Laundry Soap, Our Recipe

Liquid Laundry Soap Recipe
This is 'green' for those interested in more natural cleaners. This is VERY frugal for those interested in their budgets. This cleans clothes, for those interested in clean laundry. And it does not really take that much time.

3 Pints (six cups of water) Water
1/3 Bar Fels Naptha Soap, Grated (we use a vegetable peeler and just pare it into strips- and we have made this with all different sorts of soap, including IVory and the Fels Naptha bar soap instead of the laundry soap- it all works, although different bars thicken to different degrees)

1/2 Cup Washing Soda (Arm and Hammer makes it. You find it in the laundry or cleaning section of your grocer's. This is a GREAT cleaner, and we use it for several things. If you cannot get it, you can use Baking Soda, but it works more as a softener than a cleaner. I think you can use 'Nellie's All-Natural Laundry Soda,' but this is so expensive that this is no longer a frugal recipe if you do).

1/2 Cup Borax (I've only seen 20 Mule Team brand- this is a mineral, which is why you'll see it in so many 'green' cleaning recipes)

Optional: A few drops of lavender essential oil for a pleasant scent. Lavender is also traditionally used to keep stored clothing fresh and moth free without the nasty smell of mothballs.

2 Gallon Bucket* (see below for variation)

1 Quart (four cups) Hot Water
More Hot Water

Mix the grated 1/3 of a bar of Fels Naptha (or any other) soap in a saucepan with 3 pints (six cups) of water, and heat on low until soap is dissolved.

Stir in Washing Soda and Borax. Stir until thickened (the consistency of honey, according to one of my recipes, but it doesn't always get this thick for us- often it's not much thicker than my dish soap. So it's okay if after ten minutes or so it hasn't gotten thin, just move on to the next step), which is:

Remove from heat.

*Add 1 Quart (four cups) Hot Water to 2 Gallon Bucket (OR OTHER LARGE CONTAINER).

Add soap mixture, and mix well. (see below for variation)*

Fill bucket with hot water, and mix well. Set aside for 24 hours, or until mixture thickens (we usually set it aside overnight only).

Use 1/2 cup of mixture per load for top loader.

Front Loading Machines: For light load, use 1 tablespoon. For heavy or heavily soiled load, use 2 tablespoons.

*We do not have a two-gallon bucket, or if we do, it is packed somewhere. We do have a large (10 quarts, or 2.5 gallons) stainless steel stockpot. Pipsqueak- our 16 year old Master Laundry Soap Maker- mixes the soap mixture up on the stovetop in that stockpot. Then she microwaves the quart of water (we use filtered water because of the nasty iron and sulfur content of our extremely hard water) and pours it into the soap mixture in the stockpot. She stirs this well. Then she adds enough hot water (also heated in the microwave) to the stockpot to bring it up to the two gallon mark (a mark we figured out by a complicated process of measuring using the water line on our wooden spoon, a judicious use of the two eyes God gave us, and a generous application of by guess and by golly).

We leave the mixture in the stockpot overnight to cool (our kitchen is very, very cool at this time of year). Later I use a funnel and ladle and pour or ladle the laundry soap into a couple of large plastic bottles or pitchers with lids.

The first time Pip made this it did not turn out entirely well, at least, not to appearance. Although she had melted the soap completely, it reconstituted in small unattractive, curdish looking lumps. I thought I might be able to get rid of them (or at least make them smaller) by using our immersion blender, but I didn’t bother. The laundry soap worked very well anyway, and it lasted a very long time, which takes some doing in our house.

We did try using some of it as a substitute for dish-soap, but that didn’t work very well at all (I do now have a recipe for dishwasher soap, I'll post that later and link to it here, so check back with us). We can’t use Castile soap on our dishes, either, and we suspect that it is a problem with our water, which has such high iron levels it turns everything orange. Castile soap leaves a filmy, scummy looking layer on the dishes. I should mention that the brilliant and hardworking Headmaster figured out how to put a filter on the hose for our washing machine so that the water that goes into it is not quite so hard and yellow as the water that comes out of the kitchen tap (we can’t filter that, long story about old pipes).

The Fels Naptha I bought new, and it cost me about one dollar. You can use any kind of soap that is really soap. I suspect the Fels Naptha brand was specified by our grandmothers and people have just copied those older recipes without realizing why Fels Naptha is specified. I think it’s because back in the day the naptha was really naphthalene. Napthalene is the stuff that you find in moth balls. Ew. But there is no naphthalene in Fels any longer. There IS scent, so we don't use it anymore.

What makes Fels Naptha better than most soaps from the store is that it contains only animal fats (sorry, vegetarians), no vegetable oils. That’s probably why it works so well, too. Any homemade soap using lard, milk, cream, or other animal fat will work very well. Vegetarian soaps work okay- but we have found, not so well on really grimy clothes. Most bar soaps are not really soap, they are detergents. Read the labels.

