Home Made Household Cleaners

Grime on clothes, or on walls or on benches is grime - so I figured that cleaners don't have to be very different.  Strength and application would be the biggest differences.

This led me to using the basic laundry cream recipe that I make for my other cleaners.  I make a spray cleaner replacing “Spray and Wipe” type cleaners and a cream type cleaner to replace the abrasive cream,“Jiff” and “Vim” type cleaners for more heavy duty cleaning.

Multipurpose Household Cleaner (Spray)

50gm bar of coconut oil soap

(A laundry soap such as Sunlight Soap will be fine though being a tallow soap is harder to dissolve and doesn’t have the cleaning punch that coconut soap has).

¼ cup of washing soda (Sodium Carbonate)

¼ cup of baking soda (Sodium Bi-Carbonate)

Dissolve the soap in 3 cups of hot water.  Stir in sodas till dissolve and leave to cool. Dilute a portion (store the rest for later) till it is a thin liquid with a slip feeling between your fingers and add eucalyptus essential oil.  Use in a spray bottle.  Spray on greasy surfaces (eg tops of kitchen cupboards), marks on walls etc.  Give it a minute to work before wiping it off.  It works well if the dilution isn’t too weak.

Add Eucalyptus oil when diluting for an antibacterial/viral, added cleaning qualities and a nice fresh smell.  It is also an anti-fungal and should help if mildew is a problem.

You could probably use Borax instead of Baking Soda.

While coconut liquid soap would be effective as a cleaner I think it would be too bubbly used in this way.

Lemon may be good for these sorts of things but I can't reconcile decreasing the alkalinity of the other cleaners.  If you wanted lemon smell, you could try Lemon Grass or Lemon Myrtle oil.  

None of these ingredients are toxic.

Very cost effective 

Cream Cleaner

Diatomaceous Earth Right.  Mixed Cream cleaner, Left

Use the laundry cream and add finely ground or food grade Diatomaceous Earth (a fine abrasive).

I use this to spread over my shower floor, laundry tub etc, leave it to work for a short time before rubbing it and rinsing off.

Remember that this is an abrasive cleaner so don’t do your polished wood table with it unless you want to resurface it.

Add Eucalyptus oil for a nice fresh smell and cleaning qualities.

If the cream cleaner is quite ridged as you see in the picture it wont spread so well.  Mix a little water with it to make it more spreadable.

Diatomaceous Earth can be brought at Natural Health Shops or outlets that sell chicken feed and supplies.

Cost effective.