Laundry Soap - What Works for Me

Many moons ago, when I was first getting started on being even more frugal in an effort to save Daniel's hard-earned moo-lah, I switched from "cheap but good" store-bought laundry soap to making my own. It is very, very inexpensive to make and 1/2 a recipe lasted us quite a long time.


I think I used homemade for about a year and a half. Many people that I know IRL (In Real Life) and through the blogging world use the same recipe for homemade laundry soap and it works great for them. I figured it would do the same for me :) I was tickled pink to be able to save money in this area of our lives, especially since it kinda is a necessity :P

Towards the end of summer last year (2009) I started seriously paying attention to our clean laundry. I was beginning to notice things that I didn't really like. Two things that stood out to me the most: First was that Daniel's clothing that he wears for work (jeans, company shirt, etc.) was not smelling so nice after a good washing, even with line-drying on a nice, sunny day. Especially the clothes from the days that he would get so hot and sweaty, the clothes would still smell sweaty and stinky when I'd get them in off the wash-line. The second thing I was really noticing was that the towels and washcloths were getting the same way. Smelling very stagnant and stale, and the lighter colored washcloths were becoming very dingy and gray in color. For some of the washcloths, it was very obvious exactly where my body-wash had been, either because there was a large gray area, or the color from the body-wash (which was pink Oil of Olay at that time) was staying in the cloth. I didn't care for any of it.

I decided to "experiment" with a jug of Tide laundry detergent.

Photo from Tide's website.

The next time Tide was on sale and I had coupons, I bought some. It was a 64 load bottle. I wanted to try two things: First and foremost, I wanted to see if it made an obvious difference in the cleanliness of the clothes. Second, I often hear people say that the number of loads that is listed on the bottle is a bunch of hooey because they never get that many loads, so I wanted to see exactly how many loads I got out of this bottle.

The results from the first would be that almost immediately I noticed a big difference. Within 2 washings (2 weeks), the towels and washcloths lost almost all of their dinginess. The one white washcloth that had the pink area from the body wash was white again (and it had been pink for some time!). Daniel's clothes were smelling clean and not just like rinsed sweat. Yes, I'm sure that the fragrance of the detergent had some effect on that, but when I line dry the clothes I don't really notice the detergent smell so much as the laundry just smells like clean fresh air :)

The second experiment proved the bottle to be correct. The fine print stated that the 64 loads was based on the 1st line (smallest amount) in the bottle cap. I eye-balled it and determined that line 2 was equal to 1 1/2 "loads" and line 3 was equal to 2 "loads" worth of detergent. Based on this, I kept a marker with the bottle and each time I did laundry, I marked on the bottle how many "loads" worth of detergent I used. In the end? I had gotten just a few more than 64 "loads" of laundry out of that bottle!!

So, for now, what works for me is Tide. So far I have been able to get it fairly cheaply (as far as Tide goes) and I'm hoping for another good sale to come around before I run out again :) I have not been brave enough to try the "less expensive than Tide" brands again. I may, or I may not. Right now I'm very happy with Tide!!

This post is linked to this week's Works for Me Wednesday.