The secret is out. Making your own laundry detergent is not only frugal, environmentally friendly, and easy, its also kind of fun! I’m a bit of a science geek, and when I was young I used to do experiments like this all the time. It certainly did my heart good to find this particular experiment would benefit me in numerous ways.
I read How to Make Your Own Laundry Detergent over at The Simple Dollar last week. Interesting, I thought to myself, this doesn’t seem like too much of a pain, maybe I should give a whirl. Rob brought home a 5 gallon bucket the following day, and I scoped out the laundry soap aisles for the supplies I needed over the weekend. My costs were a bit different, but I used the same supplies Trent did with the exception of the bar soap, I used Irish Spring.
Borax $3.36, washing soda $2.59, bar soap $0.97, total cost $6.92. About the cost of ONE bottle of Tide. Not too bad.
Sunday night I got to grating up the bar soap and making my soap soup. While that was simmering, I filled up the bucket with about 3 gallons of water and placed it in the kitchen. Everything came together fairly quickly. All told, it probably took me about 20 minutes to do everything, put the lid on and left it in the laundry room to set.
When I got home from work Monday evening, I was all excited to see what I had. The texture was similar to Jello until I poked it with my spatula. I stirred it a bit and had a nice concoction of globbery goup. I saved a bit of dirty laundry to try it out on, and I am happy to report I notice no difference between the store-bought detergent and my homemade stuff. Plus, it smells like Irish Spring, which is one of my favorite smells 
Luckily, a couple of my empty detergent bottles hadn’t made it into the recycling bin yet, so I filled those up to make dispensing a little easier.
If you are sick of paying through the nose to get your clothes clean, give this a try. Seriously, its a half hour of your life that will pay you back over and over again. Additionally, you don’t have to lug the bottles home from the store. You don’t have to add to landfills. And you don’t have to worry about what perfumes and dyes are in it because YOU made it!
As an aside, I accidentally bought a ginormous box of baking soda thinking it was the same thing as the washing soda. I’ve already found a bunch of uses for it right on the side of the box. Let’s see what kind of experiments I can come up with for it!uses for baking soda