Recipe Review: Homemade Laundry Detergent and Cheap Fabric Softener!

So in keeping with the theme of the blog (for once!) I've been going outside of the realm of the ordinary to try to save some money. And the first thing I started with was laundry!
Before I get too far into this, I should say that J and I have always been laundry product snobs - unless we really can't afford it, we've always bought higher end brands of detergent and fabric softener (Tide and Downy are our favorites, though with coupons or sales we might use All or Snuggle). So bear in mind when I get to our reviews of the products that we have some pretty strong opinions when it comes to washing our clothes.

Alright, end of the disclaimer, on to the actual recipes!


Cheap Fabric Softener

An eco-minded friend of mine recommended something to me that I'd read about before but never tried: replacing your usual fabric softener with white vinegar. It's cheap and apparently not only makes fabric soft, but helps brights hold their colors and whites stay white longer.

My initial concern was that then all our clothes would smell like vinegar, and that is a really far cry from the fresh Downy scent we are accustomed to! :) However, I want to make it known that the smell completely dissapates after you put it through the dryer, so don't let that scare you off!

The Verdict
To be honest, I'm still a little bit on the fence with this one. You just put the vinegar in the fabric softener dispenser in the washing machine, so you're using the same amount of liquid but paying a LOT less (I don't feel like doing the math, but my vinegar cost about $1.50 - I've never seen a good fabric softener cost that little!) And I like paying a less, so the vinegar has that going for it!

The first thing I noticed after using the vinegar for a little while was that the clothes ended up being a bit stiffer than I remember them being with Downy, but not in a course or scratchy or uncomfortable kind of way. I actually liked the sheets being a little bit stiffer because they felt really crisp when I got into bed (is that why people like to starch their shirts?) So that wasn't a deal breaker for me.

What does concern me though, after doing this for probably about a month now, is that I feel like the fabric is degrading - the collars on J's polo shirts have more of that "pilling" effect going on (I don't know how else to describe it) and my tee-shirts look like the fibers have all raised up a little bit and gotten fuzzy, which makes the color look dull. I only have a few tee-shirts and I wear them to work all the time, so it is kind of a big deal to me that suddenly all of them look really worn and old.

I don't know that J would have been able to pick the clothes that were washed with vinegar versus softener out of a visual line-up, but apparently he has a super nose (more on that later), so I know the lack of Downy fresh scent bothered him. (He didn't come out and object to my using the vinegar, though, so it can't have been THAT bad).

At the end of the day, I really WANT vinegar to be our go-to fabric softener (it's so cheap!), but I think taking both of those factors into account, we're going to keep being snobs and buying the name brand.


Laundry Detergent

I love making random stuff, so I've been wanting to try this since a friend recommended a book with cool household stuff that you can make yourself years ago. (I love that book, I am fascinated by it!) My issue was that a lot of the recipes called for stuff I'd never heard of and didn't know where to get, so I didn't pursue the detergent issue for very long (I made a great window cleaner, though!)

Stumbling around on the internet a few weeks ago, though, I found the post that inspired me to hunt down the necessary ingredients and give it a go! This recipe is taken from My Frugal Lifestyle and you can read her original post here. This is my version of it!

Ingredients 
* The original recipe made a 5-gallon bucket worth of soap, but I only had a 2.5 gallon bucket so I modified the amounts. If you have a bigger bucket and REALLY struggle with math, you can certainly refer back to her post for the original amounts!

• 1/2 cup Washing Soda
• 1/2 cup Borax
• 1/2 bar Fels-Naptha
• A 2.5 gallon bucket

As I mentioned earlier, I'd never made laundry detergent because I could never find the ingredients! I ended up buying all of these items off of Amazon.com because, with the exception of Borax, I'd never even HEARD of them before. (Apparently they are all items that are sold as laundry detergent enhancements, so I guess it makes sense that if you put them all together, they'd just enhance one another!) After ordering the Borax on Amazon I did finally see it at a grocery store, but I already can't remember which one. Apparently, all of these ingredients can be found at some store called Winco (that I've never heard of, it might be an East Coast chain), and when I looked online a lot of people said that you can usually find the products at small, locally owned stores. I didn't have time to make a lot of phone calls, though, so since I couldn't find them at Target, Wal-Mart, Albertsons, Vons, or Lowes, Amazon seemed like the way to go!

What I Did
The original recipe said to grate the Fels-Naptha (which looks and feels like a big bar of Dial soap), but again, I didn't have time for that! (Or, come to think of it, a cheese grater either. I think we lost that in a move or something). J just helped me chop it up into small-ish chunks and I threw it in a pot with 6 cups of water and set it to simmer on the stove! I watched a movie, ate dinner, did some dishes, ate dessert, and every so often just wandered back to stir it again a little bit more.

• What I'd Do Differently: I recommend cutting the soap into much smaller pieces, unless you are extremely patient and have a lot of time to kill. It took a pretty long time for the soap to dissolve, and I ended up needing to go to bed so there were some teeny tiny chunks left when I decided to move to the next step. 

Next you stir in the washing soda and borax and mix it up. Nuff said for that step!

