Tag Archives: Washing machine

Cheap & Excellent Laundry Update

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The homemade laundry detergent that I made from Michael Nolan’s blog post has been working exceptionally well! Here’s my experience so far:

  • General Laundry: The lack of perfumes and fragrances are rather shocking. You lean in to sniff and there isn’t anything there. Not having overdone fragrances nearly brings on a reflexive search, very much in the vein of “I must not have a good grip on this sock…” and to be honest, it feels cleaner now than it did before, no odd someone-else-thought-this-smelled-nice fragrance just malingering after a wash. I appreciate it.
  • Extreme Laundry: Doubling what I normally use and using HOT water, this preparation actually outperformed Liquid Tide and removed not only fresh oil stains but older really set-in oil stains. There are two runners in our kitchen that are for comfort and to hide a oopsy-daisy burn-mark on our kitchen carpeting. Yes, I said it. Kitchen Carpeting. The previous owners were lazy and old. There is hardwood floors underneath but we’re too terrified to actually look for the fear that once we pull up the carpet, we’ll have a $5000 rehab job on the flooring that will need to be done.
  • Big-Batch Laundry: That is coming today, as soon as I get home and strip the slipcovers off of our white Living Room couch. There is a LOT of fabric in that deal and I’m going to take it down to the laundromat where they have the fancy 50 pound front-loading industry-sized washing machines and use half-a-cup of the cleaning solution on it with HOT water. That should fix it’s wagon. I’ll write an update to see if the fancy-powder-of-happiness can power out some of the odd stains and marks on the slipcover.

Between Michael Nolan and Lifehacker’s Blog I find so many neat ideas and clever tips that it makes me dizzy! It’s so wonderful when things like this go so very well, to say nothing about the frugality of it all! Bravo!

My Clever Laundrette

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This weeks theme is “Clean or Die” and as a wonderful spot of serendipity I ran over this blog post by a fellow I’ve been following for quite some time. I went to my local Meijers market and while there to stock up on some needful food items I thought I would walk down to the laundry aisle and see if Meijers carried any of the items listed in the post. The items specifically are:

  • Borax (sodium tetraborate)
  • Washing Soda (sodium carbonate)
  • Ivory Soap

As it turns out, I only have a very faint and foggy understanding of what Borax is and not a single clue as to what Washing Soda might be, at least I know what Ivory Soap is, oddly enough, that was the most common and most annoying item to buy. The Borax and the Washing Soda were the first big surprises, they were nestled up against each other at the end of the laundry aisle, far away from the big expensive detergents, hanging out in the “laundry additives ghetto”. At the other end of the ghetto were the bar soaps. Meijers doesn’t sell Ivory in single or even double-packs, instead, you have to buy a 10-pack. The price, $4, of course is insanely cheap, but the fact that I couldn’t acquire just a few bars at once irked me. My snark would have been fully realized if Meijers had put all three next to each other, but alas, that was not to be.

I had the earlier referenced blog page printed out and after I had whipped together dinner I got out some non-food-use implements and started to assemble the recipe for the laundry soap. With three ingredients, it was embarrassingly easy to assemble. Pour this, pour that, but when it came to the Ivory soap, I was blown away. The instructions say to microwave the ivory soap in a container. Huh? You don’t cook soap! Well, yes, that’s actually the entire point! I got a plastic tub, put the Ivory in it, and closed the door and turned on my Microwave. At first I was full-o-doubt, but then the damn thing started to foam and extrude big white fluffy cloud-shapes out of the side. I realized that I needed at least 2 minutes, not 90 seconds, but that may be due to a difference in microwave wattage. Once I was done decimating the Ivory soap, I grabbed the giant puffy white mass and knocked it down and then mixed everything together with my handy-dandy potato masher. I suppose I could have used my KitchenAid Mixer, but on something this exploratory, I didn’t want to make a mess of my entire kitchen.

The end product is quite plain. It’s a white powder with very teeny puffy bits interspersed throughout. It has a very feeble scent of Ivory soap and it made me sneeze a few times. Once I was done and ready to process a extra-large load of laundry I went downstairs with my powder in hand and utterly geeked at the novelty of it all. As I stood stooping over my plain-jane Whirlpool washing machine (not HE, of course) it struck me. I have no idea what an appropriate load measurement might be for this powder. The blog post goes on about two tablespoons of powder in an HE machine, which does me no good with my old-skool standard washing machine. I thought about the powder, what each one does and pulled a 1/4 cup per XL load out of thin air. I started my machine, waited for a inch-deep puddle in the bottom of the basin to collect and tossed in my powder. Once it was in, I added the clothes.

When the cycle was done I pulled out a shirt and gave it a sniff. Absolutely nothing. No fragrance, no scent at all. It was honestly clean, nothing left behind. I sampled other items and they all were the same way, no scent at all. Everything being equal, I still have a 64-load jug of Tide Liquid Detergent to use up but this powder is really quite good.

How about the economics? By my calculations, buying everything either in a market or off of Amazon (I used Amazon because they display prices) the per-ounce price of this laundry cleanser is 43 cents. I guess a quarter cup per XL load, so that’s two ounces so my per-load cost is 87 cents! If I had a HE machine, it’d be half that price!

So if this home-crafted laundry detergent costs 87 cents for a XL load, leaves no perfumes behind, cleans soiled clothing adequately and is non-toxic to the environment how can you go wrong?