Ditch the Tide: Homemade Laundry Detergent

Everything you need to make your own laundry soap

Grating the bar of soap


Adding the soap mixture

Adding the washing soda & borax

The finished product after sitting overnight

With three teenagers in the house I find myself on perpetual laundry duty. As a genuine cheapskate I never pass up an opportunity to save a buck. Recently I decided to try out a recipe for making homemade laundry detergent and kill two birds with one stone. There are numerous variations of this recipe floating around on several frugal living sites. I pulled this particular one from beasurvivor.blogspot.com as it was simple and cheap. Using just three ingredients you can produce a five gallon bucket of laundry soap in only fifteen minutes at a cost of just pennies per load. One batch kept my family in clean clothes for eleven weeks and I was a little heavy handed with my soap. I found no difference in cleaning results compared with the name brand detergents I had used in the past. This soap is low sudsing but does a great cleaning job without the bubbles. Also do not be surprised if your soap appears to have a gloppy uneven texture. The mixture will still work just fine. I use one and a half cups of detergent per load with excellent results. The hardest part is finding a store that carries the washing soda.

Ingredients: Bar of soap, Borax and Washing Soda (Not Baking Soda).

After grating the bar of soap place the shavings in a saucepan with 4 cups of boiling water until melted. While the soap mixture melts place three and a half gallons of very hot water in a clean five gallon bucket. Add the melted soap mixture to the five gallon bucket and stir. Next add 1 cup of washing soda and a half cup of borax stirring well after each addition. That's it! Just let the whole concoction sit overnight and in the morning you will be ready to hit the spin cycle.

Thoughts on Laundry Day

Yesterday was a perfect laundry day-the sun was shining, a slight breeze blowing as butterflies danced around the backyard flowers.

it was only a year ago since our family began a concerted effort to forgo the dryer and go back to letting Mother Nature do the drying for us. While the dryer had afforded us the convenience of doing a quick load at any hour its days were numbered when I learned the true cost of that convenience. According to Alexander Lee, a lawyer and clothesline activist from my native N.H. using a clothesline and washing with cold water saves the average family 15% of their annual energy costs. Lee started Project Laundry in 1995 to promote the benefits of hanging clothes to dry. Fifteen percent of my electric bill was enough of a benefit for me to bring out the post hole digger and set up some line.

So with some grumbling from the kids I started drying all our clothes on a solar clothes dryer . The electric dryer still sits in the utility room though it now has a few boxes piled on it. Occasionally, we use it when we have a string of rainy days or one of the kids remembers at dinner that they need a certain shirt for school the next day. And my teens have now discovered that the triangular device with a handle and a cord sitting on the utility room shelf has a use. It is great at removing wrinkles in their favorite jeans. My seventeen year old son has even become quite the expert at pressing a shirt.

As for myself, I have rediscovered the joy of folding a basket of sun-dried clothes freshened with Mother Nature's scent. The smell of fresh laundry straight off the line-that alone will keep me forever a clothesline gal. Few simple pleasures reap such rewards.