Laundry powder

[Robert]

I was determined to sell laundry soap, but it's very time consuming.I'm thinking about to get the ninja blender otherwise it's impossible to pulverize the soap/powder.How do you get your's chopped and pulverized ? I already ruined one kitchen aid blender.

Commercial soap powders (as opposed to flakes) used a rapid heating process. (Today they'd probably spray dry.) Bits of soap would have the trapped water in them boil and the resulting tiny broken bubbles are called beads and similar to popcorn. Hard to do with any home apparatus I can think of to make commercial quantities; oven would be pretty slow. Intermittent microwaving will show you the principle and produce small amounts.

 

[kazmi]

I made a batch of soap with alkanet infused OO and it has faded a LOT. Also I did a swirl with it so not all of the soap has alkanet in it. Not really pleased with how it came out so was thinking of turning some if it into a laundry soap. Even with the very light color does anyone think it may stain my laundry? I could rebatch it and add some colorant to see if its salvageable into something that I would like but was thinking about the laundry soap route instead. Any thoughts on this? Maybe save it for dark clothes load only?

 

[MKRainville]

Oh, and I stumbled across some inexpensive plastic shot glasses at Walmart -- a dozen for under $2. A shot is about 2 TBL, so they make great scoops and reduce the temptation to add too much soap to the load. A little condiment cup scrounged from the local burger joint would work too.

Pet peeve -- I hate the big caps that commercial laundry detergent comes in!!! I am convinced they are cleverly designed to make the consumer use way too much expensive detergent. :x

Hehe... I have one or two of those condiment cups... they mysteriously came home in my togo box once... Mostly because I didnt want the sauce all over everything! However, I use them to weigh out F/O!

I agree! I hate those large caps... ugh so frustrating.

 

[Bridgett]

I'm disturbed that just about all the homemade laundry detergent (liquid or powder) recipes call for much more alkali than research long ago showed was optimal. These recipes that call for more borax or washing soda (or both) than soap would produce what would've been considered a very inferior product in the days when soap based laundry detergents were the rule.

First of all, there's no point in using both washing soda and borax. They each do approximately the same thing, soda a little better IMO. They "soften" water, provide alkalinity, and knock down suds a little.

Alkali do help the cleaning of fabrics, but they also degrade many fabrics. And even in helping the cleaning there are diminishing returns after a little is added. I can't tell you the point where the value a little more of them contribute to cleaning is exceeded by the value lost due to fabric degradation, but there were extensive tests done early in the 20th C., and that point is much lower than what's seen in most of the recipes going around lately. The best products were the ones that were mostly soap, no matter how "hard" the water was. (What was odd was the finding in the development of Tide that it worked the other way around, in that its surfactant made clothes scratchy unless a lot more "builder" was used -- but the builders were less alkaline than the ones commonly used with soap.) And of the builders then in common use with soaps, silicates were better than carbonate or borate. Were there commercial powders that were higher in alkali? Sure, but they were the cheap stuff, not the good stuff.

Robert, do you have any idea where to locate this research? My sister and mother are allergic to SLS and need a cheap alternative to laundry detergent.

 

[Robert]

Robert, do you have any idea where to locate this research? My sister and mother are allergic to SLS and need a cheap alternative to laundry detergent.

Look in library collections of trade journals from the industry. JAOCS is the more academic, but there were also variously named soap & detergent industry journals that are indexed in libraries. Online you can still look up more recent research done in recent decades via patents, usually for formulations with minor additives with small advantages that you can easily skip, just using the rest of the formula for guidance as to what's out there.

But I'm sure you can find laundry detergents that don't use either SLS or soap. In fact, up until the 1990s SLS had been seeing little use for decades among the anionic surfactants for laundry, having been eclipsed mostly by SDBS, and anionics generally had been dropping in usage for laundry for decades in favor of nonionics. Yet somehow I doubt it's particularly SLS that your family has a problem with. You may be blaming SLS for a problem with an ingredient you don't even know about.

If you want to minimize the chance of getting laundry detergent having SLS, these days I'd suggest using a liquid or powder recommended for HE machines. But that won't do you much good if the problem's not with SLS.

 

[kazmi]

Yeah, any amount of soap to 0 baking soda! Baking soda's not going to do anything.