• FYI: Even if you think you dissolved all the soap, this is where you see how wrong you are! Adding in those two ingredients thickens up the solution, so suddenly little soap chunks that you didn't even know were there end up floating on the surface. I don't think it matters, (it's all going to the same place for the same purpose, it'll be fine!) but it looks kind of gnarly!

Put the solution into the bucket and fill it up with water. The original recipe said to go until about 3 inches below the rim of the bucket, so I did the same (though it did drive me nuts that I didn't know exactly how much that was).

Then you let it sit for a while and thicken up. As it cools down it does separate a little bit, so before you use it you need to stir it up again. I use a huge slotted spatula (because that's what I've got!) but she recommends a whisk, or better yet, saving up old laundry detergent bottles, filling them up with the new detergent, and then just shaking them really well before measuring out the detergent so it all gets mixed up. (I'm in the process of saving some bottles, but in the meantime, my bucket and spatula just sit in the closet on top of the dryer!)

The original recipe says to use 1/2-1 cup of the detergent (so I compromise and use 3/4 cup at a time) and that it is safe for HE machines (not an issue on my end, but I'm passing along what I've heard - don't hold me to it!) Her 5 gallon buckets makes about 75 loads, so I'm going to round slightly and say that mine makes 38.

The Cost Breakdown (All Prices Taken From Amazon.com)
* Just for the record, I'm no mathematician - let me know if you see an obvious error in my calculations, but if I rounded up when you would have rounded down, or if my unit conversions aren't entirely precise, cut me some slack. I'm just going for an estimate, here.

Using a bottle of standard Tide detergent (as listed on Amazon, because I am not going to the grocery store right now to research prices!) you will pay approximately $0.28 per load.

Using my recipe, the breakdown is as follows:
Fels-Naptha: $4.11 for a bar, 1/2 bar per bucket made = $2.05
Borax: $6.49 for a 76 ounce box, 4 ounces (1/2 cup) per bucket made = $0.34
Washing Soda: $9.15 for a 55 ounce box, 4 ounces (1/2 cup) per bucket made = $0.67
Grand Total For 2.5 Gallons of Detergent = $3.06
Approximately $0.06 per load! That's a great deal! If you tried I'm sure you could find the ingredients cheaper, too.

The Important Part: How It Turned Out!
I liked it quite a bit, actually! I had a blast making it, the bucket of detergent itself smells really nice, and I like to swirl the spatula around the goop just for kicks every now and again. I know, great way to judge a detergent, right?

Here's the thing: J and I don't get all that dirty. We don't have kids, play outdoor sports, or even sit in the grass (we're pretty much just indoor people). So the clothes we're washing have about the normal amount of sweat and grime that a person accumulates as they sit (or in my case, run and dance) around the house all day. I've never tried it, but I'm willing to bet that you could put our clothes through a wash with no detergent at all, and J and I wouldn't realize the difference. So the cleansing factor is good enough that I haven't noticed anything being unclean, and while I have no way to prove this, I feel like the clothes feel nicer when I wear them, like they fit better. I can't explain that (I don't think I lost any weight!) but I'll take it!

The major debate right now has to do with scent. I know, also a great way to judge a detergent ;)

The detergent itself smells like soap - it has a strong, clean, soap-y smell to it. By the time the clothes come out of the dryer, though, the fresh scent is gone. So when I asked J for his review of the soap, he said, "Well, it makes the clothes smell bad". Upon further questioning, it turns out that he was unhappy with the fact that all of the previously scented products we had used on the clothes (I'd done that load with the vinegar) had been removed, and we ended up having to agree to disagree with my statement that, "A lack of scent does not mean that something smells bad".

At the end of the day, J's clothes are being affected by this process, so I want to make sure he is pleased with the end result. So far I have tried:

• 3/4 cup of detergent and vinegar softener (that was the original load that didn't pass inspection)
• double the amount of detergent with vinegar softener (that didn't help anything)
• the original amount of detergent with Downy fabric softener (that's currently in the dryer, so I don't know yet how it will turn out!)

I read that you can also scent the detergent with essential oils, but I don't know how well that smell would last through the dryer either (and essential oils are expensive, which defeats the whole point of this recipe!)

The Verdict
For our household, the decision to continue making detergent or return to store-bought detergent will ultimately be made based on how this load smells when it is done in the dryer (ahhhh, the pressure is on for it to smell good! I want this to work, I have fun feeling like a chemist!) If you don't have issues with clothes that smell like nothing at all, and you like to feel like a mad scientist with your bubbling pots and buckets of goo, I totally recommend this!


If anyone has any alternate recipes, suggestions for mine, or just other random stuff that they make at home, I would love love LOVE to hear about it! Otherwise, have fun and let me know how it turns out if you decide to try it yourself! :)





** This post contains Amazon affiliate links. All that means is that if you use my link to access Amazon and buy something, Amazon gives me a kick-back. I don't even think it matters if you buy what I'd linked to in the first place, they're just happy that you ended up buying something from them at all! So if you need to purchase anything at all on Amazon, use my link to access the site, and help me afford a baby, by golly! :) Or not. It's your choice, and I'll love and respect you either way. But it would be cool if you did ;)