Homemade Laundry Detergent

[dj-gabriele]

@stan

Yup, that's my opinion!
I had to use natural soap a few times and while it cleaned skin as well as surfactant based detergent, it always left my skin very dry. And I'm not talking about of the 1€ a bar soap, I'm talking about expensive pharmacy quality stuff at 15€ per 150ml! (That's 100 € per litre of soap!)

 

[AZREOspecialist]

It's always a bad idea to start experimenting with making your own laundry detergent when you don't know anything about your water chemistry or how the different ingredients will interact with your water. If you have hard or medium hard water, your homemade laundry detergent will quickly cause soap scum build-up inside your machine. When it stinks like mildew in a month, you'll know why.

 

[arbilab]

Lay perspective, but Tide is only as complex as it is in order to work across a spectrum of water chemistry. There's not only pH and stuff like iron that might precipitate disastrously, but ionic load which I don't even know how to quantify. Just that it can hose chemical formulas so formulators deionize their own water so they know where they're starting from.

 

[launderess]

Soap and Laundry "Sours"

Just wanted to clear something up one sees posted else where about the use of laundry sours, especially when using pure soap.

The purpose of creating a slightly acidic final rinse bath is to neutralise any remaining alkaline substances left from detergents and or soaps in textiles. This serves many purposes but the main effect is that items are less likely to irritate skin. The other reason is to remove sodium bicarbonate (a natural occurance of using any alkaline substance for washing, but especially washing soda), from textiles before ironing and or tumble drying. The application of heat in any form will cause bicarbonate laden textiles to turn shades of brown, tan or slightly yellow.

When it comes to the use of pure soaps (which by the way are always alkaline in water, whereas man-made detergents can be formulated to be near or neutral to slightly acidic), the purpose of using a sour rinse is *not* to pull out remaining soap. That is the function of proper rinsing.

When acidic substances meet textiles with any soap residue, the later will convert into fatty acids (all soaps are made from a combination of oils/fats/grease etc), which not only leads to grey and dingy laundry, sooner or later things will get a whiff about them from the residue going rancid.

The above is why proper laundering with soap includes all those rinses in the proper water temperature (hot or warm) suited to the properties. Indeed amoung commercial laundries it is known and preferred to bring down the pH from laundering by rinsing as opposed to using chemicals. However depending upon what chemcials were used for the wash baths this could take quite allot of water which costs money. If that water must be heated the cost goes up further still.

Finally it is the pH level of the acidic chemical used for the sour bath and not the amount that will determine the final level of the bath.

If using common white household vinegar for instance, depending upon the volume of water used once a certain acidic pH level is reached adding more will not increase. To do that you'd have to go with a stronger acidic substance. Laundries use litmus papers to test the bath for indication of proper final pH, or items coming from the tubs/machines can be tested the same way.

Commcercial laundries then and now would often purchase acetic (glacial), formic and or other acids to use for sour baths at full strength, then dilute with water to form a stock solution.

The case against using laundry sours is that certain textiles can be harmed by even weak acids over time. This damage can be compounded when said items are exposed to the high heat of tumble dryers and or ironing.

For all of the above and more reasons, many laundries are moving to pH neutral laundry detergents, or at least those only slightly alkaline. This explains the increase in liquid detergent use. If alkaline substances aren't used for washing, there is no need to add sour rinsing baths. Removing this step not only saves laundries water, but time as well.

 

[arbilab]

In my last house I had a reverse osmosis system in the kitchen. To keep the tank water fresh I would drain it to storage regularly then use the storage as final rinse water or to rinse the spotty mineral water off my car.

Let's face it, if we could all afford to do laundry in Evian, would be so much simpler. Softener gets you halfway there but it doesn't remove salts, it only substitutes them with less-obnoxious ones than calcium carbonate.

 

[stan]

mrsalvo

LOL hope your watching your thread! See all the "thought provoking ideas" so here is another...Detergent is a synonym for Soap! Anyone ever think about that?

