My curiosity finally got the better of me. For many months I’d been wanting to try the Dawn Powerwash dish spray but the price always stopped me. But then it was on sale, and I had a coupon, so I trotted home with a bottle to give it a try. And I liked it – liked it a whole lot actually. A dish soap that you can spray is super handy. But when my bottle was gone and it was time to buy a refill, I was stopped again. Darn, those refills are expensive too. Time to make my own Dawn Powerwash refill!

Let’s Make Homemade Dawn Powerwash Dish Spray

Much of the value in the Dawn Powerwash is in the sprayer itself. It’s a clever way to deliver some aerated bubbles of watered down dish soap onto your dirty dishes. In fact the first ingredient listed on their bottle is water! But another ingredient listed is denatured alcohol and it’s thought that this ingredient helps the mixture foam as well as add some cleaning power. With those ingredients in mind we can create a homemade Dawn spray recipe.

We’ll be using Distilled water in our recipe. Distilled water is pure H2O so there are no hard water minerals to interfere with cleaning. We’ll also be adding some Isopropyl Alcohol, and I decided to use the 91% for extra strength. Finally, we’ll be adding some Dawn Dish soap. Here’s how to do it.

Step 3: Add Dawn Dish Soap

Now we’ll add our dish soap to the bottle. We’ll be adding 4 Tablespoons of Dawn dish soap. Once again, we’re adding this at the end to lessen the amount of bubbles that could suds up as we’re making our refill.

Step 5: Screw the top back on and start using your DIY Powerwash Refill!

The spray nozzles of the Dawn Powerwash dish spray bottles twist on and off quite easily. So once your homemade refill is complete, simply twist the nozzle back on, gently tip the bottle back and forth to mix the ingredients, and you can begin using your new frugal homemade Dawn dish spray!

My experience so far has been that this DIY refill is working very well. It sprays around in the same way and gets my dishes clean – AND – it makes my sink shiny too in the same way the store-bought version did.

How Frugal is our DIY Powerwash Spray?

Now for all the frugal folks, let’s do some math! Are we saving money by making our own Powerwash spray refill? Yes, indeed we are. When you look at the per batch cost of our refill, we’re actually saving a lot. First, let’s look at how much each of our ingredients cost per ounce:

128 oz Distilled Water @ $1.39 = 1¢ per ounce
32 oz 91% Isopropyl Alcohol @ $4.19 = 13¢ per ounce
5.8 oz Dawn dish soap @ $1.09 = 18¢ per ounce

Now, how much of each of these ingredients did we use in our mixture? My calculations are:

14 ounces of Distilled water = 14¢
1 Tablespoon Alcohol = 7¢
4 Tablespoons Dawn = 36¢

DIY Batch Total of 57¢  vs. Store bought refill of $4.19 – That’s a savings of 86% !

The prices at your local store might differ a bit from mine, but even with slight variations this is still a money-saving mixture. It should cost you less than a dollar per batch to make and still give you good cleaning results too. And those are great reasons to make your own!