Here’s a little discovery: liquid laundry detergent works as well as (maybe better than) dish detergent, and it costs less. Possibly it can be made to cost a lot less.
In the past when I’ve burned food on a pan and not wanted to scrub it clean right after dinner, I’ve carted the dirty pan out to the utility sink, squirted a little laundry detergent in it, added water, and left it to soak. The laundry detergent seems to work a lot better than dish detergent to soak off stuck food.
I don’t like perfumes and dyes either in the kitchen or the laundry (but I draw the line at paying extra for so-called “natural” products because of the high scam potential), and so I buy Kirkland’s Ultra liquid laundry detergent and clear Ivory dish detergent. I transfer the Ivory into a vinegar cruet, partly because it gets the advertising off my kitchen counter (which is not Proctor and Gamble’s billboard!) and partly because you only need a tiny fraction of the detergent dispensed from a squirt bottle—a hard-sided container with a dripper top is a lot more economical.
Last week I was running low on dish detergent and on cash. Having made up my mind to stick to as many no-purchase days as possible, I decided that if I ran out, I’d substitute a little laundry detergent. That led me to wonder whether using laundry detergent would be more or less costly, per squirt, than Ivory dish detergent.
Wonder no more! The results from today’s Costco/Safeway run are in.
The Safeway brand of clear, relatively unadulterated laundry detergent is 7.99 cents an ounce; at Safeway, Planet eco-friendly detergent will cost you 19.98 cents an ounce. Kirkland’s clear, relatively unstinky liquid laundry detergent and its “green” variant are both the same: 7.64 cents an ounce.
Ivory was selling for 9.96 cents an ounce at Safeway.
You probably could get Ivory cheaper somewhere else, and if you don’t mind blue, green, or orange dye in your cleaning products, you’d no doubt pay less to wash your dishes.
The difference between the Ivory and the Kirkland detergent is 2.32 cents an ounce, not an inconsiderable amount—especially if you wash all your dishes by hand.
Now, laundry detergent is highly concentrated. If you wanted to use it at the kitchen sink, you could dilute it with water—probably by a fair amount!—and still have an effective dish detergent. And that would represent a real savings.
Hi – I use an oil dispenser for dish detergent – it is decorative and allows only a bit of dish detergent out at a time. Add about an inch of water if the liquid is too expensive. Also, try putting baking soda on the burned mess in a pan, then add about an inch of water and boil. Most stuck on food will lift right off in a couple of minutes.
Another tidbit from a previous post….if you soak a garment in hot water and white vinegar for about 5 minutes or so it will color fast the fabric. Works much better than salt.
Take care
Previous post should say “if the liquid is too thick” not expensive. My bad – sorry.
Good baking soda hint! I’ve tried vinegar to set dyes, too…sometimes it does work pretty well.
In college, we used to soak our university-branded sweatshirts in salt water to try to set the dye–which was fire-engine red. LOL! It didn’t stop my mother, one holiday weekend, from dropping my sweatshirt into a load of underwear that my boyfriend (whom she loathed) had lugged to our house for her to wash. Chortle!!! It dyed all his jockey shorts pink!
I might caution you about the laundry soap for dishes, because dish soap is supposedly food safe (meaning if you ingest a little it won’t kill you) . Laundry soap not necessarily so…Same for using plastic bags that are not food specific to store food. Like garbage bags..they could actually leach lead or other chemicals into your food. Better safe than sorry.
Hmm…. Good point! One never knows what’s in chemicals marketed to consumers.