Thread: Hard water!

Originally Posted by niftyshaving

Yes.
Soap making use a fat and a caustic to saponify the fat. They work hard to get the chemistry correct
and have all the caustic react and have just the smallest amount of fat/oil left.

Soap also likes to age and dry.
https://www.oliveoiltimes.com/olive-...oil-soap/42868

For good reasons a puck of a good soap is even better a year or two later... If you find a soap you love
get some extra once a year so you have a stash of many year old prizes.

I have a lifetime supply of VDH VanDer Hagen shaving soap in that little green box. I have always liked it for the way it worked, and bought a "case" of 12 on Amazon a while back since I could not find it again (replaced with different VDH) at my local Walmart. Then my daughter bought me a case of 12 of it for Christmas. It lasts a very long time. If it's like cheese it should be well aged now sitting in the box under my side of the bed.

Years ago in Nebraska I used to make lye soap at home from Lye (sodium Hydroxide) and beef tallow at the local grocery store. Worked fine, and there are a multitude of changes, as the type of oils or fats that can be used in this process. They even sell "homemade" lye soap here at a local "general" merchandise store about 3 miles from me.

I've also used DOVE bath soap that does a remarkable job with a good badger brush for a luxuriant lather on your face for shaving.

Back on the hard water issue... a water softener changes a calcium ion for a sodium ion as water passes by the beads. The beads hold so much calcium until they can hold no more and then the bead need to be refreshed... salt. Sodium Chloride flushes off the calcium ion and replaces it with the sodium ion and the water softener is once again capable of "softening" water. You get more sodium in your drinking water (not salt) depending on the degree of the hardness of your water. When you use soap in washing clothes there is affinity with the already "sodium" in the water and the sodium tallowate from the process of making soap (sodium hydroxide) works better. It is that slick feeling that you have when you wash your hands with soap and softened water, as it is the sodium ion ever present.

My suggestion is to get distilled water (it's cheap) and put it in a soap scuttle and microwave it for about 70-80 seconds. Makes it very hot. Then dip your brush in the scuttle water - soak - and then shake out a bit of water and work with your soap. It will lather like crazy. Alternate is to put in a water softener for you clothes and your pipes as it will save a plumbing bill later on if they clog up due to very hard water. You'll use less soap for clothe washing and dish washing and you have a ready supply of softened water for your shaving. If you use soft water for making coffee your coffee maker will probably never need the "vinegar" treatment ever again, as that is what we use for our coffee makers. I bring home the Winery's softened water for our coffee making and to cook with. It does not leave a ring around the pot or make it harder to clean like it does if I use our tap water.

We have pretty hard water in Houston. What you'll notice is more soap scum in your sink.

Early on I tried a few things to help -- distilled water, a pinch of citric acid (from the grocery) as a chelating agent, etc.

In the end, I just use products that work well in hard water. It's trial and error. With so many great soaps & creams out there, I just have to live without a few of them.

Originally Posted by Geezer

So; perhaps the reason that old "William's Soap" and some other vintage soaps are sought after?? Hmmmm!
~Richard

This may be true for many soaps. If you find a shave soap you love get a couple refill pucks
and replace them when you use one.

There are some cottage soap makers that make soap and sell it within a week. It works well
with a modern stick blender but time can still help. Some folk make soap with a kitchen
mixer and the results are not as good as a powerful stick blender.

The triple milling and time sorts out a lot of issues in soap making old school and today.

The old soaps may be so good because of the choice of fat used by the
maker. One difference in old soap might be that grass fed beef tallow
is yellow and has different chemistry when compared to corn fed beef tallow.
The feed changes the organic fatty acids in the tallow and then the lather and cleaning qualities...

If you look at soap sites you will see chemistry tables... These tables might line up.
Certified Lye - Using Lye to Make Soap
Saponification Values for Making Soap with Lye (Sodium Hydroxide) or with Caustic Potash (Potassium Hydroxide)
Fat or Oil Lye (Sodium Hydroxide), NaOH Caustic Potash (Potassium Hydroxide), KOH
Tallow, Beef 0.1419 0.1999
Tallow, Deer 0.1382 0.1946
Tallow, Sheep 0.1384 0.1949

On other soap sites you will see qualities and characteristics of soap made from different oils.
Saponification Table and Characteristics of Oils in Soap
oil or fat (acid) SAP Hard/Soft cleansing fluffy lather stable lather skin care
lard 138.7 hard good no yes fair
tallow 140.5 hard good no yes fair

