I know this thread is old, but as for detergents, I'm just getting into making our own laundry soap. We have three kids, two adults, and eight dogs in the household. The towels get used very frequently, especially as one of our dogs is blind, deaf, old, and senile.. she doesn't go outside. The recipe I used is gentle on the skin and the clothes, it gets any washing mechanics clean, and the batches lasts a long time. I'm interested in the concept of not using the washing and dryer machines, but we have way too many loads.
As for the recipe?
All you need are:
3 Ingredients
- A bar of mild soap, preferrably Ivory (you can get bar soaps in bulk, lasts forever)
- 1 1/2 cup of baking soda or washing soda (Arm & Hammer brands have those in bulk)
- 1 1/2 cup of 20 Team Mule Borax powder
A big pot/sauce pan to boil water in
A 4 to 5 gallon bucket
Now, what to do:
Grate the soap into the sauce pan. Add 6 cups of water and heat until the soap melts. This takes generally 15 minutes.
Add the borax and baking or washing soda, stir until that dissolves.
Remove from heat. Pour 4 cups of hot water into the bucket.
Now add the soap mixture and stir.
Add 1 gallon plus 6 cups of water and stir.
Let the soap sit for about 24 hours and it will gel.
How to use it and what's the breakdown:
1) You use about 1/2 a cup for each load.
2) You notice you only need a bar and a little over a cup of each soda and powder for each batch of detergent. Each batch of detergents makes for about 100 loads of laundry. The boxes and bars are in bulk, thus you have the ingredients to make up to 20 batches of soap.
3) Each batch is up to 3.5 gallon.
4) Each box of store-bought detergent is generally from $10-$15 for 64 to 76 loads. A box of borax powder costs about $3, bar soaps about $1 to $2 each depending on the brands, and washing/baking sodas (which you should have in your home as a generic home product for cleaning, laundry, toothpaste [baking soda], skin health, general home deoderizer, etc) are about $2-$4. That totals up to $9 max. However, divide the costs up into the batches themselves. It's roughly $1 to $2 for 100 loads laundry soap. For even better breakdown, Temptress did a good job on that:
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