Tale of Three Laundry Soaps

[sudsmaster]

Just for fun, I decided to grate some regular bar soap (Ivory) and see how well it cleans in my Neptune 7500 front loader. I planned on using the food slicer attachment for the KA Epicurean mixer.

But then, I thought, if I'm going to all this trouble, why not grate some other laundry soap bars I have around the home?

So in addition to an entire Ivory soap bath bar, I also ground about 1/2 of a pink Zote laundry bar, as well as about the same amount of a blue Island brand laundry soap bar (from Fiji).

The Ivory soap grated to a very granular, dusty powder. The Zote was the easiest to grate, producing nice fluffy ribbons of soap. The Island was in between the Ivory and the Zote in terms of grating. It produced ribbons as well as some powder and then some hard "blueberries" that were quite resistant to grating.

The bell shaped object in the background is the grater attachment for the KA mixer food slicer.

 

[sudsmaster]

Ivory wash test

I tried the Ivory powder first.

I added it in 10 ml increments to a load of about five or six big bath sheets. I found that 40 ml was required to give a very light layer of suds. I also added 20 ml of STPP to help soften the water and prevent soap scum from forming.

I chose the boosted hot regular cycle with extra rinse. That means 125F to 130F wash water. The first rinse is cold but it winds up kind of warm because of the heat left over from the wash.

Here's a shot of the wash about halfway through the wash portion of the cycle.

 

[launderess]

Neat!

Am sure you know this, but one adds the water softener first, then soap. You want to bind up the minerals in the water before the soap gets to them. Not only does this mean less chances for soap scum/build up, but one uses less soap this way.

Soap is one of the oldest water softeners, in fact old laundry/housekeeping guides would advise housewives to use a water softener so they could use less soap, as soap was costly and more was "wasted" being used to soften water than required.

Man made detergents, OTOH do not soften water on their own, hence their need for various builders/water softeners.

L.

 

[sudsmaster]

Here I was adding the STPP first...

 

[sudsmaster]

And after the STPP, I added the Ivory...

But I don't think it really makes much difference if you add the softener and soap in sequence, or simultaneously. STPP probably has a higher affinity for hard water minerals than soap. Additionall, most soil contains hard water minerals, and as these are released during washing they are taken up by the water softener so that the soap can continue to work. Chemistry is a ballet of balances, and if one compound has a higher affinity for a molecule, it will not only snap it up faster, but may even strip other compounds of that molecule as they exchange it into solution. Everything in chemisty is in equilibrium - it's not a lockbox.

 

[sudsmaster]

The results

Well, my first impression upon removing the towels washed in granulated Ivory was that they smelled CLEAN. No fragrance from detergent or fabric softener was there to mask any odors, and none was needed, because there weren't any odors. That part was very nice.

After drying, the towels are nice and fluffy. I honestly don't know if they are softer than they would be if washed in regular liquid HE and with softener, but they are not at all harsh to the touch, so I think it's an acceptable result. If I had no other soaps to test, I'd say I'll probably want to wash the bath sheets in Ivory/STPP again, but I'll see how the other two perform, first.

 

[frigilux]

I'm loving this whole 'back-to-soap' experiment. Very pretty colors you have, there.

The only bar soap I have in the house is Lever 2000 and I refuse to use that on my laundry, but I'm awaiting the arrival of a bag of made-for-laundry soap I bought from a 'retro' soap website. Like you, I want to use it on my bath towels.

 

[launderess]

Don't use Lever2000, too many skin care "chemicals" for laundry.

All this talk about laundry soap, has one thinking about the 30 or so vintage Fels soap bars lying around. Am too tired to even think about grating, so guess they will stay put. *LOL*

Do have a box of vintage Fels "Instant", but that is for show and not go.

Must say the smell of vintage Fels is wonderful. I just love the smell of Napalm in the morning! *LOL*

L.

 

[frigilux]

Napalm in the morning---have you been at the cooking sherry, Launderess?



If it works out I like using soap on certain loads, I'm counting on you to provide a groovy make-it-yourself recipe for me.

 

[peterh770]

Napthalene, not napalm!!! LOL!!!

 

[exploder321]

Ok..

Being that i am on a military base, with a navy man, i must state that my brother chris found this quite hiliarous..

 

[sudsmaster]

Soap a dope

Glad you folks are enjoying this... ;-)

Update:

Last night I did a load of whites with the blue chips. The Fijiian soap has a very strong tallow aroma, not one I really like. But it cleaned very nicely (with the help of STPP and the very long hot cycle I've been doing for whites all along). The items were nice and fluffy at the end, more fluffy than if I'd used detergent and fabric softener. And without that slick feel that softener tends to give them.

Today I did my work clothes (very very dirty). I ran a warm rinse spin first with just 20 ml of STPP, to get the worst of it off (and hopefully the foam suppressant from the machine coolant). Then I ran the standard long hot whites cycle. I found I had to use twice as much of the soap/stpp mixture to get any level of sudsing going. That is not unusual; in general I've found that these dirty work clothes require twice as much HE detergent to maintain a thin layer of suds. In fact, the cycle is running right now, the pre-soak/wash (taking almost an hour) having just finished, and it's filling right now with a hot rinse (you go Neppie!). Oh, almost forget, for this load I'm useing the PINK stuff (Zote). It has a fairly strong fragrance, not one I find especially entrancing, but hopefully that will be history when the load is finished.

