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laundry detergent

Use caution when making DIY laundry detergent

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Many of us have begun making laundry soap with Fels Naptha soap, borax, and washing soda. If you’re doing that, please take a look at what’s in Fels Naptha soap. Turns out the stuff contains mineral spirits, a petroleum product. It can be highly irritating and apparently should not be used as a regular laundry additive.

Several bloggers have reported good results using ordinary bath soap, such as Ivory. See, for example, Thrifty Fun, Little House in the Suburbs, and The Simple Dollar, among others. Whichever bar soap you decide to use, be careful when grinding it in a food processor. Some soaps can throw off fine dust when processed, which will fly up into your face when you open the machine’s lid. Avoid breathing the stuff, either by waiting a while before opening the food processor or at least by keeping your face a good long way back from the machine.

Hold the dish detergent, please

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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.