I'm not scientifically inclined so please be patient with me!

 

I make home-made soap with lye. I bought some drain cleaner which said 100% lye on the bottle. I've made many soaps with this but recently got suspicious when other soapmakers said their bottles of this particular brand of lye was pure white - mine was grayish and had bits of 'junk' in it.

 

I wrote the company and they told me it was 100% lye and nothing else. Today I bought some more, opened the bottle and found it was TOTALLY DIFFERENT from those last bottles I bought earlier.

 

From what I can gather in internet searches, this company used to sell this drain cleaner with other ingredients added but changed to 100% lye when Red Devil Lye was no longer available. I'm sure what I had was the old stuff and they mislabeled it.

 

Of course, I wrote the company but haven't heard back yet and I'm not even sure they'll be honest with me. Where can I find the MSDS for this stuff? I arrived here doing an internet search for it. If I can't get the MSDS, how else can I find out what was in those bottles (I have some left)?

here`s the data you wanted: http://physchem.ox.ac.uk/MSDS/SO/sodium_hydroxide.html

 

as for the grey color, it`s quite possibly just dirt, perhaps a sack broke open while packaging and got shoveled up along with dirt off the floor, I have Sodium Nitrate prills like that also, bits of grit and some sand in it, afterall it`s not like you`re suposed to Eat it, it`s only a drain cleaner and my Sodium Nitrate was for plant food, so Purity isn`t a big issue with these grade of chems.

Oh....I guess I didn't explain myself well. I'm not looking for what's in lye but what's in this particular brand of lye-based drain cleaner. I didn't mention the brand name because I don't want a libel suit on my hands or something like that!

 

The gray is definitely not dirt. It's hard to explain but it's definitely different than the same brand lye I just bought so I know this is the old lye-based drain cleaner they used to sell and they just stuck a sticker on the bottle that says 100% lye.

 

Since I don't know what it has in it, I don't know if it's safe to use or sell all these soaps I've made with it.

I would simply use the white material and discontinue the use of the grey stuff.

 

The grey material may be aluminium in the form of fine filings or granules. That frequently is added to drain cleaner to make it more powerful, when used in hot water. Sodium hydroxide (the white material) reacts viogorously with aluminium (the grey stuff), when mixed with hot water. This violent reaction, which produces a lot of bubbles (of hydrogen gas) helps unclogging the drain.

 

I would NOT sell the soap you made with the grey material. Although aluminium is not that toxic, repeated exposure and especially intake of small amounts of aluminium may promote development of Alzheimer's disease. There is no big chance that such a thing could happen, but you definitely do not want all the liability issues associated with that.

 

So, lesson learned: If you use NaOH for soap making purposes, assure that the material is pure white, otherwise it is not good.