Caustic Soda Vs One Shot Sulphuric Acid

[meow2222]

I havent experienced either, but everything I've read seems to indicate alkalis are much worse for eyes. Acid results in instant action and surface damage. Alkali in the eye can be so innocuous at first that no action gets taken, but it will eat right into the eyeball gradually, and do major damage.

Caustic should be taken seriously re eye damage imho.

yeah. The continuing popularity of diy is one of the things that reminds me that all the nanny state's attempts to turn our world into a safe powerles victim zone is just not the way a whole lot of people want to go in life, and will not go.

NT

[Andy Wade]

Or you can add it to sulphuric acid to make an electrolyte for anodizing aluminium.

[david lang]

I think mixing a strong acid with a strong alkali would have a stronger effect :-)

Dave

[Les Desser]

In article , Andrew Mawson Sat, 31 Dec 2005 12:40:23 writes

Quote from

Although it is sold commercially as a drain cleaner, never use caustic soda to open a drain. It will combine with the grease from soap or food wastes to form an insoluble compound. Potash lye or caustic potash may be added to finish opening a drain, but never use them on a completely stopped up drain. They may take as long as overnight to work, and if you ultimately have to open the trap, the chemicals would be a hazard.

Maybe US soap and food is different??

[Stuart Noble]

The soap it forms will always be water soluble, but not always instantly. A bar of soap would be pretty useless if it dissolved as quickly as you want a blockage to disappear. Also, the soaps of fatty acids are often much bulkier than the original oil/fat.

[Nigel Molesworth]

Quite. Considering that soap is *made* from caustic soda and oil.

[The Natural Philosopher]

That does not compute. I've used it many any times to dissolve fats - on cookers and in the drains.

It may form insoluble saltst with other things however..but fat seems to be teh most uysal cause.

I'd agree that a completely blocked drain is something to be wary of.

But I don't understand the rest of it. Soap IS |(or was ) sheep fat and caustic...

[Stuart Noble]

Is/ was olive oil and caustic. Sheep fat is lanolin IIRC

[Tim S]

I though lanolin was sheep sebum, ie wool/skin grease?

Tim

[Steve Firth]

Stuart Noble wrote: [snip]

Only Castille soap is mnade from olive oil and lye. Almost any old fat will do for saponification and early soaps were made with animal fat. There's a clue in the name "Palmolive" about the sources of the oils they use for saponification.

I've found that rape oil is useless for soap making. Needs loads of lye and produces a nasty, hard, very alkaline soap which is probably best used for cleaning floors rather than hands.

The original soaps were supposed to be produced from the fat and woodash run off from ritual sacrifices.

[Nigel Molesworth]

Did they have to wash after using it?

[Chris Bacon]

Yup, lovely for the hands.... you can buy skin lotion with lanolin in it, read the label. It's good.

[Tim S]

Yep, you can also buy pure lanolin, sold as "nipple cream" but very good for babies with skin problems. Only source I could find was on teh Internet, none of the local shops had heard of it.

Tim

[Chris Bacon]

Good Lord. I am astounded.

[Dave Fawthrop]

| On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 13:12:13 +0000, Chris Bacon wrote: |=20 | > Tim S wrote: | >> On Tue, 03 Jan 2006 09:06:46 +0000, Stuart Noble wrote: | >>>The Natural Philosopher wrote: | >>>>But I don't understand the rest of it. Soap IS |(or was ) sheep fat= and | >>>>caustic... | >>>

| >>>Is/ was olive oil and caustic. Sheep fat is lanolin IIRC | >>=20 | >> I though lanolin was sheep sebum, ie wool/skin grease? | >=20 | > Yup, lovely for the hands.... you can buy skin lotion | > with lanolin in it, read the label. It's good. |=20 | Yep, you can also buy pure lanolin, sold as "nipple cream" but very = good | for babies with skin problems. Only source I could find was on teh | Internet, none of the local shops had heard of it.=20

It used to be extracted from Bradford's sewage at Esholt Sewage works. Sadly the wool washing trade in Bradford is sadly almost dead, so ATM no sidelines for Esholt :-(

--=20 Dave Fawthrop

17,000 free e-books at Project Gutenberg! Yorkshire Dialect go to

[Andy Dingley]

It's generally a bad idea to use chemicals on a _totally_ blocked drain. If it's _that_ bad, then there's something physical down there and you're just going to have to use physical methods to shift it.

One of the most effective toilet blockers known to man is toilet roll and a bar of soap. They're both perfectly soluble (sic) in small quantities, but put a whole bar down there and it just ain't going to wash away. "Soluble" only works in a sufficiency of solvent to do it - a grease blob in a narrow pipe is perfectly capable of resisting dissolution if there's no flow, no matter how much caustic soda you get to it.

[Andy Dingley]

Yes, as drain cleaner. It's my standard source for cheap conc. H2SO4

My favourite brand is from "Thaumaturgy Ltd." Now there's a brandname to trust!

[The Natural Philosopher]

I think thats what he said. What I said was that mixing lanolin and caustic gives a decent soap.

[Tim S]

I usually read "fat" as internal fat, lanolin I would usually think of as a grease.

Most fats (internal or external) make reasonable soap when mixed with caustic though, don't they (if Fight Club is to be believed)? We did the soap thing at school, though the result wasn't very convincing (caustic scunge IIRC).

Cheers

Tim

[Andy Dingley]

Grease is (prettty much by definition, for 20th century technical definitions) some mixture of soaps and fats. Even stuff you put in wheel bearings is, although the definition of "soap" is stretching it a bit here - it means a saponified oily stuff, more than anything you might think of for washing with. Even original formulation napalm is a grease

- a mixture of soap and oil, so as to thicken it and make it behave like a thick grease.

Lanolin won't truly be a grease unless your sheep have been rolling in ashes (and if they're loose fleeces, they may well have been). Things feel "greasy" (as opposed to merely fatty) because they have had some saponification going on. Don't stick your hands in caustic soda, but washing soda or potash lyes have their distinctive greasy feeling because the oils in your skin are getting saponified.