Curious about laundry detergent...

The soap isn't body soap but soap designed for washing clothes... Fels-Naptha would be one, Octagon if you can find it is another, and Zout (bar) is yet another. They are designed specifically harsh for washing clothing. Or you could use any lye soap, including homemade, instead of the named brands.

Borax and washing soda are additives that enhance the action of the soap as I understand them. I never heard of them being used alone but clearly I don't know everything.

I've thought of the soap flakes, but I just never used it. They would be soap of the right type and would remove the need to shred the bar soap. To use you'd just weight them out along with the powders, mix, then blend.

we used to make our own as well...tried various different recipes and never found them to be exactly better than store bought. the wife has been using branch basics products for a few months now. I can't really say it's much better, but it makes her happy. here's a link: https://branchbasics.com/

it is cheaper to make your own than buy from the store though, for sure.

OK, maybe some words need to be expanded on.... I should have done this sooner, and indeed had it written, but decided not to post it.

There is laundry DETERGENT vs laundry SOAP. They are very different substances. One cleans but doesn't do all of the things that modern science can do, such as brightening and whitening. Bright and white does not mean clean. My shop towels are NOT bright and white, but they are definitely clean, as are our clothes.

Detergents are not the same as soaps and don't make the cloth entrusted to them finish the same. They are known to have brighteners and whiteners which soaps and such don't contain. But detergents can have negative consequences for some folks that soaps and such might not. Most detergents are synthetic and most soaps are "natural" more or less. I'm not stating that one is better than another, just that they have their own characteristics. YMMV.

But one must understand the difference between clean, and bright and white. They are very different things.

FWIW, soaps can be used with bleaches and bluing and brighteners to mimic what detergent blends do, but it's more work. Frankly folks today want none of that, so the detergents command the majority of the laundry cleaning business. Yeah, we're aware of that. I still choose soap and borax and washing soda for my own reasons. In fact I chose soap for our laundry after many years of using really good detergent. I still use detergent once in awhile to bring the fabrics back to bright and white.

One can be selective in ones choice of cleaning chemicals and not blindly use one over another exclusively and think that's the end of it. It all winds up in the environment and we all live with the consequences after that.

Personally I dump my cleaning chemicals into my septic system and into my land, so I have a personal responsibility to myself and those who come after to not poison them. Don't make religion of this. It's just a responsibility I feel for what I've been entrusted with. It's much easier to use whatever if one puts it in a pipe that others need to take care of. Except much of what's "flushed" is never taken care of, it' just a can kicked down the road.

Read nothing more into what I've written other than personal responsibility. Read any more into it than that and I guarantee you that you would be absolutely wrong. I am no tree hugger but I understand my role as a steward.

I've made several batches of bath soap for personal use, to some degree of mild success. I find it fun, and I was curious to see if anyone has used (or made) hand-made laundry soap and what their experience was? It doesn't seem to be all that difficult to make.
If you've used flake or hand-made laundry detergent, does it work well in HE (high efficiency) machines?

Gareth,

We used to make and sell it on Stirling's website.  We used our own handmade soap for it.  We used a Vegan Soap formula with a 0% lye discount so there wouldn't be any leftover unsaponified oils in the mix. That's the biggest mistake most people make that try to make it from scratch. If you use a base soap that has unsaponified oils, they will leech into your clothes over time and make them water resistant and they will start to smell bad. We had tried the fels naptha method before (and it works fine), but we found that using an actual real soap in the mix with the borax and sodium carbonate rather than a bar that still contains a bunch of fillers work much better.

We still make our own for personal use ters as normal laundry detergent irritates both their kids' skin.  We use fragrance samplers typically, so I can have laundry powder that smells like a Creed cologne, or English Lavender, or really anything that suits my mood.  The only reason we stopped selling it was just lack of space, and the high costs of shipping it.

Rod

Would you be willing to share your recipe?

I think DapperDragon experimented with it, can't find the thread now...

Nope, not me. Read about it, but never tried it.

OK, maybe some words need to be expanded on.... I should have done this sooner, and indeed had it written, but decided not to post it.

There is laundry DETERGENT vs laundry SOAP. They are very different substances. One cleans but doesn't do all of the things that modern science can do, such as brightening and whitening. Bright and white does not mean clean. My shop towels are NOT bright and white, but they are definitely clean, as are our clothes.

