Make your own dishwasher tabs
Dishwashing tabs are very expensive, here’s a great and easy way to make your own dishwashing laundry detergent tabs. Making your own tabs is quick, easy and about half the cost of purchasing the commercial variety.
Ingredients list:
You’re going to need a few items for this little project, most of them you probably already have, the others are inexpensive and available at the grocery store.
2 cups of borax
2 cups of baking soda
Half a cup of Epsom salt
Half a cup of white vinegar
20 drops of lemon essential oil
2 ice cube trays
One large storage container
Directions
This is a little bit like baking, but trust me you do not want to eat this no matter how good that lemon essential oil smells.
- In a large mixing bowl, mix all of the dry components together and gently blend.
- Add in your white vinegar, don’t worry that it will start to Fizz a little bit this is normal.
- Add in about 20 drops of the lemon essential oil.
- Mix us up into a paste, it will start clumping together when it’s well combined.
- Press this mixture into your ice cube trays, really press down firmly. You want the cubes to be compacted and solid.
- Let this mixture sit in the ice cube trays for about 24 hours, play sit in a dry and sunny spot.
- after 24 hours they should be dry and hard, you can now remove them from the ice cube trays and put them into your storage container. They are ready to use now.
Why this mixture really works well
The combination of these ingredients is fantastic at cleaning dishes, baking soda is a natural grease cutter, borax is a disinfectant, vinegar is the binder for all the dry components and adds a little bit of cleaning power, and the salt helps reduce the effects of hard water. The essential oil is strictly to make things smell good.
If you live in an area where you have extremely hard water, it’s a good idea to add a half a cup of white vinegar to the bottom of the dishwasher. If the inside of your dishwasher is stainless steel, please refer to your owner’s manual before adding vinegar. It can do damage to some dishwashers.
Now that you have learned how to make your own dishwasher tabs you are going to want to know how to clean your dishwasher to keep it at peak efficiency, check out that tutorial here.