Robert did you mean to say that she needs to turn her baking soda into washing soda first?

 

[Robert]

Robert did you mean to say that she needs to turn her baking soda into washing soda first?

She could do that (actually it becomes soda ash when cooked, but it doesn't seem worthwhile when you can simply buy some form of sodium carbonate), but my point was simply that baking soda did nothing for soap. You'd be better off replacing the baking soda by more soap.

 

[kazmi]

So you just powder your soap (or turn your soap to liquid) and use nothing else for laundry soap?

The reason I'm asking these questions is because you said you prefer soda to borax and I'm trying to decide how I want to proceed with trying to use soap for laundry detergent AND if I can use my alkenet colored soap.

 

[mel z]

I think Robert is correct on adding both washing soda and borax breaking down clothes.

I have been doing this for over a year, powdered version as I don't want any germy skin issues from touching add water and stir version sitting around too long.

I have noticed my clothing is no longer lasting. Especially the cheap undies. The elastic is shot within 2 months of new purchase. Worse, is my work clothes, which I cannot afford to replace so frequently.

I also noticed the yucking soap scum build up in the washer, and duller clothes. Even if I add vinegar to the rinse water. I still have a big bucket of this that I will keep for winter back up if I can't get out to buy detergent, but I have now purchased another bottle of "Allergen Free" detergent. (Why it costs more than the fragrance type I don't know, but the prices shot up in this last year, I have no choice but use it.) Oh, I was using Fels Naptha - whatever the new kind is - not my homemade soap.

Maybe homemade soap is gentler?

I was using borax in hopes of getting rid of dust mite allergen, but it is not necessary if you have to wash once a week. Work clothes need cold water, so that is why Borax et. al.

Any advice is appreciated, or I'll stick to store bought.

 

[Robert]

So you just powder your soap (or turn your soap to liquid) and use nothing else for laundry soap?

The reason I'm asking these questions is because you said you prefer soda to borax and I'm trying to decide how I want to proceed with trying to use soap for laundry detergent AND if I can use my alkenet colored soap.

Adding some alkali (but it's got to be more alkaline than baking soda) will make it a little stronger and a little cheaper. But if I had to choose between some of the recipes I've seen going around in recent years that are more alkali than soap, and using nothing but soap, I would easily choose using nothing but soap for laundry.

Lately in cx with this discussion I've been doing some Googling for state-of-art soap-based formulas for laundry detergent, and they're typically 70-80% soap, 5-15% alkali (carbonate or silicate of soda), and the rest other stuff. That's not out of line with what would've been said over a century ago.

In water that was "hard" enough to make a big difference, it never paid to add enough carbonate to wash water to take up all the calcium, etc. unless it was done separately. Laundries would "soften" their water separately rather than doctor the soap. Consider this:

Na2CO3 + Ca(OH)2 --> CaCO3 + 2 NaOH

Meaning that if all the "hardness" in the was water to begin with was lime (it's not, but that's not too bad an approximation), you're adding washing soda to turn it into chalk and lye -- neither of which are good for fabrics. So typically soda-"built" soaps would have only enough carbonate in them to boost the alkalinity of the wash water a little, regardless of whether it was anticipated there'd be more calcium in the water that could react with more soap and/or carbonate. It did the clothes more of a favor to generate scummy lime soap in the wash water than to try to precipitate all the calcium as chalk, if there was a lot of it.

Silicates were better additives than carbonate or borate, and the only reason I imagine they're not used in the home recipes is that alkaline sodium silicate is not a common grocery item. It is a little more hazardous to work with than washing soda would be, although soaps made with the amounts of sodium silicate typically used are no more hazardous than plain soap powder.

I might recommend sodium citrate as a water conditioner for these recipes, except that I read once that citrate's affinity for Ca++ isn't high enough to efficiently pull it away from soap, so you'd have to use a lot of it. Trisodium citrate's not so strongly alkaline so it wouldn't do clothes any harm, and it complexes calcium without making a chalky residue so it's advantageous there, but apparently you'd need a lot of it, which would cost you, to make a difference in "hard" water.

