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After our dishwasher broke, we waited for a month for the maintenance crew to actually fix it. Long story short, it's been 2 months and no one has come to fix our broken dishwasher. That's ok! The hippy husband suggested that we wash our dishes by hand for a few months and see the difference it makes on our electricity bill! (You gotta love a husband who so willingly follows in the quest of living a more sustainable lifestyle!) After I finally ran out of the Dawn dish soap that I had been finishing up, I needed a new dish soap that I could make just like all of the other cleaning products in my house. At first I tried only using castile soap as my dish soap but I needed something to cut the grease. The first recipe I tried combined castile soap with lemon juice and vinegar, but I eventually realized that the reason that the solution curdled so often was because I was mixing castile soap (a base) with vinegar and lemon (an acid) which was advised against by Dr. Broner's themselves because the acid/base chemical reaction makes the soap de-saponify causing it to no longer be soap and render it useless as far as cleaning.
Homemade dish soap
INGREDIENTS
- 1 ¾ cups boiling water
- 1 Tbsp borax
- 1 Tbsp of grated bar soap (I use Dr. Bronner's bar castile soap)
- 1/2 teaspoon orange oil (also known as d-limonene, it's a GREAT natural cleaner that is cold pressed from the peels of oranges. I use this as a de-greaser and it smells amazing!)
- 10 drops MRH Tea tree essential oil (or PT Tea tree essential oil)
- 10 drops MRH Lavender essential oil (or PT Lavender essential oil)
DIRECTIONS
- Heat water to boiling and combine the bar soap and borax, mixing until fully dissolved.
- Let sit out on the counter, at room temperature, to cool for about 6-8 hours. Stir whenever you think about it. It will gel upon cooling.
- Mix in the orange oil and transfer to a re-purposed soap bottle or some other container.
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