How to make laundry detergent at home

Looking at the prices, I want to make my own washing powder and not go to the household chemicals store at all. And, indeed, the cost of powders is steadily increasing, and they have to be washed often. How can you save your family budget at least a little? The answer is obvious, partially replace expensive washing powder with a homemade analogue. How to prepare powders for hand washing at home from soap and other ingredients and how to make powder for an automatic washing machine, read in this publication.

What ingredients will be useful?

Today, many information sites offer recipes for homemade washing gels and powders. Some recipes are really worthwhile, while others are invented at random and are not at all effective. What should the housewife do? How to choose the best option for yourself from the entire array of recipes, and how not to run into an unreliable recipe? We recently asked ourselves the same questions and decided to conduct a series of experiments. To begin with, we selected the most common components of homemade powders and decided to study their beneficial properties.

Homemade powder consists of cheap and relatively safe household chemicals, but still the word “relatively” confuses us a little.

• Laundry soap, toilet soap, baby soap. This is the main component for most household gels and powders. It is soap that helps soften fabric fibers, and its components react with dirt stains and help remove them. From the point of view of removing dirt, 72% laundry soap is better, but it gives off an unpleasant odor.It is better to use baby soap, it removes dirt well and smells much nicer.
• Sodium tetraborate or simply "borax". A chemical that is very effective on stains of any origin, helping to remove them from laundry. Borax can often be found in modern detergents and cleaning products. Additionally, this substance also disinfects well, so any housewife should get a bag of borax and keep it in her pantry. Unlike laundry soap, borax does not harm the washing machine, which is very important for us.
• Sodium bicarbonate (baking soda). This substance is found in every home, but few use it as a cleaning agent and in vain. You can use soda to clean a pan, stove or sink, but in our case, soda is interesting as a component of homemade powder. Soda, like borax, reacts with dirt and helps remove it from laundry.
• Soda Ash. Like baking soda, soda ash removes dirt from things and does it much better. But the problem is that when the fractions of soda ash react too violently, they can harm things, so before using it you need to dissolve it well and not exceed the maximum established concentration. Both baking soda and soda ash can be used in an automatic washing machine.
• Various essential oils. To make your homemade powder leave a pleasant scent on your clothes, you need to add a small amount of essential oil to it. This will be especially effective if you are preparing not a dry powder, but an erasing gel. You can choose an essential oil with any scent you like and add a little bit of it to your homemade remedy, just a few drops - the effect will be amazing.
• Mustard.Dry mustard has a disinfecting effect and copes well with various contaminants. Mustard is also sometimes used as a component of homemade powder, but only in hand washing powder. It is strictly not recommended to pour mustard into a semi-automatic washing machine, or even more so into an automatic washing machine.

Mustard powder in hot water will quickly swell, and mustard masses will clog hoses and pipes, which can lead to damage to the washing machine.

• Salt. Regular salt can also help fight pollution. If used in combination with other ingredients, it can be very effective. Salt is absolutely safe for the washing machine.
• Lemon acid. Lemon has an excellent cleaning effect. It will not only help in removing various types of dirt from your laundry, it will soften the fabric and give it a pleasant smell.
• Table vinegar. This component is added to homemade laundry detergent mainly to soften the fabric and give the laundry a fresh smell. It is not recommended to pour vinegar into the washing machine.

For hand wash

Despite the abundance of automatic washing machines, modern housewives continue to wash some things by hand. There are many reasons for this: the item is very expensive and you want to save it for a longer time, the fabric is delicate, the item does not match the rest of the laundry in color, for example, we wash a mountain of colored laundry in the machine, but we wash two or three white items by hand so as not to start the machine again. In general, there are always many reasons to wash by hand, but you don’t want to buy powder for hand washing separately.

Let's not buy, but make a good washing powder with our own hands.We have excellent recipes for this, which we tested during experiments. The first recipe is soap powder for hand washing. To prepare it you need:

1. 300 g soap shavings;
2. 200 g soda ash;
3. 100 g baking soda;
4. 250 g borax;
5. About 10 drops of your favorite essential oil.

If you are making powder for hand washing your baby's clothes, you can do without essential oil. In this case, the powder will be hypoallergenic.

This powder is very easy to prepare. First, mix soap shavings, soda, borax, and then pour the resulting mixture with 10 drops of essential oil. Place the mixture near the radiator or in the sun to dry, and then pour it into a dry, sealed container. Before use, the powder must be thoroughly dissolved in a basin of water, and only then added to the laundry. Do not place laundry in a basin together with powder.

How to make washing powder for hand washing is clear, but from the above components you can also prepare a washing gel. Moreover, it will be almost more effective than powder. How is the gel prepared?

• Pour soap shavings into the pan.
• Pour about 1 liter of hot water and place the pan on the stove.
• Heat the mixture over low heat, without bringing it to a boil, and stir constantly until the chips melt.
• Pour soda ash into the hot soap (up to 300 g), and we will not add any baking soda at all.
• Add a little hot water and stir again until the soda dissolves.
• Now add borax and add a little water again to maintain a gel-like consistency.
• Stir again and wait for the borax to dissolve.
• When the borax dissolves, you can pour 10 drops of essential oil and remove from heat.
• Cool the gel and pour it into bottles.

Machine washable

We have already decided that some of the above components are not suitable for preparing homemade powder for an automatic washing machine, which means our powder should be without soap, mustard, and preferably without vinegar. You can find good recipes for homemade powder for automatic washing in the article, How to replace washing powder for an automatic machine. In this publication we talked in detail about such recipes, and we will not repeat ourselves.

The only thing I would like to draw your attention to is this point. Despite the environmental friendliness and considerable efficiency of home washing powders, they are not recommended for constant use, especially in an automatic washing machine. The best option is to alternate home remedies with regular powder, and then the washing result and the technical condition of the washing machine will invariably satisfy you.

To summarize, we note that there is nothing difficult in preparing homemade washing powder. Every housewife can easily find all the necessary components and make laundry detergent, but she still needs to use it correctly. If you don’t overuse homemade powders, you can save money and get high-quality washing results!

1 reader comment

1. 02/09/2018 at 15:21

   Elya:

   Excellent article, otherwise it takes so much time to figure it out on your own. Because there are a lot of contradictions, different opinions, even about soda and soap.

   Answer