Homemade Laundry Detergent

I’m not an overly obsessed pinner on Pinterest, but I am a major DIY’er. If I can do it myself, I prefer to.  So when I saw the dozens hundreds of DIY laundry soaps and baby wipes being pinned, I was intrigued.  At first I thought it would be more of a hassle than it would be worth, until I found a mom blogger who had put them both to the test to see her savings over the course of a year.  By replacing these two items with homemade versions she claimed to have saved $600 a year! Now granted she has 6 children in a household of 8, and we are only a family of three, but still I wanted to give it a shot.

I mean $600 is one mortgage payment.
$600 is one large vacation, or three mini weekend get-aways.
$600 is eight weeks of groceries in our house.
$600 is 15 tanks of gas in my car.
$600 is one year of paid satellite television.

Even if in our small household we only save a portion of that, we would still see the savings over time. So ten minutes of mixing time seemed well worth it. We decided to only do the laundry detergent for now, as we are almost done (fingers crossed) with baby wipes for now.  When we have more children we will try to do both.

I thought I would share my recipe even though it is not the most original I’m sure. I saw many recipes on Pinterest that I liked and decided to mix several different ones for my own.

A few reasons for my choice ingredients:

• *We used Zote soap instead of Fels-Naptha for two reasons.  Zote is plant derived so it’s environmentally safe, whereas Fels-Naptha is not and is strongly discouraged if you have a septic take (even though we do not) because it kills the good bacteria inside them causing back-ups over time. Fels-Naptha is also harmful if it gets in your eyes or ingested by mouth whereas Zote soap is not. Because of this we went with the Zote soap which has a whitening agent in it but does not have as much stain/grease fighter in it. For that reason we added the Oxi-Clean which replaced the need for Fels-Naptha. If we had not used the Oxi-Clean we would have used a small amount of Fels-Naptha instead, but in smaller amounts mixed with the Zote soap.

• *We used a mix of Washing Soda and Baking Soda as everything I read said that Washing Soda was so acidic and with such a high PH balance that the Baking Soda was needed to re-balance the load as to make sure the fabrics did not cause skin irritation. So we used equal amounts of each in our mix.

• *I wanted to use a booster in our mix, like the Oxi-Clean, but as I looked for others besides Oxi-Clean I found most were scented.  Purex Crystals were my first choice as a stain booster but since they are scented, I bypassed them for the Oxi-Clean because of the sensitive skins in our house. If it were not for the sensitive skins I may have chosen a scented booster and powdered softener, but the Zote soap does give a good clean scent.

My advice is to customize your recipe for your households needs and then test out different versions to see what is right for your crew, but our version is below. We loved the results and the laundry smells and feel just as soft and good as our normal All Free and Clear detergent.

We average with our costs per ingredient, that the total cost for one batch (which does 256 loads) is between $9.80-$12.90 for the one batch of almost 2 gallons.  The price varies only due to generic or name brand ingredients and if you remove the extra option for the Oxi-Clean or not. This averages out to $0.03-.05 per load!   Our normal liquid detergent (All Free and Clear) is $4.00 at 33 loads which is $0.12 a load. Since I tend to use the liquid more freely and get only 22 loads from the bottle (I always use the large load amount) I would be spending $0.18 per load.

To switch to homemade is a saving on average of 9 - 15 cents a load!

Let me break that down further for you.
Say I do 6 loads of laundry a week for a year.
That’s 312 loads a year.
Homemade would cost me $9.36-$15.60 a year, and store bought would cost me $37.44-$56.16 a year.
A possible savings average of $46.83 a year!

Now I know what you are thinking--that’s not $600 a year! It’s true it isn’t, but remember how I said that mom blogger had six kids? Two of those children were babies in diapers….washable cloth diapers. Also, the $600 was baby wipes and laundry detergent combined. So I can easily see how, over time with a large family, you would save more money with these homemade versions than our smaller family will. Still to me it’s a small save and a fun new DIY to try. So, now for that recipe.

Homemade Laundry Soap

*1 Bar Zote Soap  (or 3 bars Fels-Naptha Soap bars, or use one of each)

*1 3lb 7oz box Washing Soda (We couldn’t find the 4lb boxes-just make sure it’s even with the Baking Soda.)

*1 3lb 7oz box Baking Soda (or 3-4x 1lb boxes if you cannot find the larger box)

*1 box of 20 Mule-Team Borax (You will only use an equal amount to match the sodas so if you’re using 3lbs of each soda use only 3lbs of Borax. If you can find the 4lb boxes of the sodas use the whole 4lb box of Borax. Since we used about 3lbs of each soda we used ¾ of the 4lb box of Borax for ours.)

*½ of a 2lb tub of Oxi-Clean

Dump all of the above in a large container and seal. The bars of soap (Zote/Fels-Naptha) will have to be grated with a cheese grater into small shreds, and then everything should be well stirred. Just like most powders you need to add the detergent mix in the water before the laundry is put in, and if you have an HE washer it’s advised that you dissolve it in a cup of hot water first and then pour it into the washer.

Happy Washing!