Soap Making

Googled Soap Making leads to many articles describing the process, basically talks about reacting oil with strong alkaline, producing a salt, thru saponification process.

Wonder why i talk about soap making, out of a no where??

Recall my last posting, about cooking oil fire, where i described the challenges of trying to extinguish a burning cooking oil or fat??  

In this posting, i will try to explain the usual, and proven, of course also the most economical and practical, method of stopping a burning oil.  Yes, change the hot burning oil into soap! Yes, that's Saponification.  Let's SAPO the oil fire, sounds interesting, right?

The use of alkaline to turn hot oil into a fatty salt has been known by mankind for ages, maybe since few thousand years ago. Now i understand why my mom used ashes from the firewoods to clean oily utensils after cooking. It is because ashes are alkaline and it reacts with oil, turning it into salt, which can be washed away easily.

Oops, i drifted too far from what i suppose to touch, that is controlling a burning cooking oil fire.

Last saturday, i did a simple training for a friend to a group of textile factory staffs, where i showed the basic skills and knowledges of using a powder portable fire extinguisher.

It went on smoothly and i saw the trainees were more confident after the practical session, where i used a used drum with diesel fuel and water. Petrol was used to ignite initially.

After the training, we adjourned to a nearby coffee shop for lunch and the chef-cum-owner of a food stall joined us for a chit chat.  He shared his personal experience where his cooking appliance caught fire while deep frying some food stuffs.  What he did to control the fire was, to just pour in more oil into the burning oil, the fire is off. Make sense! Definitely Yes. However, this method only works when the heat contained in the burning oil is not excessively great to the extend that the cold oil is able to absorb to a level below it's flashing point. Too technical?

If the burning oil level is already close to spilling out from the container, then adding more oil will cause spillage of hot burning oil, Not A Good Thing To DO!

So, just put some alkaline in and change the oil into Soap, Fire is Out, simple?

Please do not try at home, if you are not a trained fire fighter.

If you need some training, please contact me, maybe we can share some points and do it safely.