Natural, Homemade Dishwasher Detergent...
A few weeks ago Jim and I got our first essential oil diffuser. To say we like it is a complete understatement. We are mildly obsessed with it.
Over the last few months, I have been slowly growing in my skills in trying to make more homemade and natural products for our home. My most recent natural living experiment was making laundry detergent, which went interesting? Yeah let's go with that.
Since that mis-hap, I have been wanting to take a crack at making dishwasher detergent. I am quite pleased to say this went much better than grating endless bars of Fels-Naphtha soap.
So when I found a recipe from this book for dishwasher detergent, I knew I wanted to try it out!!
Like I said, cheap and only 4 ingredients. Can't be too hard right?
Ingredients
2 cups of Borax
2 cups of Baking soda
1/2 cup of white vinegar
20 drops of lemon essential oil
ice cube tray (not pictured)
1// Mix together the Borax and baking soda. Easy enough.
2// Slowly add the white vinegar to dry mixture. Mix well.
3// Add the 20 drops of essential oil. (Side-note: lemon oil not only smells great, but has amazing cleaning properties in it!)
4// Mix well again to spread around the oil.
5// Carefully spoon with a tablespoon measuring cup the mixture in slots of the ice cube tray. Pack it in tightly, but do not fill to the top of the tray. Keep tapping each slot until the mixture feels secure
The directions call for letting the mixture stay in the mold overnight or to dry out in the sun. I also threw the tray in the freezer to help keep the form even more.
Then, just store in sealed Tupperware. One batch has a shelf life of 2 months.
Total cost??
1 box Borax-$3.97 at Kroger
1 box baking soda-.99 at Aldi
1 bottle of vinegar-$1.79 at Aldi
Not a bad deal at $6.75!!!
Are any of you into making homemade, natural products for your family?
What are your favorite go-to items?
Happy dish washing!
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Patty, thanks for sharing this recipe!!! We don't use much detergent, but I will keep this in mind for the future. I don't have to do "natural everything," but the hippy in me does like natural stuff when it's easy and cheap :) I think one of my favorite "natural" things to make for home is coffee body scrub: coffee grounds, brown sugar, olive oil. It makes the shower (and me!) smell like coffee, coffee has awesome exfoliating properties, and it gives me an excuse to drink more coffee (all in the name of exfoliated skin!). So that's pretty fun :)
ReplyDeleteI recently won some wild orange essential oil in a contest, and I'm trying to figure out the best possible way to use it-do you have any thoughts on what would be good?
This DOES sound easier than the laundry detergent recipe! Question though, how many cubes does one batch yield? I get the shelf life part, but is it actually cheaper than buying detergent pre-made?
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