Our homemade laundry soap experiment

Three weeks ago I put my foot down and refused to pay R169 for yet another 5kg bucket of commercial laundry detergent that lasts me a month. The buckets are great (we have 3 years worth) but I suppose our soil and ground water also have stored 3 years worth of chemicals so the switch was made. I used the following recipe but doubled it:

Homemade Liquid Laundry Soap

What you need:
1 large bar (250g) pure soap (grated)
½ cup (100g) borax (they are sold in 100g containers and stocked with the bicarb etc)
½ cup washing soda (I found a 500g container among the detergents)
26 cups of water
A large bucket with a lid (this will be your storage container)


Method:
Put the grated soap into a large pot. Add 6 cups of water and heat gently until the soap has melted. Add the borax and washing soda and stir until it is all dissolved. Remove from the heat.
In your bucket add 20 cups of hot water to your soap mixture and stir it until mixed (I used my handheld blender fondly called the Shzjoosh). Let the soap stand for 24 hrs when it will become gel like.
You can add ½ cup to each full load of laundry in a small machine and 1 cup in a large machine.

The following day we had beautiful "ice cream" according to Boniswa, my domestic helper (who has taken the recipe home). It cost R69 and lasted 3 weeks (we do six full loads per week in our Whirlpool Toploader). Our second batch produced more - at least a months worth so we might have made a mistake when mixing the first lot. The clothes wash and smell clean, there is no soapy residue (it totally dissolves). We still use very diluted fabric softner though. The first batch worked out to R3.83 per wash, the second  will be R2.88 per wash excluding softner. A definite improvement on the R7.04 a wash we have been paying!

On my wish list is "Biowashballs", they replace both detergent and softner making the washing machine's water recyle-able (my spell checker doesn't like this word no matter how I spell it!). Bottom line is the water could go to the orchard. The King of Avalon says the wording on this website makes no scientific sense but I know of people that swear it works (real life people too not just these online testimonials) and it has won a few awards! Apparently they last approximately 1000 washes (nearly 3 years in our case). I would need two balls (2 x R450) as I have a big machine which works out to a mere 90c per wash! So why is everybody not switching to Biowashballs I wonder?!