Grated Laundry Soap

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peterh770

peterh770

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For all of you who tried/used grated laundry soap: how do you do your grating?

I have been using a simple, standard, 4-sided kitchen grater thing. You get a very fine soap powder, almost dust-like. Takes a long while and you end up with cramps in your hand and scraped up fingers and knuckles. And a lot of soap dust powder up your nose.

I recently bought the shredder/slicer attachment for my Kitchen Aid mixer. You can get thru 3 bars of Fels Naptha in about 2 minutes. The consistany is that of shredded coconut with nearly no dust.
 
Anything you use to grate soap, mixer or chesse grater must NOT be used for anything else, especially preparing food. Fels soap in particular is filled with substances you should not ingest.

I use a cheese grater nabbed for $.50 from Target. When grating soap wear one of those surgical type masks (purchased from local chemists) to cover my nose and mouth. Actually prefer the finer soap that comes from this method as it disloves eaiser in the wash. Otherwise one must either melt the soap with boiling water than add to the wash, or use hot or very warm water adding the soap as the machine fills to make sure it all is disloved before adding the wash. Obviously this would apply to a top loader, as I have a front loader, like the assurance using "powdered" soap gives.

If I had the room in my kitchen for yet one more gadget, may consider purchasing a machine just to grate soap. However doing it by hand really isn't a big deal.

Tip:

The drier your bar of soap is, the easier it will grate. My vintage Fels soap bars are so hard and dry they grate into fine powder. Octogon soap off the shelf is very "wet" and would gunk up my chesse grater.

If one is going to dislove the soap in boiling or hot water then add to the wash, it is not necessary to get fine powder. Flakes or slivers work just as well, our grans and great grans probably just shaved off slivers into the copper. Of course if they were "Lace Curtian" they bought pre-flaked soap like Lux.

Launderess
 
Back in the day I can remember using the different types of soap flakes on the market, Fels, Lux, Ivory Snow, etc. Here in the Atlanta area, I do rmemeber dealing with soap scum left during the rinse cycle. I also remember letting the machine (mom's '63 Frigidaire WCI) fill with hot water first, adding the soap, then letting the machine agitate a few minutes to dissolve the soap (which created a thick billowing tub full of suds) before (adding the clothes which then always wanted to float on top of all that soap foam) and resetting it to fill the rest of the way. Otherwise you might get clumps that would float on top and not dissolve. It was almost impossible to "dose" it correctly and if oversudsed it would creat a suds lock like you never saw before----I mean it was thick! Would pop that "overload" button in a second! Might have to keep re-setting the machine for ten minutes of over-flow rinse untill you could wash it all down the drain before trying to spin it out again. Then there was the other issue-----soaps did not seem to do very well at removing perspiration odors.

Given all that, what is the advantage, if any, of going through all that trouble (grating, etc.) to use soaps? I mean, have they changed formulations to eliminate some of the problems I remember? I always figured the soaps dissapeared because everyone else went through what I did in using them and the detergents that were comming along were a major improvement over the soaps.

Not critical, just curious-----------
 
Well, I noticed that some things clean up very well with soap, expecially greasy things. There is another thread around here somewhere about bed linens and greasy pillowcases. Hot water and soap is where this excels. Additionally, I like the subtle softness and fragrance it leaves behind.

In the Miele, I use soap in the Delicate cycle at 105, 120 or 140 degree wash (probably 80% of my washing is done in the Delicate setting). I add STPP to the dispenser and start the washer. When the water is visible, I add the soap. I'm still either adding too much (complete white out) or too little (washing in milk), but still getting a really good wash.
 
Soap really disloves grease and oil, Fels especially is good at this. Detergents mainly lift soils and keep them suspended so they can be rinsed away. Soap tends to leave certian items feeling softer than washing in detergents (linens especially those made from pure linen). This is because of the oil/fat content of soaps, also the fact that even with through rinsing , some tiny fraction of soap remains.

I pre-soak bed linens in cool water and a bit of Cheer Free and Gentle liquid, then wash in hot or warm water with soap.

Soap is not great for every day laundering of clothes and table linens as soap can set many stains (mostly tannin based). Soap is also not the wide ranging laundry cleaner that many modern detergents are for coping with today's laundry problems.

As they say it's a "comfort", like using a vintage washer which takes more effort than a modern one. You wouldn't want to do it every day, but every now and then....

Launderess
 
I am used to dumping a cup of clear ammonia in the machine along with my detergent to get really greasy things clean. At the funeral home we used to spread Tide (powder)on top of the oil stains in the garage from the hearses and limo's. It would absorb oils very well and we just had to hose off the residue and give it a little scrub with an old broom. So I always assumed detergents were superior in their grease/oil removal abilities,especially since soaps are made from fats.

I can remember the nice scent the Ivory Snow flakes left in the bed linen's and blankets. I would use it again if it were still available. I can't remember what Lux or Fels smelled like---I need a refresher!

Peter it sounds like you are in the same boat I used to be in with my FriGEMore-----hard to get the dosage just right. It used to drive me crazy with heavy fabrics especially towels! But I never tried soap in it-----you are TRULY brave! If I put it back into use I would use Fab, or even better---- Costco "Industrial" as they make almost no suds and I could use as much as I want.
 
