A few weeks ago I decided to try another attempt at making my own DIY liquid laundry soap. I had actually tried another recipe a few years back with no success. It was so bad that my wife all but forbid me to try it again. 😉 Ok, it wasn’t THAT bad but the recipe I tried–which supposedly made something like 10 gallons of laundry soap if I remember right–was just way too watered-down to be worth a darn.
And, of course, there was the grating and boiling of laundry soap bars that wasn’t much fun either. So, I searched and I searched for a recipe that looked like it would work for us. No doubt there are MANY recipes out there. Fortunately, this one is very simple to make and had promise. I should point out that this recipe is quite a bit watery too but seems to work better than the other recipe I tried… and it still actually has plenty of sudsy bubbles. 🙂
DIY Liquid Laundry Soap Ingredients
You’ll want to adjust your recipe quantities to fit the container you use but I wanted my recipe to refill one of those large 200+ ounce jugs we use. As such, I needed to make roughly one and a half gallons worth of soap. To do so I used:
- 1/2 cup borax
- 1/2 cup super washing soda
- 1/3 cup of Dawn dish soap (I used Ultra Dawn but regular may work just fine too)
- 4 cups hot or boiling water + enough cold water to fill the jug
DIY Liquid Laundry Soap Directions
- Add 1/2 cup Borax and 1/2 cup of Super Washing Soda to a large mixing cup or bowl. I used a four-cup mixing cup but probably would have been better off with a slightly larger option. The other recipes I found said to use boiling water. I choose to use very hot tap water which worked well enough but I did notice that the borax and washing soda didn’t completely dissolve which required me to add another two cups of hot water to dissolve the rest. No big deal, just something to note.
- Add the diluted borax/washing soda mixture to your container then add 1/3 cup of Dawn dish soap. Replace the cap and shake well. You’ll see a lot of sudsing but that’s ok.
- Add cold tap water until the rest of the bottle is nearly full. As you can see suds began pouring out.
- The suds continued to pour out and wound up all over the bottom of my sink. At least my sink was going to cleaned well. 🙂
- Label the jar with the ingredients (or write down wherever you prefer) and begin using about 1/2 cup per load (adjust more or less as needed).
Thus far we’ve used about half the bottle of our DIY liquid laundry soap with no problems in the washer or with our clothes. Granted, we don’t get our clothing super dirty so I can’t say for sure how well it works on grungy, soiled clothing. That said, for normal cleaning duties it works just fine and is certainly less expensive than store-bought detergent.
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