The Fels Naptha bar does have scent, which we usually do not use in our laundry. One of these days I am going to be brave and try my own hand at making soap using lard and lye, but probably not until we’ve gotten into the new house with the new kitchen and all the kitchen stuff finally after three long years unpacked and put away-I-can’t-wait! (er, we've been in the new house a year now, and I still haven't tried it)

Meanwhile, we'll keep making our own laundry soap to help pay for that new kitchen.=)

Update: (10:09 a.m. March 03/06) I did use my immersion blender with this batch because small bits of white soap started solidifying, making tiny curds again. I added some of the previous batch which was still looking like extremely sour milk and blended it all gently until I had an opaque, milky looking liquid. This morning it has truly, really gelled. I could not pour this stuff into a bottle through a funnel. It's not so solid as jello, but it's not pourable, either. Cool. Very cool.

UPdated March 06- Turns out the stuff was pourable, just thick, like jello that hasn't set but is firm enough to stir in fruit.
Pip spent the morning tracking down prices (I lost the receipt) and figuring out costs, and here is what we've come up with:

The cost of ingredients for the homemade laundry soap is .4278 cents (.42 3/4 cents) for the entire batch. Since you have to heat it on the stove and add hot water, we guesstimated it up to .50 a batch. Some recipes we looked at called for 1/2 a cup for each load. That means for .50 you can do 80 loads of laundry. Some recipes said 1 Tablespoon was enough. We haven't tried that yet, but 1/4 cup is working well for us in our front loading, extra large capacity machine. Using a quarter cup means we can do 160 loads using a grand total of .50 worth of ingredients. That's .003 per load. Not bad!!

Keeping in mind that we live in a small town and sometimes we can't get discounted prices on items, here is what we paid (all these prices have gone up a bit since I first posted this):

The Fels-Naptha we bought is .99 a bar
Arm and Hammer Washing Soda, 3 lb box- 2.39
Borax, 76 ounce box or 4 lb 12 ounces was 3.79

For those of you for whom that's too big an investment up front, I would suggest getting together with a friend or two and splitting the cost of ingredients, then making and splitting a batch of laundry soap. Do look into other green cleaning recipes, as the washing soda and borax can be used for many, many things (and check back here for the dishwasher recipe)

See here for another natural cleaning recipe you would use instead of, say, 409 or Fantastik

(see previous post for the links and other discussion about this recipe. )

Other 'green' cleaning recipes are in Clean and Green, by Annie Berthold-Bond

Since my children help clean house, and children have young, absorbent skin, I like to use cleaners that I think are safer for them.

UPdated (10:09 a.m. March 03/06)
Updated as of March 06, 2006
Updated July 08, 2007- to add that right now there are 14 people living in our house- including six adults (one who works in construction), 2 teens, a handicapped 'adult' who functions at the level of a toddler (and consequently has toddler sorts of clothing stains), and the Mudpuppy Brigade- 11, 10, 9, 8, and 7 years old. The Life Goals of the Mudpuppy Brigade seem to be centered around either ditch digging or coal mining, given how they spend their time outside. A batch of this laundry soap lasts us two weeks, and it's still cleaning our clothes, with an occasional need to presoak some items in a mixture of borax, washing soda, and water, or dab a few food stains with dish soap.

Update: April 8/08-
Questions and Answers
I made the recipe on the Simple Dollar last night and this morning it looks like it can't decide whether it wants to be a liquid or a gel. Kind of clumpy too. I might try your blender method but I'm starting to regret having made 5 gallons of this...


A. It does not matter whether it's a liquid or a gel or if it has small cottage cheese like clumps in it. It cleans just the same no matter what it LOOKS like. The blender just makes it look better.

Has it turned any of your whites grey like others have claimed?

A. It has not turned my whites gray.

We're still using it a year and a half later.

I am betting those who complain that it did were using laundry soaps with optical brighteners before and they don't like the look of clothes without them:
"The optical brighteners found in many common laundry detergents are actually tiny particles that stick to the surface of your clothes. These particles make colors appear to be brighter by absorbing invisible ultraviolet light and re-emitting it as blue light. This blue light offsets the yellow light that is produced when colors begin to fade and lose their intensity. Although these optical brighteners may make your clothes appear brighter, they are chemical residues that are intentionally left behind on your clothes and may cause skin irritation or other allergic reactions." Or maybe they do construction work or something like that.

If I was unhappy with the whites, I would just do a load with an extra 1/2 cup of baking soda, washing soda, or borax in it.

Do you have hard water?

A. We have soft water. If I had hard, I would use extra baking soda in the soap and/or in my wash.

does it work in front loading washers?

A. That's what we have!=)

There's a nice tutorial with pictures at this blog.