Do you want to save $60.00 this year?
Make your own liquid laundry detergent.
It’s easy, cheap and fast! You don’t need any special equipment.
I’ll tell you how I wash clothes for 2.3 cents per load.
There are 3 Ingredients:
- Borax,
- Washing Soda (Not Baking Soda!), and
- Dawn or Palmolive Dishwashing Liquid (the handwashing kind, not for dishwashers, & get the good stuff.)
You can buy these on Amazon, but it’s going to be way cheaper at the Wal-Mart.
Here’s the Nuts ‘N’ Bolts of how we calculated the savings. Check out the breakdown below:
You can buy 4 pound boxes of Borax, which is approximately 13 cups, for $3.99. We use one quarter cup per recipe. This works out to 7.67 cents per load for the Borax.
You can buy 3 pound boxes of Washing Soda for the same $3.99. Ibotta had a $1.25 rebates on these recently, so be sure to check for the additional savings because, well, money. Even at $3.99 for 3 pounds, this works out to 12.46 cents per quarter cup, as each box has about 8 cups of product.
For the Dawn/Palmolive (seriously, buy the good stuff for this), 3 Tablespoons works out to 16.67 cents, if you buy the 25 oz bottle for about $2.50.
Our total for a recipe then is
$7.67 (Borax)
+ 12.46 (Washing Soda)
+ 16.67 (Dawn)
= 36.79 (37 cents).
Each gallon of detergent makes 16 regular loads (one cup per load)
$0. 37 cents / 16 loads = 2.3 cents per load!
I like to add a capful of those scent crystals to each load, which can bump up the cost to about 3.5 cents per load. Still saving money.
How much are YOU spending on laundry?
What do you buy, Purex? Gain? (GASP) Tide????
Look, I could impress you with savings from Tide, but I’m going to choose the most popular one for the sake of comparison. Now, I did do some research. I stood in the laundry aisle the other day for about fifteen minutes, just watching people shop for detergent, pretending to fiddle with my phone. Was it weird that 14 out of 22 of you went for the Gain? And most ofyou picked the liquid. (No, it was not the one on sale that week.)
Since it appears to be the public favorite, I’ll use Gain’s price from the Wal-Mart in my comparison below. It’s $5.97 for 50 ounces, which will wash approximately 32 loads. This is a nice figure since our detergent washes 16 loads, exactly half. Anyway, the Gain detergent works out to 18.65 cents per load.
Seems inexpensive enough.
Until you consider how much laundry you actually wash.
I am assuming you wash a load of whites, a load of darks, some towels/blankets, at least one set of sheets, socks/underwear/dirty-dirty clothes, maybe a load of dress clothes or play clothes, and one to grow on.
Basically, I’m assuming you wash seven loads per week.
GAIN LIQUID DETERGENT
7 x 14 cents per Gain load = $1.30 per week
Total Gain cost for the 52 weeks in the year is $67.91
Laundry doesn’t stop for vacation and we don’t take two weeks off each year not wearing clothes, so my calculations are based on this assumption: 52 weeks of laundry each year.
HOMEMADE DETERGENT
7 x 2.3 cents per homemade recipe load = $0.16
Total Homemade Laundry Detergent cost for the year is $8.37 (The initial purchase price of $10.48 will wash 256 loads before you have to buy more Dishwashing Detergent.)
Annual Savings for Liquid Laundry Detergent:
$67.91 – 8.37 = 59.54
But wait! There’s more! Are you using dryer sheets?
You know you don’t need dryer sheets, right?
Sure, you can buy a box of 80 Bounce Dryer Sheets for, like, $3.97. (B-B-But that’s 4.9 cents per load!) But you can eliminate this cost entirely by using a wadded up ball of (clean) re-used aluminum foil. I’m not kidding. It works the same. Or ask for some dryer balls for Christmas. Or use a tennis ball stuffed in a sock.
Eliminating this one thing will save you $18.06 more dollars per year.
$18.06 + $59.54 = $77.60 Annual Savings
Plus you don’t have all those plastic bottles and boxes to recycle. Less waste. Go Earth.
Speaking of less waste, if you have a little extra time and are willing to make a little extra effort, this is my favorite, favorite homemade laundry detergent. It just takes a tablespoon per load, stores 128 loads in a mason jar, and smells amazing. And you wanna talk about stain removal? Seriously great!
~ Erica
Have you ever made your own laundry detergent? How’d it go?