Argue for your limitations and they are yours forever.
Mike Barkley wrote:Lye soap with lard and no borax.
No need to buy lye. It can be made from wood ashes.
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Nicole Alderman wrote:I'm having a local soap maker make me some laundry soap bars with lemon oil added to it. Lemon oil cuts grease, even grease from petroleum products.
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Tereza Okava wrote:Jen I think your hypothesis is right. I make a simple cold process soap (5l oil/lard, 1l liquid lye, 1l water-- probably the romper-room equivalent of soapmaking recipes, but it`s my mother in law's recipe and i'm sticking with it) and that stuff cuts grease like no tomorrow. For a while we had no hot water in the kitchen and if you use that soap it didn`t matter, it got rid of the grease anyway. I make it in big tubs (repurposed ice cream containers) and we keep a container by the sink to use washing dishes. It`s fabulous stuff.
(yes, i know, liquid lye. I could make soap with ashes, but i need to pick my battles. when i retire and have more time on my hands i`ll look at more homegrown solutions)
The limonene concentration reached a maximum level of 79.4% when the fruit was in the intermediate maturation stage characterized by greenish‐yellow coloration.
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"Do the best you can in the place where you are, and be kind." - Scott Nearing
"Do the best you can in the place where you are, and be kind." - Scott Nearing
Beth Wilder wrote:Thanks, Jen! I definitely want to try something like this. You said you did have hot water to use with it this time, right?
We don't usually have hot water. C. Letellier pointed out that lye takes a long time to work on grease without very hot water. Perhaps in that case limonene would work better/faster?
We haven't made soap yet but always have a good amount of ashes and a lye bucket going (which sometimes gets used very diluted for things like laundry but was originally intended as part of a battery experiment, I believe), so we've been brainstorming ways to do so. We don't keep livestock, so the main area of brainstorming is fats, always scarce in the desert: Buffalo gourd seed oil? Javelina fat?
Has anyone tried what craig howard suggests, adding ashes or lye directly to a greasy dish? I think this was sometimes done traditionally with ash water and tallow. You'd probably still need to add hot water, huh? But I'm thinking of the method of cleaning raw fleece that involves stale urine (alkaline) interacting with the lanolin of the wool "in the grease." If boiling water were applied to this, it would probably felt the fleece, so I think it would usually be done with cold water and more time, right?
For now, I have a decent amount of both dish detergent and laundry liquid that seem to cut grease even in cold water -- Azure Market Dish Soap and Biokleen Cold Water Laundry Liquid -- but when we run out, I may do some experimentation... Watch out, world! ;)
I really enjoy reading of all your experiments, especially since it's so hot here right now that I can neither work outside nor focus enough to get any paying work done. Thank you!
"Do the best you can in the place where you are, and be kind." - Scott Nearing
Beth Wilder wrote:You're so right, and I forgot to think about that. We're also not "conventional," and our greywater goes to buried driplines in one of our gardens. I check for "safe for septic" on products I buy, but it gets more complex as we make more things ourselves. You don't think the extra alkalinity of your boosted-lye soap would do anything similar (to ashes killing fruit trees), do you? Our soil is already extremely alkaline, so while I use baking soda for cleaning elsewhere in the house, I try to avoid putting it down the drain unless we really need a boost of bubbles and it's thereby neutralized by vinegar. We also try to let the sun do a lot of our dish-cleaning for us, letting things dry and get UV-cleaned outside until any residue can be easily scraped off into the compost and then brought back in for a quick soap and rinse. That doesn't work for lard jars, though!
Gravity is a harsh mistress. But this tiny ad is pretty easy to deal with:
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