Homemade laundry detergent can save you money!
Laundry can take up a lot of time, money and energy. I’m always on the lookout for ways to save money on washing and drying clothing. I do things like re-wear clothes before washing them, cutting dryer sheets in half, and line drying my clothes when the weather is nice outside. I thought I was doing well.
Then I wrote a post about homemade cleaning products a few weeks ago. Jessica, one of my readers, left the following comment:
I make my own laundry soap! Here’s the recipe:
1 bar bath soap
1 cup washing soda
1 cup baking soda
1 cup 20 Mule Team BoraxGrind together in your food processor. Use 2 Tablespoons for a full load. I also use it for general housekeeping. It costs 2 or 3 cents per use.
I also use Dawn to fight laundry stains, and white vinegar as a fabric softener. (The smell disappears when the clothes dry.)
White vinegar is so versatile! I love using it as a rinse aid in my dishwasher, as well as for keeping ants off my counters. (Bugs can’t stand the taste of acid.)
Your blog is awesome, Lynnae–keep up the good work!
Thanks for the compliment on my blog, Jessica. Now it’s time for me to thank you. I thought I’d do a comparison between my usual laundry detergent and Jessica’s recipe. I was skeptical, because I’ve made my own liquid laundry detergent before, and I was less than impressed. It took a long time to make, too. Still, I had to try.
I made one small adjustment to the recipe. Instead of using bath soap, I used 1 bar of Fels Naptha. It’s a soap especially made for laundry, and it really cleans things.
I used the food processor to grind everything up, just like Jessica recommended, and this laundry detergent literally took me 5 minutes to make. It was so easy!
Still, I didn’t know how it would work. So far I’ve used it on 4 loads of laundry, and it’s worked really well! I don’t think I’ll be going back to the commercial stuff anytime soon.
Let’s break down the cost. I didn’t have any of the ingredients on hand, so I bought everything last Wednesday.
I bought one bar of Fels Naptha and used the whole bar. Cost: $1.19.
A 3.5 box of Washing Soda is 7 1/3 cups and cost me $2.39. I used 1 cup, which comes to 33 cents.
I bought 1 4-lb box of baking soda, which contains 8 1/3 cups. I paid $2.12 for the box. The recipe uses one cup, so that comes to roughly 25 cents for the baking soda.
Finally, I bought a 4 lb 12 oz. box of Borax for $2.67. The box contains 9.9 cups, and I used one. Cost of one cup: 27 cents.
The total cost for one batch of homemade laundry detergent was $2.04. So far, very good! The recipe made 3 cups of laundry detergent. There are 16 tablespoons in a cup, so there were 48 tablespoons in the recipe. At 2 tablespoons per load, that’s 24 loads of laundry.
Total cost per load: 8 and 1/2 cents. That’s roughly the same as the Arm & Hammer laundry detergent I normally buy. The Arm & Hammer came to 8 and 2/3 cents a load for a $6.99 box that washes 80 loads.
However, I think the homemade stuff has been cleaning better. It’s also not heavily scented, and I’m not trashing the environment by continuing to buy boxes of detergent.  Plus, I can use the baking soda and borax for other cleaning tasks, so I’m not buying lots of different products. That saves much needed space in my cupboard.
The verdict: Though the actual cost of the two detergents is about the same, the homemade detergent saves on both packaging and space in my home. It’s more natural, too. And if you were to use regular bath soap instead of Fels Naptha, the cost would definitely be less than store bought detergent, since the Fels Naptha was by far the most expensive ingredient. I’ve heard Zote works well for laundry, too, but I’ve never seen it around here.
The Winner: Jessica’s homemade laundry detergent! Thanks for the tip, Jessica!
Now I need to dry Dawn as a stain remover and vinegar as a fabric softener!
Update: Since this post, I’ve cut the amount of Fels Napthala to 1/2 bar per batch, and it works just fine. That brings the cost per load down to just 6 cents per load!
For other versions of homemade laundry detergent, see the following sites:
How do you save money on laundry? Share your tips in the comments!
Photo by *clairity*.
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I’m going to make two comments.
From the frugality perspective. I’d say rock on. You’ve got some good cost savings. I spent ~$10 on a bottle of detergent and figure its going to last me about 8 months. Of course I’m only one person who doesn’t generate too much laundry. If you had a family and were really cranking out the laundry the little extra effort you spend making your own detergent really adds up to significant savings.
Now onto chemistry. Your recipe lacks any kind of a whitening agent, thus your clothes will fade or dull over time. This may not be an issue for you but it is something to consider when making the trade off between do-it-yourself detergent and store bought. There may also be some other benefits to store bought detergent that are worthy of consideration before you make the jump to homemade.
The whitening agents are very overrated – they work in the short term, but since they don’t rise out as easily as the home-made brews, they leave deposits on the fabrics that actually attract dulling dirt/grime. I use white vinegar, which strips out all the deposits, and throw in a scoop of oxyclean every few loads as needed – my clothes are as bright as they’ve ever been.
