Making laundry detergent at home.
Every Tuesday I send out an Eco-Tip for Home. Something simple, that anyone can do.
Last April 29, my tip was Detox your laundry! that included a link to recipes for making your own laundry detergent at home. Since I’m always trying to green my home as much as possible, I decided to give “detergent making” a whirl.
No, it wasn’t quite a “don’t try this at home, kids” kind of experience, but it certainly didn’t turn out as well as I would have liked.
I decided to try the powered detergent recipe. It called for 2 cups of finely grated soap, 1 cup washing soda and 1 cup borax.
By far the hardest part was grating the soap. I used a bar of Dr. Bronner’s Castile Soap (available in the cosmetic section of Target®). It took about 20 minutes to grate 2 cups worth of soap.
Then I added the washing soda (found at Kroger®) and the borax (in the laundry section of almost any supermarket).
The container in the center of the bottom photo shows how much detergent I ended up with.
Four cups.
The recipe says to use 2 tablespoons per load. When I added it to the water, there were no suds. So I added another tablespoon. Still no suds. But a colleague pointed out to me this afternoon – when I related this experience to him – that suds aren’t necessary for clothes to get clean. Okay.
When I took the clothes out of the dryer… (No, I haven’t set up a solar clothes dryer yet; that’s next on my list) …they smelled clean. I don’t use dryer sheets, just dryer balls to fluff, but that’s a whole different posting.
So the good news is that my homemade detergent cleaned my clothes.
The bad news is that the recipe (and required grating of soap) only made enough detergent to wash about 15 loads, if I’m lucky.
More good news is that the 100 oz. jug of Seventh Generation® detergent is on sale at Target this week.
Filed under: Green Living | Tagged: castile soap, detergent, Dr. Bronner, homemade, laundry, Seventh Generation, washing
