Homemade laundry detergent

Did you know you can make your own homemade laundry detergent, and fairly easily too? Yes, you can!

Now some of you may be wondering, why on earth would I want to make my own laundry detergent? Here are three reasons:

1. It's cheaper than store bought
2. It doesn't have the chemicals that most store bought detergents have that do nasty things to the environment and to our own bodies
3. It's easy!

Take a look around the Internet and you can find many different recipes for laundry detergent, both powered types and liquid. I decided to go with a recipe I found on a blog called Keeper of the Home.

It uses only three ingredients: Borax, washing soda and bar soap, such as Castile bar soap. Now, I gotta admit I didn't really know what some of these items were and where to find them, especially the Castile bar soap. But once again, thanks to Mr Google, I found lots of information online and discovered I could get all three items at London Drugs. The Castile soap is a brand called Dr. Bronner's. The washing soda and Borax are pretty easy to find in the laundry section, but I had to search high and low for the Dr. Bronner's bar soap and eventually had to ask a clerk before I found it.

 

The detergent recipe couldn't be easier:

• 1 cup washing soda
• 1 cup Borax
• 1 bar of soap, grated

Yes, you just grate up the soap with your cheese grater (looks like mozzarella, doesn't it). This is the part of the recipe that will take the longest, but the whole thing only takes about 15 minutes in total.

Once you've grated the soap, put it into your blender together with a cup of either the washing soda or Borax (it doesn't matter which). Depending on your blender, you may want to do this in two or three smaller batches. Blend it until all the pieces are finely cut.

Add the blended mixture to a bowl, and mix in the remaining 1 cup of either washing soda or Borax. Mix it all up together, put it into a container with a lid and you're done!

To use in your washer, add one tablespoon of detergent per load. This mixture will not produce suds and from what I've read, this also makes it suitable for high efficiency washers.

Has anyone else out there ever tried making their own homemade cleaning products?

 

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