I’m a hat man. I have to be because when my daughter was born and my inlaws happened - I got Tourette’s and all my fuggin hair fell out! Thus in summer my head gets poached and in winter I freeze - unless I have a hat. I don’t have to worry about my toques much because sweat isn’t as big a problem in winter and the soft fabrics wash up nice.
In summer I favour flop hats or boonie hats. Ordinarily I’d opt for a sporty fedora or even a stylish Stetson maybe… but I just get too damned hot. Plus I’m always painting, gluing, and lately the bloody crows have been after me. A couple years ago I got spackled by asshole crows and abandoned ball hats for good. I need something with a brim. But expensive felts and cleaning procedures were out!
I bought cheapo boonies for ten bucks and just threw them out when they got too grungy. Then I found my current hat that cost an astronomical $30.00 on temu or Amazon… and I’m rather fond of it. But it too got crudded up and I just could NOT get it clean.
I went on the net and the kids told me to buy something called “Oxy-Clean”. I filled up a Tupperware with water, mixed in some Oxyclean and threw the hat in to soak for 20 min. Then I pulled it out, rinsed it in the sink… and that sucker was CLEAN. But the cleaner faded it a bit too.
I’ve still got most of the container downstairs. Had it for a couple years now. Is it economically worthwhile to make your own detergent? The only way I’d do it is if it were cheaper while being just as good as say, Tide or whatever the wife is using these days. I didn’t know you could buy laundry soap in a bar…?
Any of you guys or your wives ever done this?
I put my hats onto the top shelf of my dish washer and run a cycle. Seems to work well, if you don't pile a bunch of them together they'll hold they're shape well.
ReplyDeleteFor the hats use a 50-50 mix of water and white distilled vinegar.
ReplyDeleteSoak overnight then rinse a few times and almost good as new. Eddie
The grandson had eight white school shirts ready to be tossed due to impossible-to-remove (by store-bought products) perspiration/deodorant stains. My wife decided to Google-up a homemade recipe and the stuff worked like a charm.
ReplyDeleteI have made my own laundry soap, and found it good for plain dirt, not grease or oil. Here's some research (not mine):
ReplyDeleteSome homemade detergent recipes definitely will not clean your clothes because they lack the essential components to clean. They need to contain a surfactant, which means either a detergent or a soap.
Homemade detergent recipes that contain a surfactant typically contain soap, plus borax and washing soda, or something like that.
These recipes will clean your clothes, but have problems.
They’re much less effective than commercial detergents, which usually contain enzymes, plus other ingredients like suspension agents, oxidizers, optical brighteners, chelating agents, pH adjusters etc, which all help get your clothes cleaner. The typical soap, borax, washing soda combo contains only a surfactant, pH adjuster (borax), and chelating agent (washing soda).
If you are using a washing machine with soap you may also mess up your machine over time if you have hard water. Soap binds to the calcium and magnesium in hard water to make soap scum. A chelating agent will soften your water but may not bind to all then hard water minerals, so may reduce but not eliminate soap scum. This can build up in areas that are very difficult to clean.
Soap may also create a lot of suds, which is a problem if you have a HE washer. It may require a lot more water in the wash and more rinsing, which is less environmentally friendly.
Homemade detergents also generally require hot water to be effective, while modern commercial detergents are formulated to work with cold water. Lots of fabrics don’t play well with hot water, hot water shortens the life of your fabrics, and using hot water requires much more energy so is less environmentally friendly.
And homemade detergents may require a lot more agitation and friction to be effective, which is rough on your clothes.
If you really cannot find a commercial detergent that works for you, and you really are stuck with homemade detergents, then you really must understand the chemistry of laundry detergent if you want some thing that cleans well and doesn’t create problems over time. There’s a huge amount of misinformation out there by people who mean well but don’t understand anything about the chemistry.
Never made homemade detergent but I used a bar laundry soap called fels-naphtha to keep from getting poison ivy and oak.
ReplyDeleteI am very susceptible to both of them. I owned a tree service for 25 years and was in them constantly. I would buy about 6 bars every spring. Use a washcloth and lather up then rinse and repeat. Then once again with a regular type soap. I rarely got poison ivy again and if I did it was not severe and wouldn’t last for more than a day or two.
Sorry this is off topic but felt it would be useful information.
The fels-naphtha would be located in the laundry detergent section of the store.
One of our family-friends made her own laundry detergent for a while. She stored it in old bleach jugs.
ReplyDeleteThen, one day she loaded up the washing machine with her husbands dress shirts and added the soap...except she grabbed the wrong jug. She poured undiluted bleach all over her husband's $30 shirts. That cancelled out about 10 years of potential cost savings.
That was the day she stopped making her own laundry detergent.
Since you're having to buy all the raw materials separately, I can't see how this is saving any money. Economy of scale dictate that the industry making it by the millions of tons can do it a little cheaper than an individual making a few batches a year. I can see brewing your own beer, but making laundry detergent not so much.
ReplyDeleteThe ex didn't make laundry soap, thank God. But she did become crazed over essential oils, buying hundreds of dollars worth to make cleaners and whatnot that cost pennies from the store. Like spray cleaners - got to buy fancy squirt bottles, mix all sorts of crap to make a cleaner that's less effective than one from the dollar store. I refused to use them. I think the cleaner I used was a walmart windex knockoff that cost around a buck. She didn't appreciate when I'd show her those same oils in the ingredients in this or that product.
ReplyDeleteWe have used the above recipe for about 10 years, except at step 3, all dry ingredients go into a 5 gallon jug of hot water and mixed thoroughly until blended. Sit for one day. That mix is then stirred, cut again, 50/50 into 1 gallon jugs. Cleans all but greasy clothes well using 1 cup per load. 10 gallons of finished laundry detergent for just a couple dollars. Huge savings.
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