An In-Depth Look At Homemade Dishwashing Detergent

Keeping in the same vein as my earlier posts here, here, and here, I’m going to be looking at how we make our dishwashing detergent.

With very little googling involved you’ll find that dishwashing detergent isn’t that great for your health or the environment. The bad thing is that you are putting this stuff on things that hot food sits on before going in your mouth. We use a powdered mix and here is how we do it:

Making The Detergent

This is a really quick, easy, and cheap process. We only need four ingredients and you may need even less depending on how hard your water is. We take 1 cup of Washing soda:

Mix it with 1 cup of Borax:

And with a ½ cup of kosher salt:

We put it into one of the many plastic containers we still have but try not to use any more and mix it up. Make sure that you get all the clumps out of it. We put our mixture in another plastic container we don’t use for food anymore with a tablespoon scoop in it. Don’t add the citric acid to the mix it will cause the mixture to clump up.

Use

After we load our dishwasher as much as possible we put 1 teaspoon of powdered citric acid in the soap reservoir, we add 1 tablespoon of our mixture to the inside of the door, and we make sure our rinse reservoir is filled with distilled white vinegar. The dishes come out clean every time.

Cost

Using my earlier (albeit bad) calculations/estimates here is a rough breakdown on costs:

Borax                          42¢*

Washing Soda            43¢

Salt                              <1¢

Each batch costs 85¢ and produces 2 and ½ cups or 40 tablespoons so it costs 2 and 1/8¢ + the citric acid and vinegar that I need to compute at some point in the future and add it in.

Cheap, easy, and a little fun. Give it a try.

*this number is different from the other days number but I believe this number to be more accurate.