I do have some intial impressions comparing the three: The Ivory seemed to clean well, and left the fabrics smelling heavenly (which is no scent at all). The Island blue soap has a strong tallow aroma, but that pretty much dissipated by the final spin. Still, I think the Ivory washed fabrics had a better smell. I am theorizing that the special things about Island laundry soap are 1) The deep blue color means it has some bluing built in (clever), and 2) It may be one of those soaps that works in salt water (in Fiji, apparently, they use a lot of salt water for washing up, including showering). I will test the salt water hypothesis by ... salting some warm water and comparing the sudsing with regular warm water.

I believe I've seen various colors of Zote in the local mercado; perhaps other colors have fragrances that are more pleasing to my nose. But since the Ivory has performed so well, I might just pick up a case or two at Costco next time out... and be done with it. The Ivory is nowhere near as pleasant to grate as the Zote, as it produces a fair amount of fine soap powder that gets up one's nose. But next time I grate it, I'll use some plastic sheeting to shroud the grater and keep the dust down.

A happy surprise in all of this has been the KA food slicer/grater attachment. I've had it for over five years now, but this is the first time I've tried it. I was half expecting a total mess, but it really grated very nicely, and I think it should work quite well on things like hard cheeses and such. The key is that it can be used at a slower speed, so that the chips can be controlled better. And, although the grater edges don't seem all that sharp to me, they're plenty sharp for grating soap.

I will have the final results of the work clothes/Zote wash in another hour or so.

 

[westtexman]

I just HAD to try it . . .

And I must say that I'm quite impressed. I grated a bar of Ivory soap (the old-fashioned way with a cheese grater), and used 4 TBSP on a load of white towels with 2 TBSP of White King (STPP with Sodium Carbonate) and 1 TBSP of Ecover oxygen bleach imported from the UK.

I used the Sanitary cycle on my LG, and the results were great. Though I didn't see a large amount of sudsing, the cleaning was very good and the towels were VERY SOFT - even without softener. In fact, they were softer than the load of towels I had washed the day before using UK Persil Non-Bio and Comfort Pure softener.

There was a TINY blood stain on one of my white wash cloths that was not removed completely by the soap, but that was the only negative. It's amazing how modern technology with the enzymes, bleaches, surficants, builders and OBA's works so much better than the good ole' soaps of yesteryear.

This may just be my new method for washing my white towel loads for a while!

Bryan

 

[sudsmaster]

Thanks for the confirmation, Bryan.

Yes, I washed my work clothes in the Ivory/STPP combination. The results came out very well, although I suspected the shop coat wasn't quite as clean as it would be with an HE detergent. So I rewashed it in Sears HE plus STPP, and the cleaning was slightly better. Let's face it, even though the coat is a deep blue, the grime of metalworking and associated fluids (worst offender is a molybenum-sulfide based black lubricating oil) has worked its way in and it will never look new again.

The load of whites I washed with the Island soap came out quite clean as well... and I didn't even add any oxygen bleach to that one.

Overall I prefer the Ivory, and so I'll probably be grating more of it. I plan on using it at the very least on bath towels, but probably also for whites, sheets, blankets, throw rugs, and lightly soiled clothing. I think for the work clothes I'll stick with an HE powder with enzymes, at least for now. For whites I might add some Oxyclean and/or some borax, but the soap seems to do a very good job, as well as leaving the white towels soft enough and certainly more absorbant and fluffy than if they were rinsed in fabric softener.

For all those who bemoan the disappearance of Ivory Snow soap flakes, it's really easy to grate some Ivory bar soap and it works just great, at least in warm to hot water.

I will say that the Zote flakes dissolve most readily, so if you like to wash in cooler water, Zote might be the best soap to use.

One thing in favor of my using soap is that the water here is fairly soft. I've measured it at no more than five grains of hardness, which is only slightly hard. It will leave spots on cars and glasses, but not much at that. And the hardness seems to vary seasonally. It's harder towards the end of the summer, when more local water is used instead of softer mountain water. It seems that after a few good winter rains (as is the case now), the utility starts to mix in more soft water from the reservoirs in the Sierra Nevada, and the water gets a bit softer. I notice a difference in the sudsing of shampoo, as well.

Well, you all have a nice Christmas.

 

[sudsmaster]

Ivory Soap Grating Update

While the turkey was rotissering today, I grated more Ivory bath bar soap on the KA mixer.

Good news: the other bar I grated must have been quite old and dried out. It gave off a lot of annoying dust and the gratings resembled powder more than gratings. The new batch of about 8 bars were much moister and consequently grated more like you'd expect, and like the Zote soap did yesterday: into nice neat ribbons with a minimum of dust and bother. These gratings do take up more volume, but I've been relying upon dry weight using an electronic postal scale to measure out the doses so far. At present, about .6 oz of soap, plus an equal amount of STPP, seems to give good results. The volume of the soap depends a lot on how it grated and how it packed down during processing and storage. Eventually I'll be able to use a measure to meter out the doses, but for now the postal scale is more accurate.

I still have more of those "hard bars" but I'll be saving them for shower and sink - a hard bar lasts longer... ;-)

 

[sudsmaster]

PS-I cut the STPP with 10% by weight sodium metasilicate. The reason for that is the silicate helps to protect washer parts. White Kind laundry booster probably contains some as well, as do most all laundry powders.