 

[arbilab]

Luv ya mate, you're only ~200 miles south of me and formerly only 25.

Soap and detergent are interchangeable terms among the unknowledgeable. Today, even what you think is soap like bath bars are actually detergents. Sodium-hoozywhatsis-hexa-whattheflarg. Surely you read the labels. (Yes I do, and don't call me shirly).

When I went to invent my skin lotion in 1994, I knew very little about surfactants (I have bad skin, mmmK?). Since then I have become much more aware of the dynamics of surfactant chemistry. Enough so to recognize how much of it is WAY over my head. I can make oil and water mix under specific conditions. Which is the essence of laundry. But the trick is to make oil and water mix across a SPECTRUM of conditions. That's why Tide is as complicated as it is.

 

[stan]

arbilab

Luv ya too..LOL. Your preaching to the choir! I have been making soaps for sometime now, and soaps made for specific purposes! and I continue to learn more, and more about it's chemistry. It's funny to me, that most people do think the Dove or Irish Spring are real soaps!
The subject of "soap? on AWF has always been touchy, and I have always found it interesting that we talk a lot about the many different characteristics of laundry detergents here, how they clean, dose it have enzymes, "Oh I found some with phosphates", someone's butt hurt because they changed the formula ect ect. With the MANY varied differences there are in detergent formulas, equally there is with soaps!! but not too many think of it this way! Most just think "it's just soap and its going to leave a greasy residue" ect
I think the reason for this is because the concept of a "NEAT" soap ( purified no 0% fat, no glycerine ) is beyond most peoples experience, in other words they have never used it, and can't buy it in the store, don't know what it means! What they can buy, is what you have pointed out, "bath bars". Even modern Fels Naptha dose not contain it's birth ingredients, and now has too much unreacted fat left in the bar, and no Naptha, to be the effective bar it once was.
I certainly don't advocate the use of soap for laundry, only because, as Laundress has well pointed out, there is a trick to get soap to work, that most are not going to fool with these days.
Would love to hear more about your 1994 water an oil emulsion invention!
Best to All
Stan

 

[arbilab]

Technically it's an oil-in-water emulsion, though not sure I could explain the distinction properly. Other than O-I-W tends toward lotion and W-I-O tends toward cream. The product is a reverse engineer of a discontinued late-1940s formula I'd become addicted to. So I had a LOM but only coarse proportions. Fiddled with it for months making glom until a more prescient friend pointed out triethanolamine has 3 hooks and stearic acid has one, then a little math and I had the primary surfactant. Boosted with diammonium phosphate (yes--gasp--phosphate) and co-emulsified with propylene glycol. The following year and a half was balancing the surfactant with the oil phase including a GOB of lanolin so it was neither sticky (too much surfactant) or oily (too much... you know). A manufacturing chemist did the scaleup and fine balancing, and of course had the proper equipment to nebulize the oil which I couldn't do in the kitchen. I gave the 4 test batches to charity. Fun project. I didn't set out to take over the world, then at one point thought I might but that point didn't last long. Selling cosmeceuticals is 10% chemistry and 90% marketing. I could afford the chemistry part.

 

[stan]

Interesting

story! So dose this chemist still make this formula for you?

 

[arbilab]

Gawd, I loved George. Knew his shxt inside out upside down and an affable chap on top of that. But his company, Lone Star Laboratories, no longer exists. I hope he found a suitable home. Surely he did.

I've got a double-lifetime supply sitting in my storeroom. It's still stable 16 years later. The original formula I rev-eng'd wouldn't last that long. It went rancid in less than 5 years. I'd love to take credit for that but it most probably belongs to George. My kitchen version didn't go rancid but it did lose its viscosity in less than a week. That nebulization thing. Plus he added carbomer 940 to the formula I sent him. I'd never heard of that.

Quite the adventure.

 

[jetcone]

Ooo I want a box of

Le Chat Paillettes!