What To Do About Clumpy Hard Borax And Washing Soda

January 12, 2014 by Beverly

When I started to make my own cleaning products and make my own laundry products a few years back, most of the ingredients I needed were pretty familiar to me. All that is except for a couple that kept popping up in a whole lot of recipes – borax and washing soda.

I remember the first time I went to the store in search of borax and washing soda. I didn’t know if I’d be able to find them, but was pleasantly surprised to discover that they were right there on the laundry aisle of my local Meijer grocery store. I just hadn’t ever noticed them!

One time I even came across this display in my local Walmart that had the borax and washing soda conveniently shelved right on the end of an aisle (an Endcap as my hubby in the grocery biz would say).

{ read the article here = = > Homemade Laundry Soap – Walmart Knows What We’re Doing! }

So yeah, I’ve gotten more comfortable finding and buying my borax and washing soda as time has gone by. I’m enough of an expert on those two white powdery substances now that I’m also familiar with something else that nobody prepared me for.

They clump up. They turn rock hard. Especially borax. Man oh man, borax can turn into one giant rock !!

If I’m using a complete box of borax or washing soda (like I do in my Big Batch Homemade Laundry Soap), then it’s not a problem. But I often use other recipes (like my No Grate Laundry Soap) where I only use a small amount at a time, and that leaves me with opened boxes to store for several months.

Dealing with clumpy or hard Borax and Washing Soda

So what’s the deal with those opened boxes of borax and washing soda turning all hard and clumpy??

A little research helped me confirm what I was already thinking. Humidity is the bad guy. Heat can be part of the problem too, but heat and humidity often go hand in hand so I think it almost always tracks back to humidity and moisture. There’s a few strategies people use to keep their powdery substances from getting clumpy (and this includes things like sugar or onion powder too), and they are:

Keep in a cool dry place where moisture is low
Put something in with the powder like rice or a dry crust of bread that absorbs moisture
Store in a tightly sealed container to keep moisture out

So let’s take a look at those options.

The first change I made a while back was to stop storing my borax and washing soda in the basement. This was the “keep in a cool dry place” strategy. Even though our basement is cool, it can be damp. I was hopeful that move would do the trick but when I got my borax out yesterday, even though it’s now stored on the main floor, it was pretty darn hard again. I haven’t come up with any place cooler or drier to put it, short of the freezer. I suppose that’s an option but I’m a little worried about it in with my food stuffs.

And on the flip side of that, I wasn’t crazy for the next option either of “putting something in with the powder” because I didn’t want remnants of any foods ending up in my laundry soaps or cleaners.

I made a small attempt at the “tightly sealed container” option by taping my boxes shut one time after opening them, but that wasn’t really tightly sealing them. I decided I had to take this option more seriously as this seemed like the best bet at a solution.

Ditch the Boxes and Find New Containers

I’ve suspected for a while that the cardboard boxes that borax and washing soda are sold in probably make sense from the manufacturers’ point of view as good containers for packaging and shipping, however those cardboard boxes don’t make as much sense for us as the consumer of the product to use for storage.

Twice now, I’ve ended up ripping apart the cardboard box of borax to get at the hard clump inside (cuz you know it ain’t gonna pour out!!) and then putting that clump in something like a large Rubbermaid container and hacking away at it to try to get it back to being kind of powdery again. Once that was done, I would put it into some other storage container because, well, the box was a total goner at that point.

{ On a side note, you can see below that I cracked my wooden spoon in half while chopping away at a clump, but guess what? My half-spoon makes a super good paddle for clump annihilation and it’s my new tool of choice! }

So ~ finally and at long last ~ it’s dawned on me that maybe instead of waiting until I’m to the point of smashing up a rock-hard clump of borax and putting it in a better container, I should be transferring my borax and washing soda to a better type of sealed container right from the get-go! That’s my new strategy and I’m hopeful it’s going to be the one that really works.

Currently I’m using these medium sized ziploc containers that hold a little over half a box. I’ve yet to transfer a complete box to a different container, so I’m keeping my eyes peeled for containers that might be a good size. Otherwise I guess I can always just use two of the smaller containers.

I was also smart one time and cut the name of the product off the boxes before I ripped them apart, and then taped them to the lids of the new containers. That’s turned out to be a nice way to identify what’s inside. As you can see in the picture, I have this kind of quirky habit of marking my boxes of stuff with the date I bought it and the price I paid. It makes me feel in control of my life or something I guess.

So that’s the plan. To immediately upon opening, transfer my borax and my washing soda into a container with a tight fitting lid and to stop using the cardboard boxes they’re sold in for long term storage. Even if they do start to harden up, at least now I’ve got them in a type of container that makes it easy to stir it and keep breaking the clumps up as time goes along.

How about you? If you’re a person who keeps borax and washing soda in the house, have you had this hardening and clumping problem too?

Feel free to leave me a comment and I would love to hear how others deal with this situation.

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