The old soap makers add subtle this and that to their blend of fats when making soap.
These would be trade secrets even today.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tallow
In industry, tallow is not strictly defined as beef or mutton fat. In this context, tallow is animal fat that conforms to certain technical criteria, including its melting point.
The composition of the fatty acids is typically as follows:[11]

Saturated fatty acids:
Palmitic acid (C16:0): 26%
Stearic acid (C18:0): 14%
Myristic acid (C14:0): 3%

Monounsaturated fatty acids:
Oleic acid (C18-1, ω-9): 47%
Palmitoleic acid (C16:1): 3%

Polyunsaturated fatty acids:
Linoleic acid: 3%
Linolenic acid: 1%

I have not tried this, but I saw a documentary about tea in the BBC before I returned home. They recommended filtering the water because you get the floating scum in tea when there is hard water. I personally haven't tried it for shaving I don't have this problem where I live in Puerto Rico, with the soaps, but I do filter my tea and drinking water for other reasons with a filter jug. You might try some filtered water and if it works, get a filter.

A month or so ago I got into a conversation with a local soap purveyor from whom I've bought a couple of shave soaps. We hit on this topic of hard water and lathering and he, oddly it seemed to me, hadn't really stumbled on the fact that distilled water can be an aid in lathering. He found it interesting simply because he gets a fair number of compliments on how well his soaps lather (which matches my experience with his products). With the discussion came a realization that the fact that he tests his formulas with tap water, which is notoriously hard in St. Louis. The fact that he tested with very hard water resulted in soaps that lather well with almost anything else. Sometimes in-depth knowledge takes a backseat to luck and a little work.

Niftyshaving's comments on tallow quality is interesting to me on a professional level. My educational background is in ruminant nutrition and I spent a number of years working with the dairy industry. From a nutritional standpoint the volatile fatty acids (VFAs) we are most concerned with are propionate and butyrate. The former is generated by the rumen microbial population when supplied with a ration high in forage (grass, hay, silage, etc.) and drives milk production. The later is a product of starch metabolism (corn) and drives intramuscular fat deposition (marbling).

The fact is that tallow is a byproduct so it isn't something many people in the animal agriculture industry are particularly concerned about from a quality standpoint. If there is a substantial difference in soap quality based on these VFAs, or their resulting metabolic compounds, then I'd be rather interested, intellectually, in knowing which is preferable. The majority of beef cattle in the U.S. are finished on a grain diet, which means that the butyrate tallow is plentiful. Grass-fed beef is growing in popularity but still accounts for a very small percentage of animals sent to slaughter and dairy cattle have very low body fat, comparatively. So if there is a big difference between one tallow source and the other, and the soap producers are aware and actually care about it, there could be an issue with actually obtaining the desired tallow.

Great, another rabbit-hole to explore in my free time...

Perhaps a soap made form Caustic Potash and butter. That is a fat. At the winery I work for, we have changed our tank cleaning from the normal caustic we were using, which was based strongly on Sodium Hydroxide to a Potassium Hydroxide flake. We have hundreds of pound of that in inventory at any given time. This was to reduce the amount of sodium in our effluent from our floor drains out to the drain field.

Butter made from cow's milk would be a rather pricey option for soap production but "butter" is certainly being used in some products like the soaps made with donkey's milk. In the end each fat source should have its own chemical peculiarities and I'm curious as to how they might affect a soap's performance.

Originally Posted by GreenRipper

Niftyshaving's comments on tallow quality is interesting
...

The fact is that tallow is a byproduct so it isn't something many people in the animal agriculture industry are particularly concerned about from a quality standpoint. If there is a substantial difference in soap quality based on these VFAs,
...
Great, another rabbit-hole to explore in my free time...

Fall is coming rabbits might be in their hole. ;-)

Connect with your soap maker and a local wild game butcher or abattoir and
gather some 'yellow' fat from deer, elk, moose, wild pig... render it and make soap see what
happens. Test the pH of the finished soap and adjust as needed in a milling process it needs
to be exactly correct but your soap maker knows that.

There are subtle differences. Fat from milk also varies on the feed (goat, sheep, cow as well).
Coconut makes crazy froth...

Sodium tallowate on the label is a well defined industry product and the great shaving soaps tinker in that
land of less than 1% that need not be listed as best I can tell.
https://hpd.nlm.nih.gov/cgi-bin/hous...ls&prodcat=all