Why I Don't make Homemade Laundry Soap Anymore

[Music] hi friends this is crystal from homemaking on the homestead and today i'm going to share with you why i no longer make homemade laundry soap i'm sure everybody has seen the recipe online it's been online for years on my old website the family homestead i used to have a recipe for it i made it for probably three or four years it was probably the most visited page on my website i it was very popular everybody was making homemade laundry soap and it's still popular today i see a lot of um recipes for it videos you know picture tutorials and people they swear by it and if you make it and you still love it that's fine but i'm going to share what my experience has been with it making homemade laundry soap required washing soda borax and some sort of soap people would use zot or felsnaptha i'm a soap maker so i would make my own laundry soap out of lard because it was a very inexpensive oil to buy or a fat to buy and it you know my grandmother great grandmothers all made laundry soap from large so i felt like that was a good choice it was so popular that at the time i was selling my own homemade soaps and i would make little kits that had the grated soap the washing soda and the borax and instructions on how to make your laundry soap and i loved it at first i thought it was great it was just less than a penny a load and when you are raising a big family like i was doing in 25 loads of laundry a week that was a huge savings and so i really thought that it was the greatest thing that had ever happened but the first thing that started happening to mine is my towels started to get to the point where they wouldn't really absorb any water and i thought that was very strange i had a large message board at the time and i went on there and asked other women if they were having the same problem and they were there were a lot of women that said yes after a good amount of time of making my own soap i discovered that my towels weren't absorbing water the other thing that i began to notice is my white clothes became extremely dingy at first it had done a great job then all of a sudden white clothes became dingy colored clothes weren't as bright as they used to be and it started making me wonder so we had discussions on the message board maybe we need to increase the washing soda or increase the borax was it hard water versus soft water we had all kinds of ideas i tried many different things i still ended up having the same problem then one day a woman said oh i all i do is i take a squirt of dish soap dish detergent and throw that into the load with it everything comes out great so that got me wondering why would this make such a difference and what i learned over the years is that there is a difference between soap this is a bar of my own homemade soap but whether it's homemade soap or zot or feldsnaphtha but there is a difference between soap and detergent a big difference too but before i could actually explore the idea any longer or any farther we bought a front load he washing machine i looked around online everywhere trying to find out can i use my own homemade soap in my front load washer everybody was saying yes you can because homemade soap is low sudsing and that's the only requirement for using an he machine is that your soap needs to be a low sedzing soap well at the time we had spent a good deal of money to buy the washer and the dryer and it had a warranty and i didn't want anything to go wrong with the warranty and i ended up switching to an he detergent and and then i just never thought about it again pretty soon my towels started to become absorbent my whites started looking better my colored clothes started improving so at that point i didn't even really give it another thought when we were in a probably two or three years later we were in a a pla in an appliance store and we were looking for a refrigerator but i asked the service man i said why do they say that you cannot use homemade laundry soaps or you only have to use he soaps in he machines and then he told me when in regards to the homemade laundry soap that the problem with that is not the fact that it's low sudzine versus high suds but the fact that soaps create soap scum the soap scum clogs up all the tubes in the he machines that will void your warranty it will also cost you a lot of money to have that fixed so i found that extremely fascinating and continued to uh to use he laundry detergent at that point what i now understand better which is what i wanted to just explain to you and tell you why when you use the soap that you probably will end up with the same problems other women have had towels that aren't absorbent whites that are dingy colored clothes that lose their brightness is because soaps and detergents clean in a different way a detergent and a soap are we use the terms interchangeably but in reality they're very different products this bar soap was made with oils to be exact it was made with olive oil coconut oil and palm oil detergents are made any kind of detergent that you have are they are made with petroleum products a detergent made with petroleum products cleans by reducing the surface tension of all the dirt so when you soak your dishes you know in a a sink full of soap soapy detergent soon all the particles just wipe away no problem when you wash your clothes the surface tension that's holding the dirt into the fibers of your clothes gets released that is how detergents work they have a it's called a surfactant property and surfactant is what reduces surface tension soaps work completely differently you actually have to have friction that's why you can use them on your hands when you wash your hands you're creating friction and it removes the dirt so what happens when you use soap in a laundry uh situation when you put it into your washing machine is whether it's he or the other type you do not have the friction anymore you just have either the spinning of the clothes the agitation of the clothes the you know they they go up to the top on a front load fall to the bottom and it's that kind of action that is allowing the surfactants to get in there and get rid of the dirt and i know you might say well my mother my grandmother no your mothers probably but your grandmothers or great grandmothers used soap large soap to do their laundry and you are absolutely right and the reason that it worked is because they weren't using washing machines they were using scrub boards and scrub boards created the friction that was needed so over time when you use your homemade laundry detergent the dirt some of it may get released but the dirt will very tiny particles of dirt continue to become embedded in the fibers of your clothing and your clothing doesn't come clean that's why your whites will continue to look dingy is because they're actually still holding on to dirt your colored clothes won't be as vibrant again because the fibers are holding on to the dirt once i realized that i knew i could never go back to making my own laundry soap and that i continue to use i still have an he machine i bought a smaller one now because my big one it did its job and was done and so now that it's just the two of us we i downsized to a smaller machine and i buy my laundry detergent and i don't make it anymore that is what i wanted to share with you on this quick video and i hope it gave you some insight onto the difference between soaps and detergents and you know if you're making your laundry deter your laundry soap and you are having great success and you've been doing it for years let me know and if you're doing something in that process that's beyond just washing soda borax some sort of soap some people will put brighteners you know those little crystals or whatever that they buy i've seen a lot of people put additions into their soap into their homemade laundry soap after a while i have to ask myself though you know how if you're doing it for frugal reasons how frugal is it getting when you continue to put stuff in there but if you are having success with it and you've been doing it for a long time i would love to hear about it and tell me what you're doing and i hope this i hope this video was helpful to you as well if you're trying to figure out why your towels aren't absorbing water if you use homemade laundry soap or if you were thinking of making it maybe this will shed some light on it in any case that is all for today and um don't forget if this was a helpful video to give me a thumbs up and if you haven't subscribed to my channel and you like my content would you please consider subscribing that means a lot to me alrighty i'll see you all next time bye

Channel: Homemaking on the Homestead

Views: 40,569

Rating: 4.8830409 out of 5

Keywords: Homemaking, Homemade, Homemade Laundry Soap

Id: VKeNjdgiwfo

Length: 10min 26sec (626 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 06 2020