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.
