Making Your Own Laundry Detergent

For the past year or so, I’ve been making our own laundry detergent. I had tried it a few years ago and was not impressed: The recipe didn’t come out right and I abhorred having this huge bucket in my laundry room. I knew there had to be a better way!

I searched and searched, sifting through different detergent recipes. Why did I need to have a 5 gallon bucket of WATER in my laundry room?! I found a few, but none of them were just what I wanted, so I tried and retried, coming up with my own recipe.

Ingredients

• 1 cup Borax
• 1 cup Washing Soda {NOT Baking Soda}
• 5 ounces of bar soap {We use Yardley’s English Lavender: It’s a natural soap, lightly fragranced and cheap}
• 4 cups of Water

1. Grate your bar soap {I use my food processor, but also managed to crack the plastic, because a hunk of soap got caught}
2. Bring your 4 cups of water to boil {I recommend using a stock pot}
3. Stir grated bar soap into boiling water, stirring constantly until it’s all melted.
4. Once it’s all melted remove the soap soup from the stove and dump in your Borax and Washing Soda…..stir, stir, stir! Until it doesn’t feel gritty anymore.
5. Pour the soap soup into a container and let it sit for a few hours.
6. Once it’s separated, dump it all into one bowl.
7. Mix all the ingredients together. I use my immersion blender for this, it’s great! A hand mixer might work too, but I haven’t tried it, as would a blender or food processor.
8. Once it’s all a lovely consistency store your detergent.
9. Use only 1 TBSP of detergent in a load of laundry.

It takes me about 20 minutes from start to finish, then a few hours of sitting time, followed by a few minutes of the blending the ingredients. It probably costs us about $1.75, if that, to make up enough detergent to last us a month and a half.

Once we got this detergent figured out, I wanted to figure out how to make detergent for our diapers. We use Purex Free and Clear, but it still gets pricey. The thing with cloth diapers is you have to watch what chemicals you use, because some of them will breakdown the PUL fabric, causing diapers to leak.

Are you ready for this? Seriously, it might be really complicated.

Ingredients

Equal Parts of {I usually use 1.5 cups of each, to fit it in an OxyClean container}:

• Borax
• Washing Soda
• Sun Oxygen Cleaner {I bought mine at Wal-Mart}

Blend together {I use my food processor, but putting it in a container and shaking it works too}, and store. Use about 2 TBSPs per load of nasty nappies. Again, this is probably 50cents to make for a month, if that.

Wow! That was tough!

I’m able to make a couple months supply of laundry and cloth diaper detergent in about 30 minutes or so, then it’s done. On to bigger and better things!