Am I using too much soap?

While I was boarding at a dorm in college a few years ago, I calculated that I used up one bar of soap 106 grams (3.75 oz) in mass every 1 1/2 to two weeks. This is not including the shampoo used to wash my hair and the hand soap used to wash my hands. If I were to make all of my soap at home, I'm curious how many lard hogs I would need to kill or how many deer, cows, geese etc. would be needed to yield just the 12.25 lbs or 5.5 Kg of soap required to bathe myself every other day for a year. If I include the ammount of soap required for hand-washing, and dish washing, this makes the ammount of soap used annually even greater. Now I'm starting to understand why people in medieval europe often only bathed once weekly. Perhaps making soap from cow butter would be a cheaper alternative.

I've made my family's bath soap for at least 14 years. I don't use animal fats. I generally use coconut oil for the main part of my oils, and I also reuse old peanut oil left over from cooking.

My basic, tried-and-true plain ol' soap recipe is:

Lye (use sodium hydroxide)--8.23 oz
Good Water (not tap)--15.5 oz
Coconut Oil--40 oz.
Peanut Oil--10 oz.

This yields about 74 ounces of finished product with a 3% superfat.

Anything more superfatted might clog up your plumbing, but anything less will dry your skin.

For a family of four using this soap as hand soap and bath soap, I make this batch about twice a year. I shower about 3X a week, my sons about 2X a week, and my husband about 5x a week. We've all used it as shampoo occasionally.

If you are interested in learning soapmaking, brambleberry.com has several good starter tutorials. SoapCalc is my favorite saponification calculator. They have some really interesting oils listed, such as Chinese Vegetable Tallow. I have a tree in my yard where I can harvest that, but it'll be many years before I store up enough of the seed pods to make it worthwhile.

Less than one animal. the last beef cow we had slaughtered came back with 100kg of extra fat, a pig can easily come home with 20-30kg of extra fat. you get more soap by weight than the fat it uses so for your 5.5kg of soap you would need about 4.5kg of fat (exactly how much depends on which fat and which superfat % you pick)

Stacie Kim wrote:
Good Water (not tap)--15.5 oz

When you say "not tap" I assume you mean not city water right? Tap for me is artesian well water, but if you are on city water wouldn't you be showering in it anyway? Or does fluoride mess up the soap somehow.




Edit: and does your family smell like peanut or coconut? lol

Yes, you are correct. City water here in the U.S. is usually loaded with chlorine, fluoride, etc. If your well water has excessive minerals, that might interfere with the saponification process. In my case, I use filtered rainwater. Whatever your best source of water is, it's probably good.

We aren't walking around smelling like fried chickens, Haha! The soap has a very ..."soap" smell. Nothing artificial like most artificially fragrances bars, just plain "soap." If that makes sense...

to answer the question in the subject...while i wouldn’t ever go so far as to say that you’re using ‘too much’, the amount you give, 1 bar every two weeks, does sound like a lot to me. but if it’s a comfortable level of use for you, what would what i think matter?

but agreed with other posters - not many. cows and pigs in particular yield a lot of fat.

Skandi Rogers wrote:Less than one animal. the last beef cow we had slaughtered came back with 100kg of extra fat, a pig can easily come home with 20-30kg of extra fat. you get more soap by weight than the fat it uses so for your 5.5kg of soap you would need about 4.5kg of fat (exactly how much depends on which fat and which superfat % you pick)

This definitely helps a lot. It looks like there will still be plenty of animal fat left over for cooking after the soap making process. Given the ammount of soap I'm currently using, would  a greywater system for bath and washing water be able to handle the soap if I only had 1/5 an acre of land to work with? I'm still new to the concept of greywater.

Ryan M Miller wrote:Given the amount of soap I'm currently using, would  a greywater system for bath and washing water be able to handle the soap if I only had 1/5 an acre of land to work with? I'm still new to the concept of greywater.

I'm no expert on greywater, and I've come across a LOT of conflicting info regarding soap in greywater systems. However, here's what seems to come up most often:

1. Bar soap (solid soap using sodium hydroxide lye) might lead to excessive salts in your soil. Some people say it's not an issue if you don't use too much soap, or if you have a lot of rain to help leach it from your soil.

2. Liquid soap (a softer soap made with potassium hydroxide lye) is generally safer to use in greywater systems. Plants need the potassium anyways.

I have made both solid and liquid soaps. I prefer the solid kind for many reasons:
  a. It's portable. Just grab a bar and go. The liquid soap requires a container.
  b. It's easier to make. The potassium hydroxide soap requires more time and muscle. Not a lot, but more.
  c. It's longer lasting. Once you dilute potassium hydroxide soap into a pourable liquid, time is your enemy. Water is working to make that soap rancid. Some people combat this issue by only diluting what they'll need during a certain time period. But solid bar soap lasts indefinitely, in my experience.
 

However, I've considered making potassium hydroxide soap for my laundry. My washing machine drains onto fruit trees. I've been buying the greywater safe laundry soap, but the cost is...Yipes. I can make it soooo much more cheaply!

If you're interested, here's the method I prefer for potassium hydroxide soap. But bear in mind that the recipe you use will NOT be my recipe given above. It's still a good recipe, I've used it successfully.

https://www.humblebeeandme.com/how-to-make-liquid-soap-easy-way/

The goal is to be squeaky clean so if your skin doesn't squeak then you are not using enough soap.

Stacie Kim recently mentioned that potassium hydroxide is needed to make liquid soap. Based on the Wikipedia article on wood ash, it seems that the primary base in hardwood ash used in making soap is potassium hydroxide. Based on this information, I'm assuming that wood ash soap might be safer for greywater systems than soap made from commercial sodium hydroxide and easier to make into a liquid form than sodium hydroxide based soap. Acquiring wood ash might be difficult though. My first thought would be to see if I can get wood ash from a barbecue smokehouse restaurant nearby. There's no way I could get nearly enough wood ash  for making soap otherwise. There are just no good places to harvest firewood in my neighborhood on a regular basis.

I'd offer that soap is not needed nearly as much as advertisers have tried to convince us. I haven't used shampoo for years now, and in the shower only my backside gets soap. Without shampoo stripping the natural oils out of my hair, my scalp doesn't overproduce oil to compensate and doesn't get as oily. So hot water has been plenty for cleaning my hair and skin. I still use soap to wash my hands after the toilet or if I get something on them that doesn't come off with just water and scrubbing, but it takes quite a few months per bar. Keeping the bar dry can also help, if the dish holds water and makes it soggy you could use more soap each time than needed.

To each their own of course!

I stopped using soap and shampoo for bathing a couple of years ago. It took a few weeks to get used to it and for my body to reduce oil production. I just use a cheap abrasive rag to scrub off the layer of dirt and dead skin. It seems that most stink is either water soluble or held up in this layer of dead skin. For my hair I just thoroughly rinse while running my fingers through it.