seasoning.
@@Countercommie Awesome! All I've ever used in my life is cast iron. Once they're seasoned well they transfer heat better than anything and are just as non stick as a Teflon coated pan, not to mention food seems to taste better/cook more evenly and have a better sear. Plus they'll last 500 years with minimal care! To top that, it actually has been shown that women who cook in cast iron are FAR less likely to suffer from anemia. I refuse to use anything else. Lol! Thank you very much! I wasn't expecting an answer that promptly! 😎👍
You can use it as a liquid, too. You cook it down until an egg will float in it, with about a quarter sized part of it above the liquid. When the egg floats, it's soap worthy. Crystals would take up less room, of course. But when you make soap you dissolve the crystals in water to make a liquid, so this saves a step.
Can you use the liquid lye to make bar soap?
Very cool. This is how my granny and grand dad use to make it. I forgot how it was done. ty for the video :)
Thanks, dude. Best video of making lye I've found so far! I'd love to see an actual soapmaking video. Great stuff!!! Tree
Nice to see some old skills have not died, I have done the same for years. University and no cash is a great impetus to learn. Best wishes from the UK!
A long time ago, I worked in a factory where we used Potassium Hydroxide (Potash) and Methylene Chloride to strip paint on bad paint jobs. We used full positive pressure (SCBA) face masks, because the 300-F tank would off-gas fumes that would, over-time, destroy the linings of your lungs (emphyzema). I wouldn't do this inside, without a chem lab chemical hood! As for the 'clarity', before your 'first reduction', double-stack some coffee filters in a funnel and pour a warmed mix (160-200 F) through it. Your remnant will then look like water, and your crystals will be clear-white in the end.
I’ve been looking into how to make this for a while, glad I found this
Glad to hear it! Please add to your process some of the suggestions of others; exclude the charcoal from your ashes and filter your liquid or wait a long time for solids to settle, for example. This was just a down and dirty experiment to show how it can be done. At the time I made the video there really weren't any better, but I think there are now. Best of luck in you effort!
Mad whistling skills!
Wow, that was neat. Thanks! Interesting how much ash was needed to yield the lye. Very cool, and thanks for posting.
Yeah I was going to make this stuff a few years back. I had heard that the soap is really good for your skin. Anti fungal aswell.
Home made soap is great for your skin and it feels wonderful. You can probably find a local brand to see for yourself. It takes a little practice to get the right balance of lye/oils. Too much lye and you'll get a drying soap that can make you itchy; too little and you'll be oily. Write down your recipes down each time you make a batch and you'll arrive at the perfect ratio. I don't recommend using home made lye for regular soapmaking though; it's strength is not consistent so you can never quite get a perfect batch of soap.
Good vid! Thx. The char cole particles settle on the bottom of the pan, cause they get wet inside so they dont float anymore. You would aceive the same effect if you just let it sit in a bit more water for a week or two. You can then filter it with a coffe filter. To get really clean Potash you can then dry it like you did, then heat it, dissolve it again in water and cristalise it. There a lots of videos on how to (re)cristalise.
The amount of water is not crucial, cause you wont make a saturised solution. It is important though that the water is low in minerals. Distlled water works best.
Great experiment. thanks for filming it
Hi
Great video, from start to finish!
I could just go to the store and buy soap and drain cleaner...
But that just wouldn't be as satifying!
Wow, this is so amazing, interesting and fascinating :) Thank you.
I found that if you just take a plastic bottle and cut the bottom off and put a paper towel folded up into the mouth so that it's jammed in there so tight that barely anything can get through if you pour the solution into that and have that so that the mouth of the bottle fits a Gatorade bottle because the mouth will fit into them perfectly you could just go about your business and it will do it all by itself and you will have a very white crystal solution, that is to say it will appear as water in your collection dish, but it might take a day, depending on how well you jam the paper towel in the mouth of the bottle and how well you kept large ash out of solution. Good job, and thank you so much. I just ran out of Naoh and would like to test an ash based lye.
Thanks for adding this idea, David. I like the soda bottle/Gatorade idea. Others have suggested filtering my solution before evaporating and if I ever make wood ash lye again, I will certainly do that. I run a small soap company and I buy my lye from a U.S. manufacturer. This video was just an experiment to see if I could do it! What do you do with your lye?
I would like to see what the soap would look like afterwards. Thank you for the video!
My pleasure! It's fun to do. I did make a batch of soap with the lye made in this video. It was tan/grey in color and pretty good, but a tiny bit too greasy. You really have to guess at the strength/purity of homemade lye. It might be 75% as strong as store bought, I suppose. I originally guessed 80%. Next time, I'll use about 10% more lye in the recipe and it should be better still. It's been 3 1/2 years but I still have a jar of this very lye! When I finally get around to it, I will make more soap and a video and post it. If you subscribe, you'll be notified when I post a video. Thanks for watching!
