Friday, May 25, 2012

Homemade Laundry Soap

 

Ingredients:
  • 1 bar of soap
  • 2 5-gallon buckets or containers (and cover for at least one, plastic wrap works too)
  • 1 Cup Borax
  • 1/2 Cup Baking Soda
  • Cheese grater
  • Large spoon with 'slots' for mixing
  • Small pan for melting soap
  • Hot water
  • Lots of bottles/containers for storing soap

Instructions:
  1. Grate your bar of soap into a pan which will be melted on the stove with water. Add just enough water to melt the soap, the exact amount doesn't matter as you will be adding more soon. Your soap will probably foam a little bit, that's normal. Stir until your grated soap is completely dissolved.
  2. Fill one of your 5 gallon buckets about half full with hot water. Add your melted soap, 1 Cup of Borax, and 1/2 of Washing Soda, mix well.
  3. Fill the bucket the rest of the way with hot water, cover, and leave alone for 24 hours.
  4. After your laundry detergent mixture has been allowed to sit for 24 hours, it will somewhat solidify, almost like a bucket of slime. Now comes the fun part... Mixing! Using your spoon with the slots in it, stir your homemade detergent to break it up as best you can.
  5. Get out your second 5 gallon bucket and split your mixture between the two containers. Fill the buckets with hot water and give one last good stir.
  6. Using a funnel, fill your homemade laundry soap into bottles/containers (2 liter soda bottles, juice bottles, and old laundry soap containers work great)
  7. Use 1 Cup of your easy homemade laundry detergent per load of laundry. Also a great pre-treater for stains.
Yields 10 gallons of soap

3 comments:

  1. Do you know if this mixture is safe for HE machines?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Yes, we use it in ours. It also cleans MUCH better than anything on the market.

      The last couple of months, we've been making dry soap:
      3 bars of Fels Naptha (very finely shredded/processed), 1 box Super Washing Soda, 1 box Borax, 1 3 lb. container of OxyClean. Mix all together and use 1 Tbsp. per load.

      Delete
  2. What are you using to shred the bar soap?

    ReplyDelete