If you can get sodium hexametaphosphate (the original Calgon), that'd be even better as a water "softener". It's still used in non-alkaline bath salts for that purpose, but has become somewhat expensive. You can use enough of it to fully "soften" the wash water and it does clothes (and skin) no harm at all. However, if you wanted to optimize your laundry soap, it'd still pay to put in a pinch of sodium silicate or even carbonate even if there's also enough phosphate in there to complex all the "hardness" cations. If all the people in the world who used home recipes for laundry were to switch to phosphates for their soap "builder", the pollution impact would be insignificant because so that's so few people compared to those using no-phosphate commercial detergents (and their toilets).

 

[Robert]

I should've mentioned one little exception to baking soda's doing nothing. If you use chlorine bleach (usually hypochlorite), bicarbonate ion helps the bleaching action. I don't know why this is, but it even helps (as verified by my experiments 20 yrs. ago) in the formation of chlorine dioxide from chlorite ion, so bicarbonate is useful in combination with various chlorine-oxygen species. It seems to stabilize the active species.

 

[Lindy]

Actually baking soda also deodorizes.....

 

[Robert]

Actually baking soda also deodorizes.....

By itself, yes, but mixed with soap it doesn't deodorize any better than the soap by itself.

 

[Lindy]

We can agree to disagree, it doesn't lose its ability by being mixed with soap. Consider Oxy-Clean, I believe two of the ingredients are baking soda and citric acid, same as in a bath bomb. It deodorizes and increases the cleansing power through oxygenation.

 

[Bridgett]

Robert, thank you for all your help. You can do the research a lot more efficiently than I can! And you are correct, no doctor has officially diagnosed my family members, but when they gave up shampoo, gel body wash and commercial detergents, their dermatagraphia flared up much less often. Regular lye soap is okay, so we're using that as a basis for experimenting. The current plan is to use sodium hexametaphosphate to soften water (it pretty much liquid rocks where they live), and 85% by weight soap, 15% sodium carbonate as laundry detergent. I promise to update this thread in a couple of months, when we've had a chance to give this concoction a fair chance. We plan on using 50% coconut oil, 50% lard soap.

 

[kazmi]

Bridgett keep us posted! I would really like to know how this turns out for you. My water is not very hard so not sure if I need it but if my soap-only detergent doesn't work I may have to consider some additives.

 

[Robert]

We can agree to disagree, it doesn't lose its ability by being mixed with soap.

It doesn't lose its ability, but it's redundant. The way baking soda works is by its alkalinity. It neutralizes volatile acids that you could otherwise smell. But soap is also alkaline, so it does the same thing. So you gain nothing in that regard by adding baking soda to it.

Consider Oxy-Clean, I believe two of the ingredients are baking soda and citric acid, same as in a bath bomb. It deodorizes and increases the cleansing power through oxygenation.

If that's what it has, that's just to make it fizz with CO2 bubbles. Baking soda doesn't do any oxygenation, that has to be by some other ingredient of OxiClean, probably percarbonate or perborate.

 

[Robert]

(it pretty much liquid rocks where they live)

Where's that? I'm interested in the geology & hydrology.

What's "fun" is that if you go just ~20 mi. NW of NYC (which gets its very "soft" water from afar in that direction) you get into territory that's so geologically complex that as one side effect the water differs enormously in places that aren't far from each other. It's part of a larger karst belt that stretches hundreds of miles roughly SW-NE, from Tenn. to Ont., but this particular bit of it is very special mineralogically.

 

[Bridgett]

Robert, my mother lives near Tombstone, AZ. My sister lives on the Atlantic coast of FL. Oddly enough, I live on the panhandle gulf coast of florida, and my water is soft.

 

[Robert]

Robert, my mother lives near Tombstone, AZ. My sister lives on the Atlantic coast of FL. Oddly enough, I live on the panhandle gulf coast of florida, and my water is soft.

In Ariz. that's to be expected because it's so dry, the water is concentrated in everything. Calcium & magnesium there are present largely as sulfates and other salts rather than the bicarbonates associated with "hardness" in most places. On the Atlantic coast of Fla., yeah, it's fairly "hard" in the southern portion, although many people don't get so much of that because of municipal "softening", getting rid of the bicarbonate "hardness" via lime treatment:

Ca(HCO3)2 + CaO --> 2CaCO3 (allowed to settle out in a big tank) + H2O

The great thing about that is that it leaves nothing add'l dissolved in the water.