1- I’m making my own laundry detergent. As I shared previously, this was a project I wanted to take up this year. We’re already halfway through the month, and I’ve only used 2 Litres of my first 8 Litre batch of homemade detergent. It was so easy to make and the savings are worth the tiny bit of effort! Normally we spend $8/month on laundry detergent. This homemade detergent costs a little less than $6/year! Do the math… well okay, I’ll do it for you:
($8 x 12 = $96 – $6) That’s a savings of $90/year!
2- Instead of buying dishwasher rinsing aid, I’m filling my rinse aid dispenser with vinegar. I am amazed at how brilliant our dishes and dishwasher looks at the end of every washing cycle! I would say the vinegar does a better job than the rinse aid. Plus, rinse aid costs about $3.50/month, we use a bottle of vinegar every 2 months. We get our vinegar for free using our Save-On-More points, so that’s a savings of about $42/year!
3- Lastly, I always do a second rinse of my kid’s clothes and diapers with vinegar (this helps remove any leftover detergent residue). I did this even before we started making our own laundry detergent. But then I saw this nifty tip of filling your Downy fabric softener ball with vinegar and now I don’t waste all that water and electricity doing the extra rinse! The downy ball releases the vinegar in the rinse cycle! I don’t know what the water/electricity savings add up to but let’s be modest and claim a savings of $3 a year.
There you have it. Some small, simple changes and we’ve got an extra $135 in our pocket every year! This will certainly come in handy when Lego releases their Lord of the Rings Lego sets this summer. It’s been a while since the hubby and I went toy shopping for ourselves!
Love it! We fell sideways into making our own cleaning agents because I was having some harsh reactions to the chemicals when I was sick. But when I realized how great they work, and CHEAP!, we stuck with it! Vinegar and baking soda are the cleaning-loves of my life. I’ve never heard of using vinegar as a rinsing aid- good to know!
Laura Emily;
I agree, vinegar and baking soda are the cleaning wonders! I also like lemon juice!
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Just an FYI, there is a super-legitimate non-copyright infringing use of the right click button that I and other computer nerds love to use. I used it to open a link to an external site in a new tab so I could read it when I was finished reading your post. Sometimes I do this when there are multiple blog posts I want to read as well. The links are not clearly marked whether or not they open in new tabs and I hate having to constantly click the back button. I was not trying to view your page source, and was kind of offended to be accused of it. It’s also super easy to disable in firefox anyway, and anyone who had the intent of stealing source code would know how. Thanks for the vinegar tips though.