Penny Pinching: Homemade Laundry Detergent

Good morning lovelies!  And a beautiful morning it is I must add 

{probably because it's not hot yet}

Last night I started out on my quest to be a saver this year! hurray for saving money!!!

{husband is very excited}

My sister-in-law Maria recently made homemade laundry detergent with some women in her ward and I thought it was such a great idea, especially with how cheap it is - and easy ;)

Simply because I prefer the easiest possible route, and dry detergent seemed like the littlest mess, I chose a recipe I found online here but Maria actually used the Duggar Family Recipe  with great results as well.  Its up to you what you prefer how involved you want it to be, etc.  

Our recipe simply required {and we cut it in half for our first trial run, just to make sure it actually works}

12 cups Borax

8 cups Baking Soda

8 Cups Washing Soda

8 Cups Bar Soap (grated) Avoid heavily perfumed soaps.  We used Ivory soap, but we're told Fels-Naptha, Sunlight bar soap, Kirk's Hardwater Castile, and Zote work well too.  

 I know it sounds like a pain in the batootie to grate 8 cups of soap, but it took us about 3 mins, no joke!  Simply mix all the ingredients well and store in an air tight container and you only have to use 1/8 of a cup per load (might not hurt to put a little more in if its a really dirty load).

Hard to believe that something as easy as that could save you so much,  but it does!  Here's our calculations: for 8 cups of grated soap $2.27

12 cups Borax $2.50

8 cups Baking Soda $2.12

8 cups Washing Soda $3.77

totaling $10.66 

The recipe makes roughly 36 cups of detergent.  Divide that by 1/8th of a cup per load and you're at about 288 loads for only $10.66! That's 3.7 cents per one load of laundry - wow!

Now incase that doesn't mean anything to you, lets compare to an average load using Tide Detergent.

At the store we saw that a $12 thing of Tide advertises 60 loads leaving us at about 20 cents per load.  

Lets say we do 3 loads of laundry a week using our homemade detergent rather than Tide in just one year we would save $25.43.  I suppose that may seem like meager savings but hey, we're poor college students and we do whatever we can to save!

Of course that isn't enough savings for Jeremy, so as soon as we use up this batch of detergent we're trying the Duggar Family Recipe {I'm still not wild about all the extra involvement and goopy mess around the house... but we'll try it and let you know!}

Oh also  - you're probably wondering, does it actually work?  YES! We tried it and the clothes came out

C.L.E.A.N.

kluvyoubye