Soapnuts for laundry

onewhoasks

I'm going to give these soapnuts a try, especially now we have soft water so hopefully that will help the effectiveness.

Anyone tried these, and if so what was your experience, and which brand do you use?

onewhoasks

Well I gave soapnuts a try anyhow and purched a kilo of Ecozone soapnuts from Ocado for £12.99 which should last 330 washes approx. I'm delighted with the first few loads which have left the laundry clean and soft.

flipper_72

Just seen the link to this from another thread, I have been using soapnuts now for a few weeks. I was previously washing my clothes with ECO balls and the rest of the families with normal powder, I have tried washing my DH clothes with them and he is satisfied that they are clean enough so have converted the whole family to it. The upside to this is my histamine levels have gone down, so obviously the others using something I was allergic to was still affecting me.
I generally wash the clothes then fish out the bag of nuts and do a rinse cycle, I used to do the extra rinse before to minimize the amount of powder left in the clothes.
I want to try using essential oils with it now, I use lavender with the bedding but don't like it on my clothes.

rach_k

I used them for quite a while as they are very good on cloth nappies. Unlike with other washing powders/liquids, they rinse clean in just a normal wash/rinse cycle so you don't need to do the extra rinses you normally would for nappies. I'm not sure exactly how that works when you still have the soap nuts in the machine; I think something to do with the temperature as soap nuts only release their good stuff properly in warm water whereas the rinse is cold.

I actually preferred to make soap nut liquid and use it as you would normal liquid detergent - it felt like I was getting a more consistent result that way, instead of trying to guess how many more washes were left in a set of them. Every couple of months I would boil 50g of them in a litre of water for 15 mins or so until the water was brown, then drain off the water (keep it!), add more water and repeat until the water stopped going a good brown colour. Then I poured a week's worth into a bottle in the fridge to use (about a cup per wash load) and froze the rest. It took a little while but I preferred it that way.

Seakay

there's a longstanding thread in Green and Ethical:

https://forums.moneysavingexpert.com/discussion/548092

onewhoasks

I'm still using soapnuts and intend to continue. They're great for regular wash loads.

Like Rach-K does, I prefer to make up a liquid. I use 54g of nuts to make 1.6litres of liquid which I store in three (clearly labelled) pint sized containers - I freeze two and keep one chilled for using that week. I use each pint for 6 washes. Using this ratio you get around 330 washes per kilo of nuts.

I did miss that laundry fragrance you get from powder but now I pop a little piece of sponge with a 3-4 drops of my chosen essential oil inside the little soapnut drawstring bag and add that to the drum when I start a wash.

I've found that anything more than general grime, such as stubborn stains, will need pre-treatment, or an addition of Ecover laundry bleach to the load.