SPOT ON

I had heard about making your own laundry detergent to save money (and be eco-friendly), but I'd tried it a couple times and it always made my whites dingy, so I stuck with my fail-proof Tide. I ran out of dishwasher detergent, so I looked up online to see how to make it. There were many recipes, but I started with one that only required salt, borax, and baking soda.

Nothing to it! So I made a batch. I had all the ingredients at home already.

You can probably guess that it was a horrible failure. Everything had a filmy, powdery residue, and everything was spotty or foggy. Plus, it stunk like burning crud when the dishwasher was running. It was awful.

I hated to waste all the ingredients I'd used, so I dug deeper online. I found that using vinegar in the rinse-aid should help, and that citric acid should make the dishes shine, and essential oils make it smell good. So I added them to the mix. After several more loads and some trial and error, I came up with this equation:


Salt + Borax + Soda + Citric Acid + Vinegar (for rinse aid) + Vinegar (poured in at the start of each load) + 2 drops of essential oil = sparkly dishes! All the powdered ingredients were mixed in a container, so I just put a couple of drops of essential oil on it and snapped it shut, then poured some vinegar in the bottom while shutting the door and called it good. No big deal, right?

The glass on the left (shiny) is from my final formula. The glass on the right (spotted) is from the first formula.

I was so proud of myself! Here I was being resourceful, eco-friendly, and frugal. And, it actually worked! But then I read that borax is a "controversial" natural ingredient, and then out of the blue, my formula stopped working like a charm and started leaving spots and residue. I was really frustrated. (I also tried Lemi-shine to help with the hard water deposits, but that stuff worked like crud.)

So rather than posting about my fabulous new detergent and giving you the recipe, I'll just admit I've gone back to the simple SINGLE step of using a Cascade complete packet (ALWAYS sparkly clean) and vinegar as my rinse aid. Works great! And vinegar is a million times cheaper than Jet Dry.

Though my homemade dishwasher detergent didn't pan out, I did discover that just pouring a little vinegar in the bottom of my electric tea kettle and letting it sit for about 30 seconds, then swirling it around for about a minute took all the hard water deposits out of it. It looks brand new now! It's a fabulous tip I just had to share!