Detergents are not the same as soaps and don't make the cloth entrusted to them finish the same. They are known to have brighteners and whiteners which soaps and such don't contain. But detergents can have negative consequences for some folks that soaps and such might not. Most detergents are synthetic and most soaps are "natural"  more or less. I'm not stating that one is better than another, just that they have their own characteristics. YMMV.

But one must understand the difference between clean, and bright and white. They are very different things.

FWIW, soaps can be used with bleaches and bluing and brighteners to mimic what detergent blends do, but it's more work. Frankly folks today want none of that, so the detergents command the majority of the laundry cleaning business. Yeah, we're aware of that. I still choose soap and borax and washing soda for my own reasons. In fact I chose soap for our laundry after many years of using really good detergent. I still use detergent once in awhile to bring the fabrics back to bright and white.

One can be selective in ones choice of cleaning chemicals and not blindly use one over another exclusively and think that's the end of it. It all winds up in the environment and we all live with the consequences after that.

Personally I dump my cleaning chemicals into my septic system  and into my land, so I have a personal responsibility to myself and those who come after to not poison them. Don't make religion of this. It's just a responsibility I feel for what I've been entrusted with. It's much easier to use whatever if one puts it in a pipe that others need to take care of. Except much of what's "flushed" is never taken care of, it' just a can kicked down the road.

Read nothing more into what I've written other than personal responsibility. Read any more into it than that and I guarantee you that you would be absolutely wrong. I am no tree hugger but I understand my role as a steward.

I've noticed that when we switched from using store detergents to our own soap/liquid, my white undershirts got a lot more dingy and dull. I had the wife bleach them a week or two ago and while they brightened up some, I'll probably need to hit them with another round or bleach.

Would you be willing to share your recipe?

Sure. The breakdown was 35% sodium carbonate (plain old arm and hammer washing soda works great, but you can get it much cheaper in bulk), 35% Borax, and the remaining 30% was our cold process soap blend (substitute fels naptha or another bar made for laundry. Regardless of what you may read on some housewife's blog, don't use just any old bar soap. You'll ruin your clothes). We had large food processor that we'd use to grind up everything into fine powder for 60-75 seconds, and then add in whatever fragrance oil we wanted it to smell like for the last 15 seconds of processing. It works great, but you do need to keep whites separate and use bleach with your whites to keep them super bright (or oxy clean). For fragrance amounts - it really doesn't take much. Anything more than 0.1 ounces per pound and you risk your clothes smelling like you just came out of a French bordello. And speaking of fragrance oils, I've got hundreds of fragrance samples (0.5 oz up to 2 oz) saved up from testing over the years. If anyone ever wants some to make their own soap or laundry soap, just let me know. As long as you'll cover shipping, you can have as many as you'd like.

Would you be willing to share your recipe?

Sure.  The breakdown was 35% sodium carbonate (plain old arm and hammer washing soda works great, but you can get it much cheaper in bulk), 35% Borax, and the remaining 30% was our cold process soap blend (substitute fels naptha or another bar made for laundry. Regardless of what you may read on some housewife's blog, don't use just any old bar soap.  You'll ruin your clothes).  We had large food processor that we'd use to grind up everything into fine powder for 60-75 seconds, and then add in whatever fragrance oil we wanted it to smell like for the last 15 seconds of processing. It works great, but you do need to keep whites separate and use bleach with your whites to keep them super bright (or oxy clean). For fragrance amounts - it really doesn't take much. Anything more than 0.1 ounces per pound and you risk your clothes smelling like you just came out of a French bordello. And speaking of fragrance oils, I've got hundreds of fragrance samples (0.5 oz up to 2 oz) saved up from testing over the years. If anyone ever wants some to make their own soap or laundry soap, just let me know.  As long as you'll cover shipping, you can have as many as you'd like.

Thanks Rod, I'm gonna try this.

Clayton

I've also read about adding TSP (trisodium phosphate) into the blends to help it boost its cleaning power. apparently this used to be included in all soaps/detergents before the government got involved and banned it in household products because of some misguided and unproven theories. you can still buy it on amazon and at your local home centers.

Yes, TSP is good stuff, but not when released into the environment untreated . If the waste water goes through a treatment plant it's used up since treatment plants must add phosphorus in order to work. In my case it would go through my septic system and if not used up by the bugs then it goes into the soil where there are organisms and plants just waiting to make use of it.

There are other chemicals as well that would be beneficial in the wash, And believe it or not I use at least one in cooking when I make cheese sauce or processed cheese. If one has eaten American cheese, yes, you've eaten it. American cheese can't be made without it.

Thanks Andrew, I'd forgotten that! It'll make my laundry soap better.