It took me about 30 minutes from start to finish, this is includes me putting the excess borax and washing sodas into jars and making labels for them, so I would say that making a batch takes 15 to 20 minutes of pretty easy work.
I like to give credit where credit is due, what got me interested in "making my own" (or DIY-ing it, whichever you prefer to call it) was a class I took in high school. We read through this book and did a workbook that the late Bonnie Morrell of Woodstock, GA had written. While I no longer share the religious sentiments of the "program", if you will, I still believe in the relevance of the lifestyle that it introduced me to. In the 8 years that have passed since that class, I have gone back and forth between living a healthier life and living a SAD (Standard American Diet) type of life. One of our wedding presents was the things to get started with making our own flour and bread, something that I loved doing when I was younger. When I started making our bread, I refocused on living a healthy lifestyle and began to think about what else I could make for us that could save both our health and wallet. I began to hear about people making their own laundry detergent and how easy it was and how much cheaper it was. I was intrigued! I started following links that I found on Facebook and I came across this site. I started scanning her articles about soap making and skincare products and I was hooked. I spent 8 hours that night reading and watching tutorials and making lists of recipes that I wanted to try to make.
The next day I showed my husband the findings and he seemed somewhat skeptical, as anyone would be when they found out that their wife wants $300 to make soap and lotion. So I sat down and for 12 hours looked up MORE recipes and did price comparisons between product sites, finding out what the cheapest recipes would be, down to the price per use, and comparing all of this data to the products we were currently using. It was exhausting but amazing, I found that we would be saving over half on most products by making our own AND the products would be greener and healthier than the ones we buy at the store.
I presented this to my sweetie along with a list of products we could make, in the order that we were going to run out of them. We decided that to bite off little chunks of making our own so we would not waste the drawerfuls of lotions and soaps that we already have on hand. The first thing we needed was laundry detergent. I got this recipe from FIMBY.TOUGAS (the previous link):
1 cup Arm and Hammer Washing Soda
1 cup borax
1 bar Fels Naptha soap, grated
This recipe costs $9.26 (AHHH!) per batch ($0.18/load), the washing soda should last for a little over 8 batches, borax for 9 batches, and you need 5.5 oz of soap per recipe.
I found a recipe (on FIMBY) for a simple cleaning soap and decided to find out what the cost of making a batch would be. I found that a single batch would cost around $16.61, making the cost per 5.5 oz bar $1.43.
Fels Naptha was not available in ANY of our local Walmarts or other grocery stores (and local for us means a 30 mile radius) so we had to order it online. It was $3.90 without shipping, about $7 when all was said and done. So, making our own soap is DRASTICALLY cheaper than buying it! A batch of laundry detergent made using homemade soap is only $3.69 ($0.07/load). Compare this to the store brand detergent with horrible chemicals in it at about $6.50 with about 15 less uses ($0.20/load) than the homemade stuff. Ay!
I will be making my first batch of simple soap tomorrow (hopefully) and it will need to cure for 3-4 weeks before I can use it. Once we do, we will save $.13 per load of laundry but until then, $0.02 per load. Every little bit counts!
Enough with the numbers, here is my pictorial of making laundry detergent!
After this step, you put all of the ingredients into a food processor and "chop" it into a powder. I left my processor on for about 1 minute, in the future I will probably let it go for a little longer so the soap shreds become a bit smaller.
As you can see, you only need to use 1 tablespoon of detergent for a regular load of laundry, 2 tablespoons for a dirty load. I have already tested it out and I love the results! Our clothes look clean and don't really have a scent, once we run out of fabric softener I will start using apple cider vinegar and a few drops of essential oil in the bleach dispenser. Once I try this I will let you all know what I think! We had some soiled linens from our bad animals (ok,they aren't bad, just ornery) that I washed with 1 tbsp. of detergent, they are drying now but didn't smell bad when I was putting them in the dryer. If 1 tbsp deodorized and cleaned them then I am impressed!
And with that, i leave you all. Good luck on making your own detergent, if anyone finds a new recipe or has a tweak that they would like to share, I would love to hear from you! Be well, everyone. :)
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