One of the great side benefits of making more of your own stuff is that you’ll usually save money too. Some of the homemade strategies may seem like only little changes at first, but over time they can all add up and become regular ways to help the budget.
One of the little strategies we’ve had in place for several years now is stretching our liquid dish soap so that it lasts almost five or six times longer than before. How do we do this?
We discovered you can make your own foaming dish soap.
The link in the previous sentence brings you to an article I wrote a few years ago when I first gave this strategy a try – and we’ve been doing it ever since! I LOVE my homemade foaming dish soap.
That article also shared the method I use. Once you have a foaming dish soap bottle, you can keep refilling it with your own mixture by simply filling the foaming bottle with a little bit of liquid dish soap and then filling it the rest of the way with water.
I never even bother to measure – it’s really quick and easy!
So yes, I’ve written about this particular recipe before, but a couple weeks ago when I was shopping I saw a price comparison that got me thinking about this whole concept again.
Let’s take a look:
Saving Money On Dish Soap
On my recent trip to the grocery store I bought a 24 oz bottle of Dawn dish soap on sale for $2.59. Just a little farther down the shelf I noticed that the 10 oz Dawn foaming dish soap was also on sale for the same price – $2.59!
Of course we’re going to look at that and think, hmmmm, 24 ounces vs. 10 ounces both selling for $2.59. I choose the non-foaming 24 ounces please!
And that’s the smart money saving choice – But here’s something else to consider.
How does your household wash dishes? Do most of the dishes go right into the dishwasher after a quick rinse? Do you just hand wash a few things like pots and pans with a squirt of liquid dish soap on a sponge? That’s how it often goes at our house. Is that how it goes in your house too?
If so, then using your own homemade foaming dish soap is a good cost alternative.
What we’ve done is traded a squirt of full strength liquid soap on a sponge for dish washing, for a squirt of watered down liquid soap from a foaming dispenser on a sponge. BUT, this works just fine because if you think about it, anytime you wash dishes in a sink full of water with a squirt of soap, you’ve got watered down soap! You still get a very nice amount of soapy bubbles with this homemade foaming dish soap strategy too.
And frankly I think that’s what the manufacturer is selling you in the foaming bottle for $2.59 – watered down soap!
So either way you save with this strategy. If you’re a person who likes the foaming pump soaps, you can save the bottle and refill it yourself at least five or six more times from a 24 oz bottle of dish soap with your homemade version. This brings your cost down to about 45 cents per batch. AND if you’re using a less expensive dish soap (maybe from the dollar store or a great bargain that you’ve found) you can bring the cost down even more. Maybe even for just pennies!
If you’re a person that’s always squirting straight liquid dish soap on a sponge for hand dish washing, switching to refilling a foaming dispenser will also greatly decrease the rate at which you use up your dish soap. You’ll find that a 24 oz bottle of Dawn dish soap, for instance, lasts much longer – probably for a year. Truly!
If it takes you a couple months to use up a batch of your homemade foaming dish soap, and you can get about six batches out of your 24 oz bottle of Dawn, then you’ve got enough dish soap for 12 months. Yup, you made your dish soap last for a whole year.
When I got out my handy dandy calculator, I came up with savings of over 80% !
Sound good? Here’s how to do it if you’d like to get started:
Make Your Own Foaming Dish Soap
You Will Need:
- A Foaming Soap Dispenser
- Liquid Dish Soap
- Water
(I think the easiest way to get started with this method is to buy the Dawn foaming dish soap and after it’s used up keep refilling the bottle.)
Fill your empty bottle with a little less than an inch of liquid dish soap. If you are using a bottle other than the Dawn foaming dish soap bottle, I would suggest going for a ratio of about 1 part soap to five parts water.
Slowly fill the bottle the remainder of the way with water. The Dawn foaming bottle has a helpful “fill to here” line on the side. This helps you leave a little head space so that you can get the top part of the bottle back on without it overflowing.
Screw the top back on, and then slowly tip the bottle back and forth to mix the contents. Don’t shake or it will get too bubbly.
Finally, you can refill the Dawn foaming dish soap bottle many, many times and the bottle keeps going just fine. The only mildly annoying thing I’ve noticed is that after time, the top doesn’t screw on “straight” anymore. If you screw the top on nice and tight, the pump will kind of be pointing off on an angle.
And even though I know the “fill to here” line is on the bottle so that you can easily use their Dawn Direct Foam Refills
How very nice of them. 🙂
It was so gratifying to read this post, because I’ve been doing this for my hand-washing soap for years. It’s nice to know I was doing it right! Tomorrow I will try it for the dishwashing soap. I hadn’t thought of that. Thank you!
Thank you so much for this tip. I am certainly going to try it.
Linda D.
I just came across this article (found you through the 2020 Blogging challenge) and while I’ve done this with hand soap for ages, I never even knew there was such a thing as foaming dish soap! This seems like a totally winning idea and MUCH better than the simply watered down version I use now (my husband hates it — we have it in a regular soap pump and it always shoots out onto his stomach when it’s watered down lol)!
Yes, the foaming dispenser is super helpful if you’re watering down your soap!
Do you know what it is about the dispenser that makes it foam?
My understanding is that the foaming dispensers add air. There are two chambers in the pump mechanism, one for the soap and one for air, and when pumped, the pressurized chamber then creates foam by combining the two.
Thanks! Will have to give this a try! I enjoy your DIY ideas!
Hi Bev: I also love foaming soap. I find if I use a little foam on the counter, stove or a plate with stuck stuff on it, it dissolves it easily after a few minutes without scrubbing. Of course, i’ve noticed if it’s a flat surface, a more than damp dish rag laid over the offending area for a few minutes also gets it off. Who knew? (When we still had gas station attendants here in California, they would wash our windows. Once I asked what the guy was using because the windows just sparkled. He kind of laughed and said, “water.”) Well, that was embarrassing!
As far as washing dishes with foam, we use a dish wand that you fill up with dish soap. When it gets wet, dish foam comes out and we use that to wash dishes.
Thanks for all your ideas.
Rita
Oh that was my smile for the day . . . finding out the magic cleaning ingredient is water! I’ve always wondered if those wet squeegee things you can use at the self-serve gas stations to clean your car windows had more than just water on them too. I guess not 🙂