A Year of DIY Laundry Detergent
Yep, you read that right… it has been over a year since we’ve bought name brand laundry detergent (or any detergent at all, actually). Why? Because last March, I made our own.
DIY Laundry Detergent has been a thing for awhile now and there are TONS of tutorials and recipes on Pinterest, so I won’t go too much into the method I used to make it. We’ll more so focus on things like the ways it has helped us save money, how it does washing our clothes, and whether or not we would do it again.
First off, the recipe. I am not sure exactly which one I used, but I did snap a picture of the six ingredients that it called for. There are plenty of recipes with even fewer ingredients (you can see some that I pinned here and here), but this is the one I ended up going with. I will do some hunting around on Google to see if I can find the actual recipe I used and update the post if/when I find it. Every ingredient you see came from Walmart and I think I spent about $20 for all of the ingredients and another $10 for the glass jar.
Did it save us money? Yes. Since making it a year ago, you can see we’ve used just over half of it. Now obviously, this was a MASSIVE amount of detergent, but that $20 way back when was the only money we’ve spent on laundry supplies in a full year and we’re still a long ways off from finishing and having to start over. I’d say we do about 2-3 loads per week, depending on the week, so if we round up to 3 loads a week we can say we’ve done over 150 loads of wash so far with this detergent. That’s about $.13 per load and if we’re estimating that we can get another half of that, so 100 or so washes… we’re now down to $.08 per load. And truthfully, I think it’s probably even lower than that.
For the sake of comparison, I did a quick Google search on how many loads a bottle of Tide will get you. It’s about 64 loads for the 100 fl. oz. bottle, which ranges anywhere from $10-15 at stores… making that around $.20 per load. When we were using brand name bottle detergent, it felt like I was adding a new bottle to our cart all the time and paying almost $15 for one bottle was so painful! So I would say that in the realm of saving money, the DIY version has been largely successful.
Does it work? Yes. You can read tons of reviews online, some that are glowing and some that had issues with it. We haven’t had any problems- our clothes seem to be getting just as clean as before. We don’t use dryer sheets anymore (the detergent has a natural softening agent in it) and haven’t noticed a change in softness either. Now I’m not a laundry expert by any means, so my opinion is just that- my opinion. But so far, it’s been working for us!
Would I do it again? Yes. The process itself only took a few minutes- the most tedious part was mixing it all together because of the huge quantity we were making. We kept the Oxi Clean measuring cup to use as the scoop inside the jar and that’s about all the effort it took. This is probably silly, but I just LOVE having a big jar full of laundry soap in the room- it seems to add just a little bit of style to an otherwise, mundane chore. I should warn you though- that jar is HEAVY. It’s a bear to pick up even being less than half full like it is right now!
Where do we keep it? Right on the dryer. There’s no explanation for this other than there was no other place to put it. Yep, this guy spent its first year of life just sitting on the dryer- and we’d just shift it to the side when we needed to get to the knobs behind it. However, all that has now changed with a little update that made a HUGE difference… but sorry, you’ll have to wait until tomorrow to see it. 🙁 Cliff hanger!
So, anyone else out there ever DIYed some detergent? Which recipe did you use? Would you do it again?
