Money Saving Tuesday - Homemade Dishwasher Detergent

Alright. A few weeks ago I talked about homemade laundry detergent and how that was an easy way to save a few bucks.

Now I'm going to do the math on if homemade dishwasher detergent passes the grade as well. I bought the ingredients yesterday and mixed it up this morning.

Here's the blog I snatched the recipe from:

http://www.thriftyniftymommy.com/2012/12/homemade-dishwasher-detergent-recipe.html

Alright here are the ingredients:

Borax ($6.99)
Washing Soda ($6.97)
Epsom Salts ($6.29)
Lemi Shine ($4.49)

Total out of pocket: $24.74

I mixed:

5 1/2 cups Borax
5 1/2 cups Washing Soda
1 1/2 cups Epsom Salts
3/4 cup     Lemi Shine (it was half a bottle and the bottle was 12 oz)

I used almost half the box of Borax ($3.50), almost half the box Epsom Salts ($3.49), 1/5 the Espsom Salts ($1.26) and half the Lemi Shine ($2.25).

One batch = $10.50.

With my measurements, that gave me 13.25 cups of dishwasher detergent. At 1 tablespoon per load, it should make me approximately 212 dishwasher loads. Shnikeys! That's a lot of loads.

I'm used to spending $5.47 on Finish. That has 1.6L in it = 6.76 cups. I fill up my dishwasher dispenser and to be generous to Finish, I'll say I only use 2 tbsp dishwasher detergent per load. That's 54 potential loads I can get out of it. I would say that is pretty accurate, if not on the high side.

Homemade dishwasher detergent = $0.05/load

Commercial dishwasher detergent = $0.10/load

Another win for homemade detergent!

A bonus is I use Washing Soda and Borax for the laundry detergent, so I can either make another batch of dishwasher detergent, or another batch of laundry detergent with my leftovers. That makes me a happy camper.