I Stopped Buying Detergent Three Years Ago—Here’s How to Make Your Own Laundry Detergent Naturally

Three years ago, Ben looked at our monthly grocery bill and pointed to the detergent line item. “Twenty-eight dollars for one bottle?” he said, shaking his head. “There’s got to be a cheaper way.” I thought he was being dramatic until I started researching how to make your own laundry detergent naturally and realized the math was actually worse than he thought.

What I found shouldn’t work as well as it does. Three ingredients, mixed in a bowl, stored in a mason jar. No fancy chemistry, no precise measurements, no understanding of why soap nuts clean cotton but struggle with synthetic fabrics. It just works, most of the time, for reasons I still can’t fully explain.

The Thing That Shouldn’t Work But Does

The recipe I use now is almost embarrassingly simple: washing soda, borax, and grated bar soap. That’s it. No essential oils, no complicated ratios, no pH testing. I mix it up in our kitchen every few months while coffee brews, and somehow our clothes come out clean.

What bothers me is that I don’t really understand why this combination works better than the individual ingredients alone. The washing soda is alkaline, the borax is alkaline, the soap is… also alkaline. Conventional wisdom says you need enzymes for protein stains, surfactants for grease, brighteners for whites. This mixture has none of those things, yet Ben’s work shirts come out cleaner than they did with the expensive stuff.

Our water is moderately hard—about 150 ppm according to the county report—which supposedly makes homemade detergent less effective. But we haven’t noticed any buildup or dinginess, even after three years. Maybe our clothes are just dirty in the right way for this mixture to handle.

What You Actually Need (Plus the Math)

Here’s what actually goes into a batch that lasts us about four months:

• 2 cups washing soda (not baking soda) – $3.50 at Walmart
• 1 cup borax – $4.00 for the whole box, lasts several batches
• 1 bar of soap, grated – $1.00 for Fels-Naptha or Zote

Total cost per batch: about $5.50. We do roughly six loads per week, so this works out to about 11 cents per load. The fancy detergent we used to buy cost around 45 cents per load, so the savings are real but not dramatic—maybe $80 per year.

The washing soda is the trickiest ingredient to find. Our local grocery stores don’t carry it, so I order it online or drive twenty minutes to the closest store that stocks it. Ben keeps suggesting I just make my own by baking baking soda, but I tried that once and the texture was all wrong.

Five Minutes, One Bowl, Done

The actual mixing process is almost too simple to write down:

1. Grate one bar of soap using a regular cheese grater. This takes about three minutes and makes a mess.
2. Dump the grated soap into a large mixing bowl.
3. Add the washing soda and borax.
4. Whisk everything together until it looks uniform.
5. Pour into whatever container you want to store it in.

That’s it. No heating, no dissolving, no waiting for anything to set. I usually make a batch while waiting for the coffee to finish brewing on Sunday mornings.

Questions We Still Can’t Answer

After three years of using this stuff, there are still things that don’t make sense. Why do some stains disappear completely while others barely fade? Why does it work perfectly in our washing machine but my sister says it left residue in hers? She has the same model machine and similar water hardness.

The stain removal is especially inconsistent. Grass stains vanish like they were never there. Grease spots sometimes come out, sometimes don’t budge. Blood comes out easily if it’s fresh but seems permanent if it sits. There’s no pattern I can figure out.

Ben thinks it’s because commercial detergents have different formulations for different types of stains, while this mixture just does one thing well. Maybe he’s right, but that doesn’t explain why it handles some tough stains better than the expensive stuff ever did.

When I Switched Back (And Why)

I’m not going to pretend this worked perfectly from day one. The first few months, I kept a bottle of regular detergent as backup, and I used it more than I want to admit.

The worst failure was when Ben got engine oil all over his good jeans. I pre-treated with dish soap, used extra detergent, ran it twice—nothing. The stain actually seemed to set deeper. I finally bought a bottle of the heavy-duty stuff and it came right out on the first try.

We also switched back temporarily last winter when I got lazy about grating soap and tried using liquid castile soap instead. The mixture turned into a weird, clumpy paste that clogged the dispenser and left white streaks on everything. Ben spent a weekend running empty cycles with vinegar trying to clean out the machine.

There was no recovery story, no moment when everything clicked. We just went back to buying detergent for a few weeks until I could get the ingredients right again.

Does Any of This Actually Save Money?

The honest answer is yes, but not as much as the internet wants you to believe. Most homemade detergent blogs claim you’ll save hundreds of dollars per year, but that assumes you were buying the most expensive detergent available and using way more than necessary.

Our actual savings work out to maybe $80 annually, which isn’t nothing but also isn’t life-changing. If you factor in the time to source ingredients, grate soap, and mix batches, plus the occasional failure that requires rewashing loads, the hourly savings rate is pretty modest.

The bigger benefit might be knowing exactly what’s in our detergent. No fragrances, no dyes, no ingredients I can’t pronounce. Whether that matters depends on your priorities, but it makes me feel better about the clothes going directly against our skin.

Ben says I overthink everything, but at least I know what’s in the soap now. Even if I don’t understand why it works.

About the Ingredient You Can’t Find

Washing soda availability is weirdly inconsistent. Some regions have it in every grocery store, others don’t stock it anywhere. I’ve driven to three different stores looking for it, only to find out they “used to carry it but stopped.”

The online ordering works, but shipping costs eat into your savings if you’re only buying one box. I’ve started ordering in bulk or adding it to larger grocery orders when possible. Ben suggested the baking-soda-in-the-oven trick again last month, and I might actually try it next time we run out.

Some people substitute baking soda directly, but the cleaning power drops noticeably. Others use washing soda alternatives from pool supply stores, though I haven’t tested whether those work the same way. It’s one of those ingredient substitutions that probably matters more than we admit, but nobody talks about why.

We’re still using the same basic recipe three years later, measuring ingredients by the handful most of the time. Somehow the clothes keep coming out clean, even when I forget to grate the soap fine enough or dump in too much borax. It shouldn’t work this well with such sloppy measurements, but here we are.