Storing My Homemade Laundry Detergent

Last updated on February 6th, 2020 at 10:42 am

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I started making homemade laundry detergent for my family about a year ago, using the recipe listed on The Duggar Family Website (click here to view recipe). I find it works really well, and is incredibly inexpensive.

I do have one gripe about it, and that is that it doesn’t get our whites as white as I like them so I use Tide with Bleach Alternative for our white loads, and the homemade detergent for all our other loads.

When the recipe is done, you have a full 5 gallon bucket full of detergent, that needs to be cut in strength by half before you use it.

The Recipe suggests using an empty laundry detergent container, the large types with the nozzle on the end to then fill up half way with water and half with the detergent.

However I don’t have a shelf to store such a large container for easy usage and I didn’t have any lying around.

So I decided to go ahead and use large vinegar bottles. I use vinegar in all our home made cleaners, and as a replacement for fabric softener, which means I empty one of these large containers every 8 to 10 days.

At that frequency of usage I was able to collect the amount of bottles I needed for one batch of detergent in a reasonable amount of time. In the mean time I just reused the bottles I had over and over.

To fill the bottles, I first filled them up one cup at a time keeping count of how many cups I was adding, until I had an even number of cups and still had enough room at the top to shake up the detergent as needed.

I then emptied out the bottle and refilled it with half the cups of water and then took a sharpie and marked a line and wrote the word , detergent beside it.

I then filled up the bottle with the other half of the cups of water, and marked a line, and wrote the word water beside it.

This gave me an accurate and simple way to refill the bottles over and over. As I emptied new vinegar bottles, I would place them next to my first bottle and mark them with the same detergent and water lines.

To make the filling of the bottle easier I made a funnel out of a water bottle. I used meat scissors cut the bottle with ease.

This is what I ended up with, and it fits great within the mouth of the vinegar bottles. It is still spills a bit so I do the pouring over the kitchen sink (but for the photo below I did it over the floor just so I could snap the picture for you)

With the funnel in place, and the detergent and water line marked I then go ahead and fill my empty vinegar bottles with detergent.

I then add the water, place the lid on top, and shake the container well. I store the ready filled bottles in the basement. They need a good shaking when it comes time to using them but other than that they are ready to go when I need them.

Do you use homemade laundry detergent?

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