Grated soap. Please ignore the state of my cooker.
I started by grating a bar of homemade soap (plus that leftover bit of Imperial Leather) and added hot water while I considered quantities. Both recipes call for roughly equal amounts of soap and soda, though expressed differently. I decided to match by weight, as that'll be easier to replicate if I do it again. The first step, then, was to weigh my other bars of soap to find out how much I'd just used. It was about two and half ounces, so I weighed out that quantity of soda crystals.
I then moved on to water - i.e. how concentrated do I want this? Comparing the two recipes, one suggests using four times as much soap/soda as the other per wash. Clearly, this isn't an exact science. If I take the average, that's recipe #5, but use one cup per load. Now, I'm used to using a concentrated liquid, so I'd like to end up with something similar. More to the point, I'd like to be able to fit it in the bottle - even scaled down, this recipe makes over a gallon!
So... I've scaled down the recipe to half, as that's how much soap I grated. That would give me 1.25 gallons, with instructions to use one cupful per load. One cupful is quite a lot - 240 ml, whereas the concentrated stuff I buy uses 35 ml per load. If I want to stick with the same cap measure, I need to reduce the total quantity by that ratio, so ten pints (1.25 gallons) x 35/240 = 1.46 pints. Hmm, how much did I put in the saucepan again?
I hadn't actually measured how much water I put in at the beginning (my excuse is that I thought I'd be adding more to it, and measuring the total). I took another saucepan of similar size and poured two pints of water into it. They looked about the same volume, maybe a bit less in the soapy one, so one and a half pints probably wasn't far off.
With the occasional stir between calculations, the soap had all dissolved (that's probably not technically correct, but I can't think of the right word) into the water, so I stirred in the soda crystals, mixed, and left it to cool. I was a bit concerned by the recipe note that it will gel. Having made it so much more concentrated, would it set solid? By the time it was lukewarm it still looked like milk, and I couldn't be bothered to wait any longer. I poured it into the old bottle, and most of it went in. There was about 100 ml over, which I put straight into the little ball for washing and put a load on. That's about three times as much as I'm expecting to use normally, but what else was I going to do with it?
Results:
Washing drying.
Note the bird feeder still on the line - perhaps not the best combination.
The washing looks and smells clean, at least with that quantity. After a night in the cold (the washing machine lives in the conservatory), the liquid had set solid, with an unattractive crust of suds on the top. I stirred it with a skewer and it turned into a gloopy liquid, just like the bought stuff, though not as smooth. I can live with lumpy laundry liquid - if it's effective it'll save us a fortune! OK, not a fortune - we never spent that much on laundry, but really, this homemade stuff is very cheap.
Sod. Now I've said that, I'm going to have to work out just how cheap it is. My homemade soap used 23 oz oil/fat, which this helpful conversion page tells me is approx 733 ml. Without bothering to look at each oil separately, that quantity of olive oil costs £2.38 at Tesco prices. Caustic soda costs £2.50 for 500 g at Boots and I used 3 oz, so that's... [can you hear the cogs whirring?]... 42.5p, making a total of £2.81 for the whole batch of soap. I used one twelvth of that for my bottle of laundry liquid, so that's 23.4 pence worth of soap. Not forgetting the soda crystals @ 92p/kilo, or 6.5p for the 2.5 oz I used, that makes a total of 30p for the bottle of laundry liquid. This compares favourably with the £4.30 we'd pay for the stuff we used to buy, I think you'll agree!
Thanks for stopping by my blog and your supportive comments. I know more people in blogland who understand what we are doing than in real life!
ReplyDeleteYour gloop sounds interesting stuff. Will be good to find out about it's long term impact on your machine as mine has mould issues if I don't use something like Ariel Bio every now and then.
Another interesting blog post! I'm going to try making my own gloop when our soap is ready - glad to have someone working through the recipe bumps before me ;)
ReplyDeleteI love blogland - it's possible to meet all sorts of interesting and like-minded people who you'd never bump into in real life :)
ReplyDeleteI'm not entirely convinced by the gloop, yet. I think some of our washing may have defeated it, which is not terribly surprising considering how small the quantities of soap and soda are in each wash. I think people who get on well with this may be discovering that washing in plain water is fine for things that aren't very dirty. I'll give it another chance, then may modify the recipe.
I think it's too cold here for mould problems, though ;)