Thank you for share this solution about the lye making god bless you
Great video! I have the ability to get tons of hardwood ash so maybe I’ll try this one day down the road!😊
it's probably an aluminum pan. aluminum reacts with potassium hydroxide in ash. which adds dark color to the crystals
Boki Minor stainless for everything
Doesn't look or sound like aluminum
Thank you. This is exactly what I was looking for.
Wow. I took soap for granted
Looks like good stuff for making concrete mix too
Thank you for the demonstration, great channel name. Keep crushing!
That was so cool I wished I found this when you made it.
Thank you soo much for this demonstration. I have always wanted to make potash lye..
15:58 OMG, This is a LOT of work for so little product at the end! Who came up with this? Kudos to you for having patience! This is something I would have never thought of in my wildest dream!
I like that you took it clear down to crystals although I wonder if that is necessary for some uses. I tested my solution (used rainwater) after I filtered it through coffee filters, very clear brownish solution, and it is highly alkaline. I'll test pH later and boil if necessary or simply evaporate.
Very useful information and thank you thank you very much
If you skim the crystals off the top as it simmers you can greatly increase its purity
So what would be the "proper way" of disposing of the unused portions from the pan? You mentioned you poured some of it into the woods early in the video. Obviously you wouldn't want to wash this down a drain, at least in my situation... we have a septic system. How hard is it to clean those utensils when you are done using them for this process? Hand washed outside or dishwasher? Does it stick to the pan at all? Great video. Thank you!
I basically live in the woods so I can safely dispose of this stuff "out back". The residue is no different than the runoff from an outdoor fire pit when the rain falls. Some of it could be put down the drain, it's basically drain cleaner such as Drain-O, but my leftovers contain a lot of solids like ash slurry and chunks of burnt wood which wouldn't go down the drain. While it can cause burns in high concentrations, this lye isn't poisonous in small amounts; Latin cultures use it to remove the husks from corn kernels in the production of 'hominy' or 'masa'. None of this stick to the utensils; it rinses away very easily and won't damage stainless. Don't use aluminum though; lye is brutal on Aluminum.
This was very helpful. Thank you 🙏.
The potassium does burn, you get K2O which is potassium oxide, the potassium oxide reacts with water to make KOH and OH- ions, which is the basic part that gets used for soap. also oxygen gets produced in the reaction but it shouldn't be noticeable.
+Ethan Petrea your chemistry is off
+Mohamed Sabra where? I'm not trying to be a typical annoying twit, i'm curious. The potassium should have turned from to an oxide salt from a chloride or whatever organic complex it was bonded to in the heat of the flames, then by adding water you should be hydrating it to turn it into hydroxide ions
All that is accurate but hydrogen gas is produced not oxygen
+Mohamed Sabra that may be the case, i'm going off of an equation i made in my head, so balancing very well could be off
Suggestion:-
a} Use a seive or a piece of steel mesh to filter out the large solid pieces from the powder.
b} Use a mortar and pestle to reduce said solid pieces to powder.
c} Add said powder back in to the other lot, and then mix it with water after that.
So how do you know how much to use with water? Do you measure it the same way you would measure regular store bought lye???
Thanks for the video! I am in the process of making soap at the moment myself. It has worked well (except for the fact that the Teflon from the muffin tray I used has stuck to the soap muffins I have made). Extracting Lye is another process I am hoping to master! Appreciate it heaps! I will be tagging this video straight to my journal!
Thanks for this comment! You just saved me an expensive muffin tin. Phew!
Micheal Farmer How do you tag it to your journal?
Thank you and God bless you
You're welcome bro. Blessings on you too!
Absolutely awsome! Thank you so much for taking the time to do all this work and give an excellent lesson. Really appriciate the shared knowledge
Glad you like it. Drying it to crystals is really the only safe way to store the stuff. Hopefully you can use the info and make it more efficient, purer, etc... Thanks, vet!
You won't have to keep letting it settle and pouring off the top if you strain it through paper towels. Paper towels will catch much more particles than the tee shirt did. If I were you I would use the tee shirt to strain it, then strain through paper towels. I have salvaged a lot of deep fryer oil with paper towels, so it will strain very fine particles.
you can separate the impurities after you have recovered the lye water by rinsing the solution with a nonpolar, immiscible solvent such as ether, gasoline, toluene, etc. The water layer will still have the negatively charged hydroxide ions in solution - without the organic impurities.
totally awesome, its way cheaper than buying lye
back in the old days they had a wooden crib lined with straw. you dumped your ashes in the crib and collected the clear lie water from the rain water and filtered through the straw. If you want a better quality just strain it through a couple coffee filters then boil it down.
I wonder if there is a way to substitute the potassium for sodium in the hydroxide salt. You can get more complete saponification and make hard soaps.
