Homemade Laundry Detergent

As you have probably figured out, I am doing a short series on some of my homemade cleaning products.

In our home, we do A LOT of laundry and some of that laundry is VERY dirty, and I am not talking about cloth diaper dirty-working cattle dirty, and over hauling engines dirty. The recipe below will do as good if not better on those types of stains as the expensive stuff in the store. However, in our HARD WATER, I do have to use oxyclean with it. But, I did with the expensive stuff I bought from the store. Please note, that it will not get rid of the stain completely if it is a bad stain-some stains are just that bad. This recipe, like my dishwasher detergent is CHEAP to make and get this, it uses two of the same products.

Supplies:

5 gallon bucket
old detergent bottle
water
borax
Super Washing Soda
Fels Naptha or My homemade bar soap-without essential oils and colorant-(a blog post to come)

First have a child grate the bar of soap. Place the grated soap into a pan of water, and cook until completely dissolved. Get your 5 gallon bucket, place into bathtub, and carefully, dump the HOT mixture into it. Next add a cup of borax and a cup of Super Washing Soda to the bucket. Now fill bucket with water, and put a lid on it. Let it set for 48 hours. When you are ready to use the detergent, fill the old detergent bottle half full of your homemade detergent, and half with water. I use 1/4 cup in our HE front load washer. For a top load washer use 1/2 cup. I also do an extra rinse just to make sure that all detergent is rinsed out well. We have super sensitive skin here, and we have had no problems since we started using this.

You can add essential oils if you want to. I normally add Tea Tree Oil and Lavender oil. I use my homemade laundry detergent on everything I wash in my washer-from delicates, to Brad’s overhauled an engine greasy oily covered clothes, to cloth diapers.

We have figured that we save an estimated $300 a year. That is with doing about 4 loads of laundry a day.