Save Over $25.00 a Hour Making Your Own Laundry Soap

During the last couple of months, I have been looking for a large stock pot casually as I went to thrift stores to make my own laundry soap.  Well now that I found one for $6.00 at Goodwill, I figured it was time to do it.

I have only ever used liquid laundry soap, which takes a bit more preparation than making a dry laundry soap.  I used a recipe I found at Wellness Mama after doing a google search.

So, yea you can make your own laundry soap, but is it really worth your time?

To be frank… it is definitely worth your time.

So how did I come up with over $25.00 an hour savings?

Well first, I compared that to the cheapest alternative of laundry soap that I could use.  Now I cannot use the cheapo stuff, my skin gives a reaction.  I have had to use either All or Tide brands in the past.  Of those two All was generally the cheaper alternative.  So when I was picking up supplies at Walmart to make this, I looked at the price per load for their largest liquid laundry soap for All.

That price was $0.09975 per load

Now making my own laundry soap costs $0.013 per load, but a single batch makes 5 gallons or 160 loads!

So buying that much in All detergent would cost $14.96, and the work took a total of 30 minutes for a cost of $2.02 for the entire batch, so for a half hour, I saved $12.94 or  $25.88 per hour!

Is it actually difficult to make the laundry soap?

No, for the most part, I followed the steps provided on the blog, and I have a step-by-step with a few pictures.

1. Fill your pot with a 1/2 gallon of water.
2. Grate your bar soap directly into the pot with water.  I used a Kirk’s Castile Coconut Oil Soap bar that I got in a 3-pack.
3. Gradually Heat the mixture and stir occasionally until dissolves
4. Add 4.5 Gallons of water and stir in 1 cup of Borax and 1 cup of Super Washing Soda
5. Stir well and turn off heat.
6. Cover pot and leave overnight
7. Give it a good stir until smooth and use a 1/2 cup per load of laundry!

Optional step: transferring all of the liquid into other containers (such as old laundry soap container or milk jugs), I am lazy and just store it all in the pot I got from Goodwill.  Once it is low then maybe I will dump the last gallon or two into a couple of containers so that I can make the next batch.