Homemade Dishwasher Soap - Recipe Review #3

Back in July we posted a review of the first two homemade dishwasher detergent recipes we made. This week, we are posting a review of the third recipe we tried. We found this recipe on wellnessmama.com. It is very similar to the second recipe we tried, only this one includes borax.

Homemade Dishwasher Detergent #3

Ingredients

1 c. borax

1 c. washing soda

½ c. citric acid

½ c. sea salt

20 – 30 drops lemon essential oil (or other citrus oil, optional)

Directions

Stir all ingredients together. Store in a glass jar. Use 1 – 2 T. per load. You can add a couple of drops of dishwashing liquid to the powder before closing the soap dispenser if you want extra cleaning power. Note: Adding too many drops of liquid dish soap will cause problems with your dishwasher.


What we liked

  • The dishes were clean. 
  • The recipe is simple.
  • The ingredients are non-toxic.
  • There was no detergent taste left on the dishes.

What we didn't like

  • Citric acid isn't something we typically kept on hand prior to making our own dish soap (given how well recipes #2 and #3 work, we now plan to store a container with our other soap making supplies).

Overall review

This recipe is similar to the second recipe we tried and it worked well! The dishes came out clean. It does call to use a bit more per load - one to two tablespoons versus one teaspoon for recipe #2. It also uses similar ingredients to the laundry soap recipe we use, so we had most of the ingredients already.

One load came out a bit cloudy. This could have been because we used too much detergent, because the water pressure was low, or because we had been having issues with our dishwasher. We didn't notice a lot of cloudiness, even after using up most of the jar.

Overall, this one works almost as well as recipe #2 and is a great recipe to use. Our favorite so far is recipe #2 for two reasons: 1) no cloudy loads and 2) it uses less soap per load.


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