both required the same ingredients, and we were about out of dish detergent, so why not try both?
recipe #1: dish detergent.
1 cup borax
1 cup washing soda
1/2 cup salt
4 packets of lemonade koolaid mix (it can't contain sugar and i used the off brand because it's even cheaper).
mix it all together in a container, add 1-2 teaspoons or so to the dishwasher and you're on your way.
recipe #2: laundry detergent
i grated 1/3 bar of fels naptha (a laundry detergent bar soap)
i then heated 6 cups of water with the grated soap til everything was dissolved (don't let it boil or i'm guessing you'll have a soapy mess on your hands) and added 1/2 cup of washing soda and 1/2 cup of borax until that was all dissolved. i turned off the heat, poured 4 cups of hot water (our house's water gets super hot, if yours doesn't, you may want to heat it on the stove) into a bucket, added the borax/soap/soda mixture to the bucket and stirred. then i added 1 gallon + 6 cups of hot water and stirred again. it has to sit for 24 hours to gel, and it doesn't gel like normal detergent- more like half gel, have liquid. i will probably shake it up before using each time just to make sure it's all still mixed
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| grating soap is better than grating cheese |
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| finished product, ready to be poured |
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| the spoils! 4 full containers of detergent! |
the detergent filled 4 bottles (it makes almost 2 gallons of detergent), and i now have detergent for months and months (plus enough for all my roommates!)
i'm pretty pumped. everything cost me about $10, and i got tons of dish and laundry detergent, plus there aren't any weird chemicals in it....
i decided to try my towels first, since they get makeup stains and stuff, and in my only somewhat biased opinion, my own detergent worked great! makeup gone, they smell clean, i even think my white stripes got whiter, but maybe that's the competitive 'i must do better than the leading brand of detergent' self talking...
let me know if you try it too!
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