We’re getting cleaner

Take the following ingredients – a bar of laundry soap from the dollar store($.50), a box of borax($5.29) and a box of washing soda($5.79).

Make  recipe #3 on this site. 

 I was amazed at how little (1 and 1/3 cups) of actual product the recipe called for, the main ingredient was water.  When you buy the commerically produced laundry detergent, the first ingredient listed is water.  So that is what you’re paying for.

 

 In place of a plastic bucket to mix the recipe, I used this handy water carrier which I bought at a yard sale for 25 cents. The only difficult part was grating the soap.   I found that running it through my small food processor worked the best.  The food processor was also purchased at a yard sale  for  $5.00.

From start to finish this took 20 minutes to make 7.5 litres (1.98 gallons) of liquid laundry detergent.   I spilled a bit when filling the bottles but a quick wipe with a terry cloth towel left my counter very clean. 

 Note the labels from the recycled laundry detergent bottles have been removed to protect the expensive. The three bottles pictured here totalled more than $23.00 when originally purchased on sale.  The water bottle is one I no longer use.  Even with calculating in the cost of the water carrier and the food processor, making my own laundry detergent is considerably cheaper.