I made my own laundry detergent and then spent the day experimenting with several brands to see which one cleaned the best and was economical too. I used white hand towels for the test. I took the towels outside and ground them into the dirt (Georgia red clay!). Then I washed each towel with a different detergent. After washing all the towels I placed them side by side to compare how clean they were. The most expensive detergents were Tide and Gain. I also used home made, Extra, Arm & Hammer, Shaklee Basic L. Tide and Gain cleaned the best and when purchased on sale and with a coupon were quite economical. The home made, Extra, A & H, were not acceptable in cleaning whites. Now, if the load was not noticeably dirty the type of detergent might not matter. I also repeated the experiment using OxyClean with the detergents that needed a boost. The towels still were not as clean as the Tide and Gain towels. I also repeated the experiment using wet towels ground into the dirt. I had the same results. I did not expect to find that Tide & Gain won because I was using whatever was on sale. In fact I hoped they wouldn’t perform better. Now I use Tide & Gain exclusively and have cut out OxyClean. This was my experience with detergents, you might experience something different, especially if you don’t have dirty dirt.
I think the whole point of making homemade laundry SOAP is being missed here. The recipes are for SOAP and NOT for DETERGENT. Detergents are chemically based (petroleum) and Soaps are natural. The choice is not limited to saving a little money, but to clean with safe and natural ingredients. Tide and Gain contain really high concentrations of fragrances and other cleaning chemicals that many people are allergic to. If you have tough stains, you can always use extra borax, Dawn dishwashing liquid (original for greasey stains), or even commercial spot treatments on them. One of the purposes of homemade soap is to get away from petroleum-based-laboratory-laundry and use green and natural solutions for everyday problems.
For really white whites, sunshine is the best bleaching agent there is, and it contains no chemicals and is absolutely free. I do a LOT of gardening and barn cleaning, and homemade soap workd great on natural dirt. The red in red clay soil is iron oxide, so you would have to use a rust remover type of cleaner to get it out. It’s probably one of the chemical agents in Tide & Gain, whether you need it or not.
I use essentially the same recipe – skipping the baking soda and adding a generic oxy powder and using Sunlight laundry (bar) soap instead since I can’t find Fels Naptha up here. I also use only one tablespoon per load (since that is what was indicated on the recipe I used) and find that the clothes get just as clean as with commercial detergent.
I love my homemade detergent!
Peggy’s last blog post..getting there
I plan to try this very soon. I have been using Dawn as a spot treatment for those oily type stains (think olive oil or mayo or dressing on a shirt) for awhile now and it’s all I use for those. It works extremely well. I don’t use anything else.
I live in Florida and have not seeing “washing soda”. Could it be under any other name, or brand name? I love the recipe and am eager to try it. By the way, Fels Naptha is a good skin soap to treat poison ivy. Thanks!
Publix and some Ace Hardware stores have washing soda. :-)
Laundry soda is made by Arm and Hammer. Look for their traditional trademark same as what is used on baking soda boxes.
Just made some last night with 2 bars Fels Naptha, 2 cups Washing Soda, and 2 cups Borax. Maybe next time we’ll try adding 2 cups Baking Soda as well, like your formula. Our costs for the Washing Soda and Borax were quite a bit higher than yours. At least we were able to get it at a local hardware store. I’ve also read that we only need 1 Tbsp. So it’s a fair bit less expensive that way that what we were using, but using the Baking Soda might make it even less expensive.
I’ve been making my own laundry soap for about 2 years now. I use milled goat soap as my soap, baking soda & borax. White vinegar as my fabric softener. I work in a very nasty environment, grease & such. AND my clothes come clean! With my work clothes I do put it on the pre soak cycle for 15 m inutes and add a little extra borax and it works every time :) I strated using white vinegar as a fabric softener when I found out that regular fabric softeners are flammable. My clothes caught on fire at work as I was welding! Not any more :) And you control static by just drying enough. Over drying is what causes the static. It’s trial and error but we now know where to set the dryer for dryness :)
why do you grind up bar soap, instead of just pouring in liquid? I use liquid castile soap, which is phosphate-free, comes in a number of nice fragrances (or unscented) and works great – it’s not cheap, but I need so little (a tablespoon or two per load, along w/baking soda, borax, and white vinegar) that it goes a long way.
where can you find castile soap?
I’ve been making homemade laundry detergent for a couple of years and love it. The recipe I use is a liquid version of the above recipe, available at the Duggar family website under ‘recipes’. I leave out the baking soda.
I haven’t noticed my whites graying. Perhaps it depends on your water?
Side note: You can easily print coupons from Arm and Hammer’s website – I always get my Washing Soda for $1 off this way. :)
I haven’t seen any postings on how this works with these new HE (high efficiency) wash machines. Any comments?
Great to see so many successes. This gives me the confidence in having a go. I will report back on my attempt.
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