My grandmother used to drop a bar of homemade lye soap into the washer with grungy, greasy overalls and coveralls my grandfather wore for chores and helping on my uncle's farm. I'm sure she probably used some sort of detergent as well, but everytime his work clothes were washed, in went that bar of soap. She'd pull it out before the rinse fill and determine then if the load needed another wash or could continue on with the rinse cycle. I have her soap recipie, it starts with the rendering instructions. Yuk!

Robert and I bought a box of soap flakes at the market (imported from the UK) a few weeks ago in Minneapolis and tried it with some towels in the pre-war Bendix washer. We first started with 1/2 cup and got milky-white water so we added more. You would have thought we added the entire box! All of a sudden, we had soap suds sloshing out of the soap dispenser and talk about cushioning the tumbling action - the white towels just disappeared! We drained the water and ran it through a couple of spray rinses and the suds were completely gone in less than two minutes. We then started the wash cycle over again, this time with no added soap, ran it through a whole cycle and then for fun, re-rinsed the towels in a unimatic Frigidaire to see how well the Bendix did at rinsing. We were shocked to see the water was nearly clear as soon as agitation began. After that 1140 spin and only about 20 minutes in the Lady Kenmore dryer with the million-watt heater, the towels were wonderfully soft and smelled terrific!

We will grate some Fels to use here at the convention - I have softened water so it shouldn't take much to make heaps of suds!
 
Warning About Clear Water and Soap

When doing laundry.

When using pure soap on its own to do laundry, the soap has to do all the work of softening water, cleaning and keeping soils in suspension. This the reason why it is often suggested that the best indicator of enough soap in the wash was a thick layer of suds.

However, the harder the water, the more soap it will take and the higher risk of soap scum. This is why it is best to use soap with either soft water or use a non cloudy water softener like STPP.

If the wash water is softened, but the rinse water is not, and tends to be hard, any remaining soap may form scum when combining with the first rinse water when laundry still has a good amount of soap left. Many housewives added packaged water softeners not only to the wash, but rinse (or at least frist rinses) as well to make sure all the soap was rinsed out of their laundry. Left over soap was the number one cause of tattle-tale grey laundry!

One sure test of how well rinsed a wash load is, is to rewash in the hottest water possible and add a water softener like Calgon. If the water starts to suds up, that is all the soap/detergent residue left in your laundry.
 
Oh I forgot

Soap is deactivated by acids, and since most body secretions like sweat and such are acidic, this is the reason one needs to add so much soap when not doing a pre-wash.

Our grand-mothers and great grandmothers had it right when they soaked laundry over night with washing soda or borax. Both are alkaline substances that neutralised the acidic substances in textiles. Also pre-soaking meant there was less dirt/oils/soils for the soap to cope with in the main wash, thus removing the need for huge amounts of soap.

Personally wouldn't wash towels in soap as the residue (and soap always leaves some residue)will affect the absorbancy.

Launderess
 
Well ... I've talked about grated Fels before and I have had great success with it. Your water has to be really soft for it to work well. I have tried to use grated Fels in my automatic with less than desirable success; it left residue on my clothing.

I attribute that to the spin cycles. With a wringer washer, you lift the clothes out of the water and the soap residue remains on top of the water. Not so is the case in a spin cycle; it redeposits the residue back onto the clothing (at least in my machine it does).

Fels used to make "Instant Fels" up into the 1990's and it was a wonderful product. The additives in it prevented the redepositing of the soap residue on clothing; it worked quite well in automatic machines. I miss that product, too.

When I use Fels, I use the "fine" grate. Dial Corporation (makers of Fels) says to use 1/2 of a grated bar per load of laundry. They don't "fully" recommend Fels be used as a replacement for detergent; probably because of the residue problem in automatic washers.

It takes between 1/2 to 3/4 of a cup of finely grated Fels for a tub full of suds! Using a wringer washer, you can get 2-3 uses of the water without having to add additional Fels to build the suds back up. It is quite an economical product but you have to rinse, rinse, rinse. Water here is cheap and so is Fels. I can buy a bar for $1.05 at our local grocer. That equates to $.525 for 2-3 loads of clothes.

I don't use Fels on my good colored clothing; I reserve it for the wringer washer and I start with hot water!! I do use it on my blue jeans that I wear in the yard and it lifts the mud and grass stains without having to soak or use a prewash on the knees.

Very clean smelling and makes clothing soft - even if they are hung on the clothesline.
 
I don't think I'll be trying grated soap either. However for those who do but don't like the tedium of manual grating Black & Decker makes a small rechargeable cheese grater that would probably fit the bill, part of their Gizmo line.
 
Soap + Acids + Hard Water ='s Soap Scum, no two ways about it.

Personally wouldn't bother using and sort of soap for laundry without STPP (phosphates).

Vintage Fels soap I think is different than the modern version. Besides containing Napthalene (sp), it has water softening and washer protection agents, as well as fabric whiteners. Think the vintage Fels was geared more toward the original purpose of being a laundry "detergent" than the modern incarnation. Seems to me the modern incarnations are more for pre-spotting than doing laundry. Also the old Fels soaps are true hard brown soaps. This could be however my stash is so old! IIRC it did come from an estate sale, but is labeled Purex, not Dial.

Launderess
 

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