My mom had told me a couple years ago about one of her coworkers who used homemade liquid detergent and swore by it. She told me that it was super concentrated, and cheap, and that it lasted forever. I was intrigued, but with one toddler and a baby on the way, I wasn't enthusiastic about grating a bar of soap and lugging around a 5 gallon bucket to do my laundry.
What's different now? Well, that toddler is now able to entertain herself, and her brother, long enough for me not only to make detergent but also to get a load of clothes in the washer often enough to get my laundry plus both of theirs done in one day. Sometimes the kids even help me sort!
Once upon a time, not so long ago actually, I sorted by color. I don't mean color families, I mean by color: underwear/socks, whites, lights (pastels), yellows/greens/blues, pinks/purples, red, brown/black/gray, blue jeans. That meant that I was waiting two or three weeks to get a large enough load to separate them that way, and by then we were out of essential items...like socks and underwear! Then, I got a little smarter and started combining them in ways that made marginally more sense: socks/underwear/blue jeans, black/brown/gray/dark blues, whites/lights, pinks/reds/oranges, yellows/greens/blues/purples. Ok, I'll admit, that was still a lot of sorting, and a lot of teensy loads or waiting for weeks to wash.
In the last couple of months, I have resorted to the tried and true method of sorting...kinda: socks/underwear, blue jeans/blues/black/brown/gray, brights, lights, whites, and if I have enough reds they get their own load just because red likes to run. Sometimes I combine socks/underwear/whites if the whites are not "good" clothes (ie, old sleep shirts). Sometimes I combine socks/underwear/jeans. It all depends on what my loads consist of, and I'm sure that is all about to change since the dark and dreary clothes of winter are but a few months away.
So what does all this have to do with detergent? I hate paying so darn much to wash my clothes! I have a front load washer/dryer, so I have to use less detergent anyway, but still - with the "concentrated" formulas that you are supposed to be able to use less of, and less in the bottle or box to start with, I am still buying more detergent than I feel is necessary. Enter the land of Make-Your-Own-Stuff!
My mom brought me home a recipe for super easy (four ingredients, people) liquid detergent. I bought the bar of soap and washing soda I needed, and I already had the other two ingredients. Didn't even make a dent in my wallet. Already I loved it. But, I had to cook it. :-/ I did NOT want to use a pan that I actually cook food in to make detergent. Call me strange, but I always worry that there will be a scratch or some porous part that will hold in something that might contaminate (poison) my food. I don't take chances where my kids are concerned.
So I was waiting and waiting and waiting to just happen upon a cheapo saucepan, and a 5 gallon bucket (preferably with a pump in the lid), to make the stuff in. Guess you kind of figured out that didn't happen right away. So the recipe laid on my buffet and got covered with the miscellany of everyday life, and I kept saying, "I need to get that stuff so I can make my detergent." I've been out of liquid detergent for months now. I never lucked into a pan and bucket falling out of the sky and begging me to use them to make detergent, so I decided that I just needed to suck it up and get myself to the nearest Wal Mart and buy the dang pan and bucket.
In the betweentime, from when I got the liquid detergent recipe up to a couple weeks ago, I was at a friend's house. She made her own powdered detergent, and it smelled so good! I asked her for the link to the recipe, but she has a young child and a new job and like the rest of us with kids, she has Mommy Brain - a condition that makes you feel like a complete idiot half of your waking hours but is totally worth it because of the cause of it - so it slipped through the cracks of her mind much like it would have slipped through my own cracks if someone had asked me to forward them a recipe for detergent. So, Internet sleuth that I am, I tracked it down. Ok, Pinterest helped me A LOT, folks! Just type in "homemade laundry detergent," and you'll get about three thousand pins of the same picture. Don't believe me? Go on and try it...I dare you. I do wish there was a feature that allowed you to get only ONE pin of a specific picture/website rather than every single instance that it has been repinned. Give me the original! I don't care if JohnnyCakesMommy repinned it via SallyGoesHollywood onto ThingsToMake. At any rate, I tracked it down, printed out 7 pages of instructions (with pictures), and made a shopping list.
I hardly ever leave the town in which I live, because I really don't have cause to. I am a rare exception to the female form: I hate to shop! It doesn't matter if it is for clothes, food, toys for the kids, or something I really want. I would rather order it online than drive 20 miles to the nearest chain store to buy it. This stuff I couldn't really do that with, and since I didn't have anything else to do Sunday I decided what-the-heck, let's drive to the store. I needed printer paper and manila folders anyway, and my $15 off coupon to Office Max wasn't going to be valid much longer. I got the stuff I needed there, and then we drove all the way across town to Meijer thinking they would surely have everything we needed. WRONG!!! Do not go to Meijer to buy the ingredients for homemade laundry detergent. At least not the one around here. I even checked online, and the two main brands that are suggested for the bar soap are not carried by Meijer. They do, however, carry Kirks Castile Original Coco Soap Bars, which I read could be substituted. We needed dogfood too, though, so we did buy a few things at Meijer. I felt better that it wasn't a completely wasted trip.
