Laundry Detergent

I've mentioned in several blog posts about Pinterest. It really is so great! One pin I found was about making your own laundry detergent, so a couple weekends ago, Adam and I tried it. The link said to get Borax, Arm & Hammer Super Washing Soda and Fels Naptha Laundry Soap Bar. It said you could get all of this at your local store, but all we could find was the Borax. We ordered the other two things on Amazon. We also had to buy a 5 gallon bucket from Home Depot. I think our total spent was about $20, including the bucket.

We (Adam) cut up the soap bar and put it in a pot with ~4 cups of hot water. We boiled it over medium-low heat, stirring continuously, until all the soap flakes dissolved. I think it took around 10 minutes.

Then we (again, Adam) filled the 5 gallon bucket half full of hot water and poured in the soap mixture from above. We added 1 cup of the Super Washing Soda and a 1/2 cup of Borax and stirred all that together, then we filled the bucket with water until it was full.

We covered it with foil (because we didn't buy the lids to the buckets) and let it sit overnight. Well, we actually let it sit for a week because we didn't have time to do the next step, which took, oh, 5 minutes. 

Throughout the "sitting process" it gelled up, so we stirred it again before beginning to put it into the containers we'd been saving. The containers should be filled with half water and half soap. The link where I got the recipe from said she used 8 cups of each for the best mixture. We put in 8 cups of the detergent mixture and then I just filled them with water.

This should make about 10 gallons of detergent, but we only had 4 containers at the time. We'll continue filling containers until it's gone. The next time we make it, all we have to buy is the Fels Naptha laundry bar, which was about $4.00 on Amazon, although its apparently about $1.50 if you can find it in the grocery store.



I've used it on a couple of loads so far, and it seems great! The link above shows an experiment she did with her husband's old t-shirts and mustard. It appears that Tide and this detergent performed the same on getting the mustard out (neither got it out completely).

She says to use the soap, you should shake the container first and then use 1/4 cup for a front loading machine and 5/8 cup for a top-loading machine. It works out that I use two capfuls from the blue bottle, so that's easy enough!

One more Pinterest project down and several hundreds more to go!