How much liquid soap in grahms is correct?

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
1

We have a newly installed Grohe liquid soap dispenser for our kitchen sink. The bottle to hold the soap is under the sink and not easy to get to at all. So the other choice, is to refill it by removing the spigot and pouring refill liquid soap until it is full.

The problem is, you never know it is full or overfilled until you put in the spigot and watch the soap ooze out everywhere. This is an issue, because it is a lot of liquid soap and a mess to clean up.

So after going through this the first time, I got an idea. How about I use a digital scale, zero it out, and stop to weigh the soap at regular intervals.

This sounded like a good plan. Until I attempted to execute it. I continued to our the soap in, of course stopping to weigh it, until I saw the first sign of soap in the reservoir. I thought I should stop here and wasn’t too confident because this doesn’t take into account the room taken up by the spigot.

My next to last reading was at 488g of liquid soap and there was no soap visible in the reservoir. Of course, I don’t have any idea how much further to go. So I proceeded until I did see the liquid soap visible at 521g. As I feared, I put in the spigot and out came the oozing soap.

So what I learned, is that 521g of soap is certainly too much. But I don’t know if I should have stopped at 488g and tried the spigot.

How should I proceed to refill this next time? Stop at 488g and try the spigot? Or a number lesser than 488g and try again? But the question is, how much less? To further make this annoying I have no idea how much soap I put in while filling it, unless I stop a bunch of times to weigh the soap re-filler.

How would you proceed? Knowing the size of the bottle in ounces doesn’t seem to be useful because that doesn’t take into account the spigot’s stem.

I have considered taking a Raspberry Pi with a sensor and placing it in the soap dispenser to aid in this task, but that sounds like more work than it is worth. Plus it would compromise the cleanliness and seal of the soap bottle.

I’ve thought about contacting Grohe for some guidance here, but I suspect they won’t be able to tell me the weight in grams of liquid soap it requires, but I’m up to contacting them if the sum of common knowledge on Straight Dope thinks this is the appropriate course of action.

2

I’m certain different soaps will have different densities, so there’d be some variation between brands.

Stopping early would only mean more frequent refills, not too big a deal.

How about a LED light and a mirror under the sink?

Mini surveillance cameras are cheap these days. Wireless transmission to your smartphone?

Sent from my SM-T350 using Tapatalk

3

It seems it’s a dispenser similar to this http://www.grohe.de/pim/profile/1000000/000000/10000/9000/000/119909.pdf ? It seems they expect the user, as per the diagram on page III, to refill by volume.

4

Yes, that looks like it. I’d have to find the exact model number, but it certainly looks like it.

I use SoftSoap which comes in 56 fluid ounces. Even if I knew the exact magic number of ounces to use, I’d have to measure that into something else, and then put it in there from a measuring cup which sounds like a mess. At least as clumsy as I am with things it would be. Might have to purchase lab equipment to do this.

5

Currently using SoapSoft, but they could easily change their formula or my wife could purchase another brand.

Can’t really view it from under the sink easily either.

Maybe I should consider purchasing an ultra-sound machine to view it while it is being filled up?

6

There is little reason for the dispenser to be exactly 100% full. So you fill it only 95% full? That means you have to fill it 20 times instead of 19 times over the next year or whatever.

7

Have you looked for your model on their website? From what I can see, you should be able to identify it visually, and then find the capacity in the technical information. (Spoiler: they’re all 15oz)

I must say, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone make such hard work out of pouring a liquid from one container to another. Have you considered asking your wife to do it? :smiley:

8

My parents have one and when I lived at home that’s what I did. Probably wasn’t even 95% full, more like 50%. Filling it twice as often is way easier than trying to get it all the way up and not have it over flow when you put the dispenser back in.

Just take your best guess so that it’s somewhere around the halfway mark and be done with it. It’s not like it holds so little that filling it up ‘about halfwayish’ means you’ll have to do it again tomorrow.

This is a classic case of ‘you’re over thinking it’.

9

As I mentioned, you can’t see it from under the sink as it was installed. Visually it is being blocked. Unless everything was cleared out from under the sink, and someone was laying on their back shining a flash light while the other one poured and just maybe it would be visible to see how full or empty the bottle is of this clear liquid soap.
As you can see, this simply isn’t a convenient solution especially since I would risk throwing my back out.

Using a digital scale which already is on the kitchen counter appears to be the only hope, although it is going to take trial and error over time to find the sweet spot for the number of grams of soap it requires from the time it is empty.

My wife prepares dinner each night, and never complains. I figure I should be able to handle doing this every several months. Besides, I always wanted to own an ultra-sound machine. :slight_smile:

10

But the question is, how many grams in weight of soap is 95%? I would have thought I was safe at 521, but it still came oozing out. 448g where the soap wasn’t visible in the dispenser might still not be enough.