At that point I was about ready to throw in the towel, but since I discovered 2 rolls of 35mm film I forgot to drop off at the Meijer photo lab (Mommy Brain, remember), I decided a stop by Wal Mart wouldn't be completely out of the question. BTW, someone remind me to check with them Friday to see if my pictures are ready because they took out their one-hour lab machines and had to send them out. I was able to purchase all the remaining ingredients for the powdered detergent, plus a stockpot, cheese grater, 1 gallon jug, 5 gallon bucket with a lid (no pump, darnit), and 2 latch boxes for the powder.
I had promised my kids they could watch Cars, so the hubs and kids watched that while I made the detergent. It took all 117 minutes of the movie, but I managed to make 5 gallons of concentrated liquid detergent and 2 boxes of powdered detergent. This was no small feat, considering I had to grate 3 bars of soap 3 fingers wide, 2 fingers thick, and as long as my hand from heel to tip of my middle finger...and it had to be a fine grate, too. The next day I diluted my first gallon of liquid detergent, and today I tried out all three formulations.
So far I am satisfied. Although I initially missed the perfumey fragrance of my original powder and liquid detergents, I quickly realized that that smell only lasts as long as it takes to put away the clothes. Granted, sometimes that takes me a few months (I hate to put clothes away), but still - cost vs. effectiveness. For what it is it works great. My clothes were all clean, didn't really have a scent (even the powder with scented fabric softener), and there was no noticeable discoloration or fading.
Now, I'm going to walk you through what I bought and what it cost me. Plus, I'm going to tell you how I divided up my powdered detergent, and why. Sorry the formatting is wonky, I copied and pasted from my Excel spreadsheet.
| Homemade Laundry Detergent | |||||||||
| One Time Buy | Store | Quantity | Price | Total | |||||
| 12.7 Qt Lidded Box | WalMart | 2 | $4.47 | $8.94 | |||||
| 5 Gallon Bucket | WalMart | 1 | $2.98 | $2.98 | |||||
| 5 Gallon Bucket Lid | WalMart | 1 | $1.17 | $1.17 | |||||
| 8 Qt Stockpot | WalMart | 1 | $6.94 | $6.94 | |||||
| Bowl | preowned | 1 | $0.00 | $0.00 | |||||
| Cheese grater | WalMart | 1 | $2.97 | $2.97 | |||||
| Gallon Jug | WalMart | 1 | $2.96 | $2.96 | |||||
| Measuring Cup (4 Tbs) | Meijer | 1 | $3.99 | $3.99 | |||||
| Measuring Spoon (2 Tbs) | WalMart | 2 | $1.67 | $3.34 | |||||
| Spoon | preowned | 1 | $0.00 | $0.00 | |||||
| Grand Total: | $33.29 | ||||||||
| Repeat Buy | Store | Quantity | Price | Total | |||||
| Liquid | |||||||||
| 20 Mule Team Borax | Meijer | 4#12o | $3.49 | $3.49 | |||||
| Arm & Hammer Washing Soda | Meijer | 3#7o | $3.29 | $3.29 | |||||
| Fels Naptha | WalMart | 5o | $0.97 | $0.97 | |||||
| Grand Total: | $7.75 | ||||||||
| Powdered | |||||||||
| 20 Mule Team Borax | Meijer | 4#12o | $3.49 | $3.49 | |||||
| Arm & Hammer Washing Soda | Meijer | 3#7o | $3.29 | $3.29 | |||||
| Fels Naptha | WalMart | 5o x 2 | $0.97 | $1.94 | |||||
| Oxy Clean | preowned | 1#8o | $7.87 | $3.94 | |||||
| Arm & Hammer Baking Soda | WalMart | 4# | $2.16 | $2.16 | |||||
| Purex Crystlas Fabric Softener | Meijer | 28o | $4.99 | $4.99 | |||||
| Grand Total: | $19.81 | ||||||||
So, my one time buys were $33.29, and my repeat buys were $27.56 for a total of $60.85! Wow, that seems like a lot, but if you look at how much detergent I made for less than $30...Basically I spent one year's worth of detergent purchases at one time, and I made enough detergent to last for probably 18 months (I may eat my words, I will repost when I run out).
