Review of the Dugger's laundry detergent

Check out my blog called Homemade Laundry Detergent story for the recipe and let me know how it works for you! :)

My first adventure with making laundry detergent started with a lot of research on different recipes and me desiding that if it worked for a HUGE family like the Dugger's it should work for me. Plus it was SUPER cheap! After making my batch and letting it sit overnight I basically had a mixture of what still looked like water and floating on top was what had gelled up and I couldn't get it to mix well at all with the broom handle that I used so I went to Home Depot and bought a paint mixer drill bit for my drill and used it to mix the detergent and it helped ALOT! It then turned into what looked like a lotion mixture when it was stirred up. I halved it and added hot tap water to fill the buckets back up, making 10 gallons. Then we filled all the cleaned empty detergent containers that we had saved up. 1 gain detergent container that has the spout on it, 4 48-50 load Arm & Hammer/Gain containers, and 2 32 load gain containers. The rest we left in the buckets until we were ready to refill a container. Ok so now to discuss how well it cleans... I say for most of mine and my boyfriends laundry it did pretty well. I washed mostly in warm cycles or atleast started it as a warm load and then turned it to cold after the bottom of the basin was filled up to the rim of the agitator, and I used 2 cap full (gain spout detergent container top...its about 1/4 c and is smaller than a top on the 32-50 load detergents.) in a large load, a cup and 1/2 in a medium load, and 1 cap in a small load.  However, for my almost 3 year old daughters and my boyfriend's son's clothes it wouldn't get the stains out, so I would use a homemade pretreater (Hydrogen Peroxide and Blue Dawn mixed in a spray bottle) and it got most of it out, however for a really tough stain like markers or dye, ect. I would have to go back to my trusty Gain. I have only used it a few times though since I made this laundry.
I also would like to note that this does not have any additives that will help keep your whites white so if you are going to use it you may want to look into getting some bluer or maybe you could find an optical brightener, because your white will begin to look dingy over time!
Overall, I think for the price it is defiantly worth a shot! I love in a hard water area and because the borax works as a water softener it does pretty well w/out having to use Calogen.

**Note: This is not safe for cloth diapers, because of possible repealing issues, especially if using pocket diapers and/or microfiber. This is because of the bar of Fels Nap soap used. Also because of the borax, it can cause wear on the PUL and the elastic in the diapers as well; however, some people do use this and report no problems. So its your call, but I'm not risking it!