What better way to spend a Monday night than to make some homemade laundry detergent? I know, I know, just call us the Duggars. I've wanted to try it for a while now so I got the ingredients this evening after work. I was able to find everything at Food City. The ingredients are Washing Soda, Borax and Fels-Naptha laundry bar soap. I found the washing soda and Borax on the laundry aisle but for some reason the Laundry Bar Soap was with the regular bars of soap a couple of aisles over. It is definitely a laundry product though so check there first. The recipe is:
1 Bar of Fels-Naptha soap finely grated
1 cup of Borax
1 cup of Washing Soda
If you are interested, there is also a liquid recipe that you can find online. Just Google it.
Grate up the bars of soap. Chris used the grater. I tried the food processor. Either way, the results were about the same.
Here are all four bars grated up. (we made a quadruple batch)
Add 4 cups of washing soda.
Mix well.
Add 4 cups of Borax and mix again.
The directions I read said to use one tablespoon per load for normal loads or two tablespoons for heavily soiled clothes. 
We have a High Efficiency Front Load washer and since the detergent has a low suds content, it is safe for front load washers. Trying it for the first time tonight.
I'll let you know the results.
So here's the break down of cost per load as best as I can figure it.
4 bars of Fels-Naptha soap: $5.00
1 box of Borax: $4.29
1 box of washing soda: $2.99
I used all four bars of soap so add $5.00
+ half a box of Borax so add $2.15
+ 2/3 box of washing soda so add $2.00
+ tax of 46 cents for a grand total of: $9.61
For the sake of arguement, let's assume that all our loads are heavily soiled and we use 2 Tablespoons of detergent for every load. There are 16 tablespoons in a cup. There are a total of 16 cups in the recipe I made. Based on that, I made enough detergent to do 128 loads of laundry. $9.61 divided by 128 loads equals 7.5 cents per load.
As a comparison, I normally use Gain detergent. At Walgreens's, Gain costs $9.99 for 40 loads. The cost is 25 cents per load. Making your own will save you 17.5 cents per load.
Yes, I'm fully cognizant of the fact that I need a life.
5 comments:
Sounds like a meth recipe gone bad. Just glad to hear you didn't have to apply heat or cook!! RRVFD Stand By, Heidi's in the kitchen! Hope you didn't spill any fels naptha (that definitely sounds like a meth ingredient)on your apron, might eat a hole in it...
Your Anonymous Aunt A.
Very interesting Heidi, I will be curious to hear about the results!
I don't see any suds.
Mom,
That was the start of the cycle but no, it didn't really suds. The clothes came out clean and smelling fresh though.
I have made laundry detergent on and off for several years. The only downside that I noticed was that I needed to change up my laundry detergent every so often because of soapy build-up.
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