Nice whistling!
Thanks man! Gotta love YT. I was wondering how, typed it in and pow your video. Thanks again!
You're welcome, sir! Thanks for watching.
When boiling it, instead of boiling it to dryness, when it starts to form crystals, get chill it to close to 0ºC, the KOH and NaOH will precipitate leaving lots of impurities dissolved. Then filter it, and you can get a whiter purer product. You can also filter it using a cofee filter before it starts to form crystals to remove the smaller non soluble impurities that go throught the cloth. This way you can get a pretty pure product.
Howeer for soap it doesnt really matter
You can also dissolve the dirty brown crystals in ethanol and filter through a coffee filter and evap the ethanol. Makes nice clean crystals
Great information. Helpful. Thank You.
if u take some straw and strain it through the straw and a tee shirt u can cut out slot of that silt
Great video exactly what I was looking for
Thanks for showing this process in detail. Do you know the chemical composition of the end product? I would guess it isn't pure KOH, but i am wondering about the concentration. I want to try to dissolve silicates with KOH from hardwood ash for geopolymerization and I am pretty sure I will need a high concentration. I'm planning to test this with both fine clay and sand.
You're more of a scientist than I! I can only guess at the strength; it's probably about 75%. You could certainly do better. My purpose was to experiment with how I might make my own soap with wood ash if I lived in the wilds in 1850 and to find a way to safely store the KOH as a crystal rather than a liquid.
@@Countercommie theres likely potassium nitrate in there as well along with other trace salts...listen, make your life easy..screen out your charcoal before water, it absorbs a LOT of your desired product...your first filtration after the cloth use coffee filters or a fresh t shirt. should remove most of your particulate.
with the remaining solution, when you get to just syrupy, try cooling it. im just guessing here but i think your lye will precipitate out from your solution, it may need a "seed crystal" so scrape just above the surface of your container ehere thrre should be a few that formed via evap..
hope this helps.
Your video is informative. My comment would be to make safety a priority as you make lye. Your suggestion to keep vinegar nearby is a good one for neutralizing spills. Long sleeves, gloves and goggles are also a must. Lye fumes are very dangerous to people, children, and animals. Be sure to turn on your stove fan and make sure there is very good air flow in the rest of your work area.
Children are people 🙈
That's great, you can seen it taking on that waxy lye consistency as the water evaporates. 😀
You can actually clean up the end result by washing it with alcohol, it should dissolve most of the organic compounds that give it color, leaving you with a better product.
I'm a little confused, wouldn't it be discolored because the organic compounds are dissolved into the mixture? To remove the impurities wouldn't they need to be precipitated? Or maybe they dissolve in the alcohol and evaporate with it? Can you confirm if it's the latter?
Actually, they worded it wrong. KOH is Soluble in C2H5OH (Alcohol), therefore the organic compounds (insoluble) remain out of solution.
I found that if you calcine your brown salt, rehydrate, filter and calcine numerous times, you get a white salt, it has a greasy feel and stains your hands black. I'm not sure it's KOH though, Maybe K2CO3. It's time & fuel intensive work for the amount you get out.
***** Leaching ash & decanting is the first step. This year I used snow melt. Then there's the long wait of evaporating what's in your buckets (boiling uses too much energy for me), an aquarium bubbler can speed things up a bit. Then calcining those brown crystals left at the bottom, rehydrate, filter, calcine; repeat till your salt is white.
Thanks for this video Sir I'm really very happy seen it. thanks again
This can also be used with ammonium nitrate or potassium nitrate and water to make a blueing salt solution for metal parts or gun blueing.
They say not to use tap water b/c of minerals....and varying pH, etc, etc. They usually say use rainwater or distilled water or maybe some spring water as long as it doesn't have certain minerals in it.
I had also read that you are supposed to take the same solution after it has leeched through the ashes....and add more ashes to the old and pour the same water back through and do it again and again and again (like 6 or 7 times) to get the right pH or strength or whatever. They had set up 55g drums or an old sistern or something....lined it with lots of clean straw on the bottom for filtering...and put a spicket at the bottom.
My tap water is well water which is essentially spring water on my property, and is very low in minerals according to testing I've have done. See my video on "the spring in my backyard" to see what I mean.
As far as using the traditional "leeching" method with straw and all of that: I'm shooting for a quicker and slightly more scientific method: In the old days, folks were making "lye water", and they wanted to achieve a certain strength which was determined by floating things like eggs in the solution or dissolving things (like a feather) with it. I tried all of this initially, but I was never convinced of the strength of my solution. Turns out, old-time soapmakers really weren't that sure either, and as a result a lot of folk lore and superstition came to the craft. People thought that the moon phase or the weather or the utensils used could make or break their soap. Really, it was just inconsistent lye water strength all along!