After this was installed, the kitchen cabinet maker who has been in business for decades for years said he has the same one installed. He loves it but said “The only thing I don’t like about it, is that I always end up overfilling it with soap”.

As you can all see what I am up against. If a fellow husband and experienced master cabinet maker has the same thing, and the same problem, then what chance to I have for success here. Not much, which is why I started with the digital scale route.

11

This is not overthinking. This is the issue, it would be like going to the gas station and you don’t have a gas meter on your car or a mileage indicator. But to make matters worse the pump doesn’t measure gas either. So you stand there, and put in a little gas at a time hoping it doesn’t come spilling out. If it were simply a matter of saying, “this is half full, let’s just stop there”, that would be OK, but you have no idea where you are. The SoftSoap refill bottle is 56 fluid ounces and it is also used to refill other bottles in the house. It isn’t like this refill bottle is clearly marked with the number of ounces are remaining. So let’s say it is 15 oz, the only way to get at that would be to measure it out which sounds pretty silly not to mention wasteful of soap.

12

It’s overthinking because everyone else who has one just squirts some soap down there and you’re trying to weigh it and you’re worried about how many ounces are in a bottle (and oddly, you haven’t mentioned that it’ll have to be totally empty for all of this to work). If you’re weighing your liquid soap before putting in the dispenser, you’re making your life more difficult than it needs to be. Millions of people have these dispensers, some of them had them over flow the first few times…they used less the next time. None of them (Well, very few of them) are pre-weighing the soap. This isn’t hard.

If it’s bugging you this much, IIRC, there’s a ‘hack’ on the internet where you can pick up some tubing at the hardware store that nicely fits into the the bottom of the pump (where the straw is) and then you run the tubing to the bottom of your cabinet and right into a bottle of soap. Get a giant bottle of soap and when it’s empty, just throw it out and put a new one down there.

13

My mother has an in-sink soap dispenser like that. (It’s just whatever generic one is sold at Home Depot.) I’m pretty sure you can look down into the hole and see the level of soap remaining. So just fill it to about three-quarters full and that should leave enough room for the spigot/hose.

14

Well, yeah, I got all that — I just don’t see how it’s relevant. The part you can see is the spigot, and that’s different on each model (assuming that what you have is part of Grohe’s current range; which I’d expect, since it was installed recently). Not that that’s important, really, since all of their models seem to be 15oz, and that’s all the information you need. As long as you don’t put in more than 15oz, you’re golden.

Are you using this thread as means of rehearsing your rationalisation to your wife for why you need to order a range of expensive technical gadgets? Because if you are, I can tell you from experience that her reaction is much less likely to be “You’re right, honey, I just can’t see any other way”, than “Oh, for God’s sake, I’ll do it myself”.

15

Yes it is.

You’re talking about electronic sensors and ultrasound machines to fill a household soap dispenser.

You may actually be creating a new paradigm for overthinking. It’s entirely possible that future definitions of “overthinking” will include a link to this thread.

It’s a little like that, except you can wait till the car’s empty to refill, you know the size of the tank, and there’s a one gallon jug right there next to you. Oh, and you don’t need to fill it to any particular level, either — you just need to have enough to drive for a while.

More silly than ultrasound? More silly than using trial-and-error to work out the volume of a container by weight of the contents? More wasteful than overfilling and watching soap ooze everywhere?

16

Get a hand pump that you can attach to the bottle you’re refilling from. When the bottle runs out, try putting in 20 pumps. If that doesn’t ooze out, next time is runs out, try 21. Write the number on the bottle so you can remember how many to use the next time. Repeat as necessary.

17

If the level of the soap is too high when it first becomes visible get a measuring stick so you know how high it is.

18

I had considered the ultra sound machine for $22K from amazon.com, but they required $9.95 for shipping. I must have free shipping with all purchases. So I resorted to the manual method using a digital scale.

The soap dispenser ran out of soap today. With the digital scale near-by and reviewing my notes from August, 2016, I decided to proceed filling this up with SoftSoap® and the answer is 401g. I was able to put the spigot back in and no overflow, and no clean up was needed. This time I used a very bright flashlight and could see soap coming up deeper in the reservoir.

Thanks to all that contributed to this thread. I’d like to think we all learned something, but most of all this didn’t involve having my wife take over this important task for me.

19

I won’t speak for others, but I didn’t. I think I just spent a lot of time tossing out ideas there were shot down for you to just to go back to your original, bizarre idea.

Nobody weighs soap.

20

I sincerely hope this was a typo.