Making My Own Dish Detergent!

I never thought I would be so excited as to when we ran out of dish detergent. Around here, we go through A LOT. With all of the dishes Eliza uses a day and the interesting way Mark loads the dishwasher, we run it almost everyday.

• Side note...he is willing to load and run the dishwasher...I'm not complaining on how he does it!

When I wrote this post about the different cleaning supplies I found I decided to search for dish detergent too. I found a lot of different ways but this one was my favorite from Off Beat Home & Life. It is super simple and quick. No liquids, all powders, and all stuff I already had from the other cleaning supplies I planned to make.

I went for it tonight when Mark said the dish detergent was all gone. It MAYBE took me 5 minutes to make, and that was only because I had a little helper.

Here is the recipe they posted:

• 1 cup Washing soda or Baking soda (I've seen many recipes that use both so use whatever you have on hand or a combination of the two.)
• 1 cup Borax (Borax and baking soda/wash are both natural disinfectants and mild abrasives.)
• 1/4 cup Kosher salt (reduces the effects of hard water)
• 1/4 cup citric acid (available at brewing places also. Or as an alternative you can use the same amount of Fruit Fresh or two packets of Lemonade-Flavored Kool-Aid, ONLY lemon and ONLY unsweetened!)

I omitted the salt as we do not have hard water and I went with the Kool-Aid for the citric acid. Walmart carries a generic brand for only a couple cents so I grabbed that.

I had this cute glass jar from Walmart as well, perfect for the detergent.

This is double dose of everything, my jar is pretty big. Don't mind my atrocious hand writing.

I tossed all of it together and gave it a good shake.

Since there are a few ingredients you need to add  in addition to the powder I decided to write them and tape them to the top. I didn't want to have to do it by memory, or here Mark say "what else do I add?" every night. 

You need to add 3 DROPS of dish soap to the mix in the dishwasher and then 1/2-1C of vinegar to the bottom of your dishwasher. You don't have to do the vinegar but I have done it when our dishes are pretty dingy and it has always helped. 

So that is it! I stored it all right under the sink next to the dishwasher. We will just use the tablespoon to measure it out then toss it in the dishwasher to run for the night. Easy-Peasy!

The dishes are going as I type this...I have even opened it twice to make sure the dish soap wasn't making it bubble up too much. So far so good!