If we stop at "lye water", we can't know it's real strength without a hydrometer because the largest variable in it's strength is the amount of water that remains in the solution. Instead of increasing the strength of the solution through repeated leechings, I am instead evaporating the water. Though my method is not perfect, if the solution is brought all the way to crystals, I have some idea of it's strength because there is NO water... In my soap recipes, I will assume that it is 90% pure. There may be 10 percent ash, minerals, and salts of different types. But at least I know the product is pretty consistent from batch to batch so my soap recipes will perform consistently. It can be stored safely for an extended period, weighed and reconstituted in a known amount of water.
Countercommie So regardless of how much water you use in the beginning the lye dust / crystals you end up with at the end is all the same strength? Is that right, or did I miss something? Thanks for the demonstration!
Scarlett
+Countercommie
Do you test Ph of your soap?
rainwater nowadays is actually sour due to the sulfic acid in it
Sir, the part you dumped in the woods can be fired in a furnace to make waterproof cement.
I use like three five gallon buckets the bottom of which has only one brick and a tee shirt the second or middle bucket will have about two inches of gravel then a tee shirt then the top bucket will have straw and a tee shirt the top two buckets will have small holes drilled in the bottom and the bottom bucket has a spout made into the bottom into it
Then how do you use that liquid to make the soap? How would I measure what I need? Or does it have to become a powder on the stove?
This was so informative. Thank you!
Thanks for the video! Try to use pure ash without coals in it, to obtain clear solution.
so if you take the charcoal out and bake it you should also get activated carbon from the process. It's a 2-fer.
Careful using vinegar to neutralize the hydroxide. The reaction can be violent. Def with sodium but probably with potassium as well
A nice video but I couldn't help adding my two cents worth in the form of a couple of tips for when doing this:
When pouring , if you do it with the pot that you are decanting from held above the back of the receiver pot and pour towards yourself, you won't need to be holding your head over the fumes as you pour.
When working with chemistry always use gloves, safety-glasses and a splash-proof apron. Keep a weak solution of boric acid handy should you accidentally get some of the lye in you eyes.
GOOD JOB!!!! YOU DID THAT!
I think that filtering through large capacity coffee filters might speed the process somewhat.
let it sit for a week or so and it should turn the color of iced tea - float an egg on it and if it floats up to the size of a quarter its perfect. then you can add tallow, make sure its rendered down and perfectly clear tallow. its pretty simple - you don't need all that fancy oil and color stuff. its just soap
I agree. Why go to all of the trouble of boiling it down to crystals? Grandma's way was probably the right way. Slowly percolate a small amount of water thru a barrel of wood ash. Filter the water by putting a lot of straw into the bottom of the barrel. Test the water with an egg. If the material is too weak use less water and more ash. Only boil the mixture as a last resort. A little slower but a lot easier and safer.
Great video!
One thing...
Would you please do a tutorial on the "merciful time lapse" for all that make videos and don't grasp that concept?
For the love of all that's hoLY PLEASE MAKE THAT TUTORIAL!
LOL
You're pretty smooth with the pouring. But why not pour through filter paper? Does that cause some kind of undesirable reaction, or filter out too many constituents that you want to remain in the solution?
A few other folks have suggested this too. A filter is a good idea but I didn't think of it at the time. I wasn't at all concerned with purity... I only did it to satisfy my curiosity. This isn't something I'd likely do again; it's too easy to buy Sodium Hydroxide instead! The stuff I made in this video would have Potassium rather than Sodium. To get hard bars of soap with it, you'd have to add some salt! Thanks for watching!
Use a decanter for wine to get sediment out. And you don't need to make crystal. Get a fresh egg and it should float halfway in and halfway out of the surface of the lye water. Then its a third lye water to two thirds lard.
Awesome tips , thank you . I don't copy one of the last step , i see you make boil the juice , then refresh
, then you set the pan in a special position , and just after that you talk about vinegar , the transition is very "sharp" . There is a 3rd pan with liquid , have you added the vinegar ?? and how much , please ? and for how many times do you heat the juice at the end ?
The vinegar is kept nearby to neutralize any spills. It is not used in the lye.
We like your videos and refer to you as Merciful Time Lapse Guy.
One thing of note, storing your lye as water actually preserves it's strength vs storing it as crystals. Over time the crystals take in moisture and lose potency etc. If you've ever made soap in larger quantities like for your extended family then storing your lye still liquid is better in the long run
You'll note than when lye is sold commercially, it is sold as crystals in airtight containers. This includes hardware store lye and lye sold for the soapmaking market, such as that from Essential Depot. The airtight container prevents the absorption of moisture from the air. At home, this can be done with a Mason jar. I've kept my lye crystals in these air-tight jars for years without any problem. I am also pretty sure that the crystals don't lose potency (become less alkaline) over time.
@@Countercommie Because that's the easiest way to transport it but that's not the best way to store it long term