Homemade Laundry Detergent

How does using all natural laundry detergent, with no harmful chemicals added sound?  How does washing your clothes for $.007 per load sound?  (Yes, that's less than a penny per load.)

If you like the thought of that, keep reading and I'll tell you how I make my own laundry detergent without a lot of time or trouble.

There are a lot of different recipes out there for making your own laundry detergent.  As far as I know, they're all pretty easy to make, and extremely inexpensive.  Since I just got done making a batch, I thought I'd share my particular spin on the process.

Ingredients:

1 bar Kirk's Castile Soap

1/2 cup borax

1 cup washing soda

Most recipes call for Fels Naptha soap, but in my experience it doesn't do as good of a job cleaning our clothes as the castile soap does.  Plus, I don't know what's in that stuff, but I can't stand the smell of it!

Most of the recipes I've seen for liquid detergent call for you to make a humongous batch and store it in a 5 gallon bucket.  I wasn't really interested in taking up that much space in my laundry room.  All of the powdered detergent recipes seemed to use a lot more per load, making it more expensive.

I went searching to see if I could find a way to make the liquid detergent in a smaller batch, and I found a site that had done the math and figured it all out.  I pinned it to my Pinterest account so that I can easily find it whenever I need to make more detergent.

I make a powder detergent, and in turn I make a small batch of liquid detergent from the powder.

To make the powdered detergent:

1. Finely grate the bar of castile soap.  *Warning: this will take forever, and you will feel like you will never regain the use of your arm.*  Relax; your arm will be okay, and now the hard part is done.

2. Add 1/2 cup borax and 1 cup of washing soda to the grated soap.  Place into your desired container, seal, and shake to mix.

To make the liquid detergent:

Combine 4 tsp. powder and 4 cups hot water.  Let sit 8 hours.  Use 1/4 cup to 1/2 cup per load, depending on load size.

I keep my powder in one container and my liquid detergent in another container.  When I'm out of the liquid I just use some of the powder to mix up another batch.

I suppose I could have made a cute label, and I definitely could have taken better pictures, but I've got a whole lot of important things to get done today, so this is all you get!  🙂

Have you ever made your own laundry detergent?  Which recipe do you use?