DIY Fail
So, as some of you might know, I decided to try making my own dish and laundry soap! I wanted to do this for three reasons:
1. Because making your own is said to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals that your family is exposed to and it's supposed to be more kind to the earth.
2. The home made stuff is super cheap when you look at the cost per load! For both dishes and laundry, the math is supposed to work out to around $.05 - $.07 per load. This is relatively important due to our recent decrease in income.
3. I'm just super interested in making my own stuff now that I'm a full time stay at home parent.
So first, let's talk about the dishes. I made a recipe that I found online involving washing soda, borax, citric acid and salt. It seemed like the dishes were not getting quite as clean as usual, so I started really scrubbing the dishes a lot before loading them into the dishwasher. Then, I noticed a ton of cloudiness on the dishes, it was super noticeable on the glasses.
Following some other suggestions I found online, I tried spraying the dishes with vinegar after they were washed and using a much higher ratio of washing soda and adding a tiny bit of dish soap but I constantly got unsatisfactory results. So, I bought the cheapest powdered dishwasher detergent I could find from Walmart. Now my dishes look great! No more cloudiness and the dishes are getting clean! It ends up costing about $0.12 per load, which seems pretty economical even though it's double the cost of the home made stuff. It is totally not environmentally friendly through, so that's not awesome. I think after I use up the box I'll explore more sustainable detergents and see if I can find one that's affordable.
So next, I turned my attention to the homemade laundry soap. I bought all the ingredients and was about to grate up my first bar of soap (a common ingredient in most DIY laundry soap). Then, as I was looking for the recipe online, I discovered this article that talked about why it's a bad idea to make and use your own laundry soap with your washing machine. I then found dozens of articles backing it up! Turns out there is a massive difference in "laundry soap" and "laundry detergent" and washing machines are just meant for detergent. Apparently, soap will accumulate in the clothes and the machine over time and can really ruin your stuff! There are so many folks out there that claim to be using their homemade stuff just fine, but now I think it's too risky! I don't want to mess up our clothes! So I will need to do more research to figure out other options for laundry - I've heard good things about soap nuts.
So I'm totally disappointed that my venture into these DIY products did not work out. Maybe modern machines need the modern detergents to work. I think perhaps I'll turn my focus to other green ideas like reducing our paper product usage, or reducing plastic usage, or finding better ways to compost or figuring out better vegetarian dinners or growing more of our own food. I definitely don't have all the answers yet, but I hope little by little we can figure out the best way for us!
1. Because making your own is said to reduce the amount of toxic chemicals that your family is exposed to and it's supposed to be more kind to the earth.
2. The home made stuff is super cheap when you look at the cost per load! For both dishes and laundry, the math is supposed to work out to around $.05 - $.07 per load. This is relatively important due to our recent decrease in income.
3. I'm just super interested in making my own stuff now that I'm a full time stay at home parent.
So first, let's talk about the dishes. I made a recipe that I found online involving washing soda, borax, citric acid and salt. It seemed like the dishes were not getting quite as clean as usual, so I started really scrubbing the dishes a lot before loading them into the dishwasher. Then, I noticed a ton of cloudiness on the dishes, it was super noticeable on the glasses.
Following some other suggestions I found online, I tried spraying the dishes with vinegar after they were washed and using a much higher ratio of washing soda and adding a tiny bit of dish soap but I constantly got unsatisfactory results. So, I bought the cheapest powdered dishwasher detergent I could find from Walmart. Now my dishes look great! No more cloudiness and the dishes are getting clean! It ends up costing about $0.12 per load, which seems pretty economical even though it's double the cost of the home made stuff. It is totally not environmentally friendly through, so that's not awesome. I think after I use up the box I'll explore more sustainable detergents and see if I can find one that's affordable.
So next, I turned my attention to the homemade laundry soap. I bought all the ingredients and was about to grate up my first bar of soap (a common ingredient in most DIY laundry soap). Then, as I was looking for the recipe online, I discovered this article that talked about why it's a bad idea to make and use your own laundry soap with your washing machine. I then found dozens of articles backing it up! Turns out there is a massive difference in "laundry soap" and "laundry detergent" and washing machines are just meant for detergent. Apparently, soap will accumulate in the clothes and the machine over time and can really ruin your stuff! There are so many folks out there that claim to be using their homemade stuff just fine, but now I think it's too risky! I don't want to mess up our clothes! So I will need to do more research to figure out other options for laundry - I've heard good things about soap nuts.
So I'm totally disappointed that my venture into these DIY products did not work out. Maybe modern machines need the modern detergents to work. I think perhaps I'll turn my focus to other green ideas like reducing our paper product usage, or reducing plastic usage, or finding better ways to compost or figuring out better vegetarian dinners or growing more of our own food. I definitely don't have all the answers yet, but I hope little by little we can figure out the best way for us!
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