Homemade Dish Soap: Lessons Learned

I'm on my third batch of homemade dish soap now. I'm still tweaking it, but I've learned a lot so far. The first thing I've learned is that most of the people who make up recipes for soap are full of crap. Rather than putting my chemistry degree to good use and coming up with my own recipe, I relied on the advice of others. Here, then, are the consequences of my trusting nature.

After the first batch, which was way too goopy and didn't want to come out of the bottle, I looked for other recipes. All of them suggested adding lemon juice or vinegar, because the acid "helps cut grease." With batch number two, the consistency was much better. I basically did the same thing, 1/4 cup of soap flakes and 2 cups water, only this time I added several teaspoons of lemon juice. After doing a load of dishes, I noticed that all of my glasses were covered in this greasy film, and no matter how much I scrubbed, it was still there.

It soon clicked in my brain: the lemon juice did it. Very simply, the soap I'm using is made by adding a strong base to vegetable oil. So, the equation goes something like this:

oil + base -> soap

Simple enough. But adding the acid sends the reaction in the reverse direction:

soap + acid -> oil

Duh! The oily film left behind was actually oil. The solution in the bottle even separated into two phases. So, lesson learned, don't add acid to soap. My four years behind a lab bench finally paid off!

My current batch is made from 1/2 cup of soap flakes, 2 cups water, and the zest from one tangerine. It smells absolutely lovely and leaves my dishes sparkling. The tangerine does add a bit more cost, but it's still far cheaper than a commercial dish soap. I'll continue experimenting, and post some results when I come up with an optimized recipe. 

January's Project: Simplifying my Cleaning Routine

Keeping the house clean takes longer than it should, even though I don't have that much stuff and it's only a two bedroom apartment. Being busy gets the better of me, and I put off chores until the house is a wreck. I then spend my entire day off cleaning, which is no fun for anybody. Some people genuinely enjoy housework. I am not one of them. So, in order to make more room in my life for living, I am going to minimalize my housework.

I'm already working on my cleaning products, so it's time to tackle the chores themselves. Regularity is the key to simplicity in this case, and so I will try and come up with a regular schedule for each chore so it doesn't consume my rare day off.

Weekly Chore Schedule:

Monday: Dusting sucks, but somebody has to do it. Lucky me!

Tuesday: I usually have half of the day free on Tuesdays, so this large block of time is devoted to my least favorite task: laundry. While the clothes are going, I will work on general tidying up and and hopefully gathering up more stuff to give away.

Wednesday: Thursday is garbage day, so I will gather up all of the trash and recycling to take out on Wednesday night.

Thursday: I also usually have half days on Thursdays, so I will use this time to clean the bathroom, as well as any residual laundry left over from Tuesday.

Friday: I have a bad habit of forgetting to use food that I buy, and I don't want this to happen. On Fridays I will take an inventory of the fridge, clean out anything that's gone bad, and plan meals for the next week. I will also do a general tidying up of the kitchen. This is a good day for it, since we usually go out for dinner, and I won't be dealing with cooking on top of the rest of it.

Saturday: I will get the grocery shopping done on Saturday. It has to happen fairly early in the morning because the supermarkets around here are a madhouse on the weekends.

Sunday: On Sundays I will attend to the floors. I love my hardwood floors but they show dirt and dust so easily. I guess it keeps me honest, but it requires regular maintenance. Once a week should work well.

A few other general habits:

• I once heard somebody say that you should never leave a room empty-handed, which I've found to be extremely true. There's always something that isn't where it belongs, and this helps to combat the chaos. I don't do this as often as I should, but I will make an effort to tidy up as I go about my daily life.
• My mother absolutely refuses to go to bed with dishes in the sink. I try to do this, but it's much easier when you own a dishwasher like she does. From now on, the dishes will be clean before I go to sleep, no exceptions.
• I will look for ways to make chores more fun, whether it's listening to music while I clean, or trying to get my fiance in on the action.

The goal here is to keep chores from overwhelming my life. As it is, whenever I'm not cleaning something, I feel guilty that I'm letting my house be messy. With the schedule, I know that everything will be done in a timely fashion. Once my chore of the day is complete, the guilt will be gone and I can enjoy a walk in the park, a good book, or a long phone conversation with an old friend. I'll report back after my first week of the chore schedule to see how it's going.

Detoxing Cleaning Products and Homemade Dish Soap

January's project of detoxing my household products is underway! The first thing I did is take everything from under the kitchen sink and sort through it. Apologies in advance for the picture quality; my camera is AWOL at the moment so I'm using my phone.

I've been pretty serious about keeping cleaning products nontoxic for a few years now. Most of this stuff was here when I moved in, and I just hadn't gotten around to getting rid of it. I used the Household Products Database which is run by the National Institutes of Health to sort through everything. I got rid of everything that was scary and/or I don't use, and here's what's left.

It's a lot less, and I'm glad to have some of that junk out of my house.

Although the things I actually use are fairly nontoxic, you can see that most of it is still commercially made products. I like them, but they're expensive and come with too much packaging. As stuff runs out, I'm going to try making my own cleaners. Conveniently today I ran out of dish soap, so it's time to cook up a batch.

I used this recipe from Hillbilly Housewife (the second one). I went to Target first, where I found an olive oil dispenser bottle for about $3.

I looked for a bar of simple, cheap glycerin soap but everything that wasn't full of fragrances was stupidly expensive. So I went onto Whole Foods and picked up a bar of their unscented store-brand glycerin soap for $1.99.

The next step is to grate or slice the soap. After contemplating the godawful pain it would be to clean soap flakes out of my cheese grater (and the sad prospect of soapy-tasting cheese) I decided to slice thin slices of it with a knife instead.

I sliced 1/4 cup of soap flakes, as thin as I could. I added them to 2 cups of water in a pan and heated it on medium heat, stirring until the flakes dissolved. It took longer than I expected -- almost 10 minutes -- probably because my slices weren't as efficient as grating it, but it eventually dissolved. I let the mixture cool for awhile, then added 1 teaspoon of bottled lemon juice (the acidity from which supposedly helps cut grease). After cooling it completely I poured the mixture into my bottle. 

Et voila, the finished product! One batch of soap (minus the bit I spilled) completely fills the bottle. It seems to work pretty well so far, though I haven't used it on any seriously dirty dishes yet. The recipe says you can add some essential oil for smell, but it has a fairly neutral, vaguely lemony scent that I really like. It is more watery than commercial dish soap, so that may take some getting used to. This recipe used 1/4 of a bar of soap; the rest of the ingredients were of negligible cost, so one bottle of homemade dish soap was $0.50.

If this were etsy and I were some sort of creative dork, I'd put a cutesy label on it and decorate the bottle. But this isn't, and I'm not, so there it is -- dish soap. It looks like laundry detergent may be the next thing to run out, so I'll probably be making that next. Until then, adios.

UPDATE: After sitting overnight, the soap thickened considerably. I had to give it a good stir in the bottle to break it up a bit, and now it works great. I also used it on a sink of dirty pots and pans, and it cut the grease like a champ. Looks like this will be my go-to soap recipe from now on.

UPDATE #2 (1/19/2013): I just made my second batch. This time I used my microplane grater to shred the soap. It dissolved really quickly and it was actually very easy to clean the grater afterwards. I also added more lemon juice this time, maybe a full tablespoon, and this made the consistency similar to commercial dish soap and thus much easier to work with.