I made my own homemade laundry detergent for years. At one point, my large family did four loads of laundry a day. I estimated we saved at least $120 a year making our own laundry detergent. Sadly, it’s time to say goodbye. Why? Because homemade laundry detergent doesn’t work! Radical, I know. Read on…
I researched the topic at length. I got some great comments on this post about the dirty little secrets of natural homemade cleaning products, I realized that homemade laundry detergent, being soap based (rather than detergent based), is a problem. The recipe hardly matters. Soap is a terrible product to use on fabrics. On hard surfaces, it’s fine. But on fabrics? It just doesn’t rinse cleanly. This is why detergents were invented – because homemakers were unsatisfied with what they currently had – soap!
Homemade laundry detergent doesn’t work. Eventually, your laundry will look dingy. It will smell “off”. It will grow mildew easily. Your cloth diapers and towels will not be absorbent. And you will have other issues (clogged drains, ring around your washing machine’s tub, etc).
Sometimes it takes several months or even years to really notice what’s going on.
At first, the main issue was that things didn’t look quite as clean as they used to. Then I noticed my cloth diapers were leaking and my towels weren’t absorbent. Not a huge problem with bath towels, but irritating with kitchen towels. When we would try to clean up a spill, liquid would just spread everywhere.
Then I noticed a lingering ring around my washing machine… just like bathtub ring. We all know what causes that. Soap + body oils.
The biggest issue I’m having with homemade detergent? Mildew.
A load of laundry that’s left for just a few hours can end up smelling horrible and require re-washing. Or worse, mildew growth and staining. Yuck! I’ve had to throw away far too many towels and items of clothing, and that is not frugal. It defeats the purpose of making my own detergent.
At first I thought this was just the house I was living in at the time, because it had a very moldy basement (where the laundry station was located), but the same thing has happened in other houses, and in other seasons (not just summer).
I tried changing my recipe. I tried different soaps (natural soaps, castille, even Ivory and Octagon). Nothing helped.
Because it is the soap itself that is the problem.
(Just as is the case with bathtub ring.) As I said earlier, problems with soap are the reason detergent was invented in the first place. Before their availability in the marketplace, women used laundry soap. And it was a far inferior product for washing clothes, which led to the invention of laundry detergent.
The mildew is a result of soap left in the fabric, which gives mold a food source.
I mixed up a separate, soap-free homemade detergent for cloth diapers and towels, and that did help tremendously. My diapers and towels became absorbent again. Because it has no soap!
After doing a lot of searching on the internet, I’ve found that for many people, homemade laundry detergent just doesn’t work no matter what they do. They either make up a soap free recipe (using some combination of washing soda, borax and oxygen bleach, typically) or have to buy a commercial brand.
I think many frugal and/or crunchy bloggers are loathe to come back around and report that the homemade laundry detergent recipe they posted… just plain doesn’t work. It’s embarrassing (especially because people LOVE these types of recipes and they’re massive traffic generators!).
It’s not our water that causes the problem. According to the water report on the county website, we have soft water here, which should rinse clearly, but it doesn’t rinse out the soap-based “detergent” (a misnomer).
I actually enjoyed making my own laundry detergent. It was fun. A little homemaking alchemy with bubbles and steam. It didn’t feel like a chore to me, and so it was a frugal activity worth keeping. (See: All The Money In The World: A Review)
But if I want clean, fresh-smelling (not with perfumes, just from clean) clothing, towels and cloth diapers, I have to buy laundry detergent.
Homemade Laundry Detergent Doesn’t Work: A few brands to use instead.
Nellie’s All Natural Laundry soda, which I get from Amazon.com since I can’t find it in stores. Nellie’s is the least expensive of the natural detergents I’ve found, and more effective than some of the ones available in stores (like Seventh Generation, which doesn’t work well for many people).
It’s also very cloth diaper friendly, so if I run out of my homemade cloth diaper detergent (a mix of washing soda and oxygen bleach) it’s no problem to use it.
Plus, the tin is so darn cute! It has that vintage retro cache. Little things, people.
Lately I’ve been buying any “free and clear” laundry detergent I can find that’s priced well, and I combine it with store sales and coupons (including those from apps) to get it cheap. A recent example is here. Pro tip: figure out the price per load to get the best deal, as concentrations and sizes differ. If you can get it at less than .10 a load, that’s a good price. The deal I worked above was .04 a load, a steal.
Another post I wrote about why this crunchy, frugal mama doesn’t make her own laundry detergent.
What kind of laundry detergent do you use? Does homemade work well for you?
I just went from using equal parts borax and washing soda, to a concoction without borax but using liquid castile soap. I hope we don’t end up with the problems you have! So far, it seems to be working great.
I used soap nuts at one point, but while they get odors out they, like you mentioned, leave everything looking dingy.
Did the castille soap not affect absorbency? I’m almost certain that my formula has to be soap free.
The castile soap doesn’t seem to have affected absorbency so far. The recipe is:
Mix 1/2 cup salt and 1-1/2 cups washing soda with 2 cups hot water. In a separate container, mix 1 cup liq. castile soap with 3 cups hot water. Pour soap mixture slowly into salt mixture, stirring constantly. As it cools, stir with whisk.
I moved away from the easy borax/washing soda formula, b/c next yr we will have a greywater system and nothing I’ve read about borax encourages me that continually pouring borax onto an orchard/garden will be good for the plants in the long run.
I made our first batch of detergent a few months ago. It’s the one you mentioned with the borax, washing soda, oxyclean. I like it so far.
I’ve criticized those home recipes, not because they’re based on soap, but because they’re so alkali-heavy and use TOO LITTLE soap. There are waters wherein a soap-based product won’t work, and it’s true that the spin design of modern washing machines (“modern” meaning since wringers went out) causes soap scum to be caught by fabrics in the manner of filter paper, but at least if you’re going to make a soap-based laundry detergent (and “detergent” IS an appropriate word there, since all it means is “cleaner”), don’t make one that was known to be inferior a century ago! As soon as light meters were invented, experiments were done showing how badly soaps heavy on sodium carbonate degraded and darkened fabrics with repeated washing.
Alkali-heavy soaps were OK in a time when fabrics were heavier and people didn’t wash them as often. In many cases in those days extremely hot water and long soaking was done as well. But those alkali take a toll. It was found in the 20th Century that a good laundry soap should contain only a small amount of alkaline builder, and that a sodium silicate of moderate alkalinity was superior in that role to borate or carbonate. In recent times some very good laundry detergents have been made combining soap with relatively small amounts of other surfactants (disulfonates especially) and silicate builders. But these aren’t popular home recipes because you can’t get those ingredients in grocery, drug, or hardware stores. You could approximate them by doctoring the soap with a small amount of lime soap dispersant in the form of Lestoil, Shaklee Basic H, or other non-ionic ethoxylate surfactant, and adding just a pinch of whatever alkaline builder is available, but you won’t be saving money over buying a simple, cheap laundry detergent from a discount store.
Plus, the amount some of these recipes tell you to use result in there being so little soap in the wash water, you might as well be using none at all. OK, the clothes won’t become scratchy or wear out faster, because they won’t be subject to much alkali, but they won’t get cleaner than plain water or maybe salt water would get them.
Ivory Snow did just fine on my clothes in New York City water when I was a child, but it was a granulated (spray-dried, easy dissolving) soap with no alkaline builder (but a little fluorescent brightener), so it’s not like grating soap at home for comparable use would save money per load the way the recipes that are primarily cheap washing soda and borax would. But those people aren’t saving money in the long run when their fabrics’ useful life is shortened.