Will homemade laundry soap save you money? We put our own DIY soap to the test

SALT LAKE CITY – Laundry is one of those facts of life you just can’t avoid. And like everything else, it’s getting more expensive as the detergents we buy to keep our clothes clean keep going up in price. Walk through a supermarket aisle and you’ll easily find jugs of detergent selling for $16, $20, and more. For a family that washes six, seven or eight loads of laundry every week, the cost of detergent can add up fast.But is it worth ditching store-bought detergent for a homemade alternative? We put it to the test.

Can a little elbow grease save money?

Laundry soap comes in various forms – liquid, powder, pods – and at various prices. Calculating price per load, my producer Sloan Schrage and I bought the most expensive detergent we found in the supermarket aisle. That turned out to be a tub of 32 Tide pods for $12.97. The least expensive option in the same aisle was a $2.43–gallon jug of Xtra detergent. It boasts 260 loads. We then purchased the ingredients needed to make our own laundry soap. The recipe we chose listed washing powder, borax – a soda powder said to act as a booster in detergent – and something called castile soap, which we found over in the beauty aisle. Total cost for the ingredients: $17.35 – enough to make four gallons of detergent. Making our homemade soap wasn't exactly hard. Per the recipe’s instructions, we dissolved the measured ingredients into boiling water. We poured the concoction into a one-gallon container and let it sit 24 hours. When ready to use, one gallon should yield enough soap to wash 64 loads.The Tide Pods averaged out to be $0.40 per load. The Xtra detergent was considerably cheaper at $0.05 a load. Our do-it-yourself soap turned out to be the least expensive at just over 3.5 cents per load. And here's something kind of interesting: Our homemade detergent gelled up into a Jello-like plasma overnight. Of course, the consistency and the cost mean very little if the soap doesn’t clean clothes. So, we put it through the most rigorous testing we could imagine – we gave three 10-year-old boys their own brand-new, white t-shirt to wear and to vandalize.

Put to the test

From playing basketball with a mud-covered ball to scribbling with washable markers and eating hot dogs liberally doused in ketchup – this crew put their new shirts through the wringer. Hardly any part of their once pristine shirts escaped mud, markers or condiments.Then it was time for us to test just how effective each detergent was at lifting all that mayhem out of those shirts. We washed and dried each shirt separately, using a different detergent for each one.

What we found

With all three, we found the washable marker had come out – mostly. On the shirt washed with the store-bought Xtra detergent, we noticed ketchup stains still visible. We agreed that shirt was cleaned the least. The shirt that looked the best was the one cleaned with the most expensive detergent in our test, the Tide pods. Our homemade soap, we agreed, was somewhere in the middle.But let's call a duck a duck. Not one of the three soaps we tested was a match for a ten-year-old armed with a muddy basketball.

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