Look at it this way, I made 10 gallons of liquid, and I only use 1/4 cup at a time (front load) - that's 640 loads of laundry I can do for less than $8!!! Today I did socks/underwear/whites, lights, brights, jeans/darks, reds, which is about typical for me on any given laundry day. So, if I do 5 loads of laundry a week, and my husband usually does the same amount so we're up to 10 per week, it will last us for 64 weeks - approximately 16 months (which is darn close to my original estimate of 18 months without remaking detergent).
Now, that is if we ONLY use liquid. We don't. We have different preferences depending on the load. My husband typically uses powdered detergent. Here's the kicker for the powder - you only use 2 Tbs of detergent at a time! I didn't measure out my powdered ingredients to see how many cups were in a box of Borax, but I found a source online that said in a 55oz box you could expect 5.5 cups of powder, which gives me the rough estimate of 10oz per cup for the dense stuff (Borax, Soda, Oxy Clean). My math may not be perfect, but when I piece it out by weight it comes up to something around 188 loads I can do using the powdered detergent. I could do 4 loads of laundry a week using powdered detergent and still have enough for a solid year. So, if I add those together, 640+188=828 loads of laundry I can do. If I do 10 per week, that gives me 82.8 weeks of laundry before I have to make more detergent. If I divide that by 52 weeks in a year, I should not have to make more detergent until 1 year and 7 months from now (March 2014). I can live with that!
I mentioned above that I split my powdered detergent into 2 latch boxes. Why did I do that? Well, I don't like to use OxyClean on my colored clothes, and I don't like to use fabric softener on my towels. "What? No soft towels? Remind me not to shower at your house!" Google "should you use fabric softener on towels," and you will soon understand why I don't. It makes them less absorbent and can actually trap odors in them. I don't like that. I want my towels to absorb as much water as possible - after all, that is why I use towels instead of shaking dry like a dog. My method for splitting the batch was easy. I have a food scale that has a TARE function. This allowed me to place my container on the scale, set the Tare to 0, and then weigh each of my ingredients into the container itself. After each ingredient I divided, I reset the Tare to 0 so I could be sure I was getting an accurate measure. I also went back-and-forth between the two containers with each ingredient so I could be sure they were weighing the same amount.
Now, do you want the recipes? I do not know where the liquid recipe originated, but the powdered one came from How Does She? which has a lot of great ideas and DIY projects.
Liquid Laundry Detergent
1 Fels Naptha bar (5.0 oz), finely grated1/2 cup Borax
1 cup A&H Super Washing Soda
4 cups water + enough to make 5 gallons
1. Grate the bar of soap into a stockpot with at least a 2 qt capacity (mine is 8 qt).
2. Add 4 cups water, and heat over medium-low to medium heat until the soap is dissolved.
3. Measure Borax and Soda into 5 gallon bucket. Fill halfway (2.5 gallons, 40 cups) with hot water. Add melted soap mixture, and stir.
4. Add another 2 gallons of hot water to the mix, and if necessary add a little more until you hit the 5 gallon mark. It may be helpful to premeasure 5 gallons of water into the bucket and mark the MAX FILL line on the outside of the bucket. I wasn't sure where the 5 gallon mark should be.
5. Let this cool overnight.
6. Stir mixture and decant 1/2 gallon into a lidded gallon jug (preferably with a pour spout and tight fitting lid). Top off with 1/2 gallon of water and stir.
7. You will need to shake or stir your gallon of detergent before each use to mix it all back up.
The original recipe states that you can add essential oils of your preference after the mixture has cooled. A recipe I found online that is similar suggests 10-15 drops of oil per 2 gallons of detergent (5-7 per gallon of diluted). You can see that recipe HERE. Every recipe says that the mixture will "gel," but I followed it to the letter and mine did not.
Powdered Detergent (from How Does She?)
In Each Container:
2 lb 6 oz Borax1 lb 11.5 oz Washing Soda
2 lb Baking Soda
5 oz Fels Naptha, grated
Whites/Towels Add:
1 lb 8 oz OxyCleanColors/Sheets Add:
28 oz Purex Crystals Fabric SoftenerDO NOT CLOSE THE LID AND SHAKE TO MIX! The powders will particulate and seep through any small opening between the lid and box. Trust me, I know. My floor looked like powdered sugar had exploded on it, and I coughed the rest of the night from inhaling the powder. Instead (I did this for the second box), use your hand to swirl the ingredients together. It may look like it isn't well mixed, but you can always use the scoop to remix it before you use it just to be sure.
I hope this is helpful to you, and if you have any tips or suggestions for DIY home cleaning (not strictly laundry), feel free to share in the Comments section. :-}
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