Recently while trying to figure out more ways to save some money in my monthly budget I came across an article talking about making my own laundry soap. Now, this isn't the first time I heard about it, my wife had mentioned it to me before but as I had not been researching I hadn't listened all that much. After reading the article I did some searching and found several recipes for the soap. At our house we prefer the dry stuff, so that narrowed it down for me which one I might like to try. Then I looked into what was in it and how much work it looked like. In the end, it didn't look too hard and the soap only contains 3 ingredients. To start off I wanted to test it to see if it would even work for us, so the first thing I did was went and bought the cheapest of the ingredients I could get. All these ingredients were found at my local grocery store, they were a box of Borax, a box of Washing Soda and some Ivory soap. I also had to buy a grater because I don't like the idea of using the same grater for soap as I do for my cheese. I then followed the very simply instructions.
Grate 2 cups of soap
Mix with 1 cup of Borax and 1 cup of Washing Soda
That was it, once I had mixed it to my liking we had laundry soap. We tested it out and found that our clothes looked clean and didn't have any smell (it's odd to smell clothes that haven't been perfumed, they don't really smell like anything). We tried it out on a few loads of laundry and found that the fabric didn't quite feel as soft. So after a bit more reading I found out we could use plain white vinegar for a fabric softener. We tried this out and it worked wonderfully, so the next logical step for us was to see what happened if we tried to get rid of the dryer sheet. What we discovered was a lot of static and so I had to do more research and found a few things to try. We tried using tin foil balls, but these did not work for us, so then we went and found those fancy blue dryer balls that they sold on TV, it took some searching but we eventually found them (the store we were shopping at didn't even think they had them). Once we had these and tried them out we found that they helped. They didn't remove all the static, but enough of it to make us happy. So once we finish using up all our name brand stuff I think we're going to be a bit greener for the environment and stop using all these chemicals to clean our clothes.
Oh, and if the environment isn't enough, I found that each load of laundry would save us around 5 cents. If you do 10 loads a week that's 50 cents, which is $2 a month or $24 a year. If that isn't enough, then add in what you save by not buying dryer sheets, I'm guessing for us it comes close to $70 a year and that is an amount I can do something with. Oh, and we have an HE washer, seems to be fine with this homemade stuff, we use about 1/8 cup (2 Tablespoons) of soap per load for our average sized load and it takes 1/4 a cup of plain white vinegar. So, having tried this I am ready to move to the next step and buy the soap they recommend, which is Fels-Naptha. When I have this and try it out I'll probably be writing some more, though from what everyone else says about it this stuff is great. So, though it originally sounded like too much work, it turned out that it was quite easy to make our own laundry soap.
No comments:
Post a Comment