laundry talk: my tide challenge

How exciting is laundry, right?

Some friends turned me on to the concept of using white distilled vinegar to wash clothes.  The idea sounds wacky and gross, but it only took one try to convince me of the amazingness of vinegar.

Its a natural fabric softener.  It disinfects.  My clothes do NOT smell like vinegar, in fact they come out smelling so clean and fresh.

But I must admit.  Even though I know how great vinegar solo works, I’m hooked on my liquid Tide like its crack.  I just love that smell.  So my idea?  Take a teeny bit of Tide, and dilute it with white vinegar for every load.  Voila!  Its the best of both worlds.  I’m stretching the use of my expensive detergent, using a mostly safe, green method to wash my clothes, and I get the smell of Tide with the power of vinegar.

The bottle of Tide I own claims to have 64 loads in it.  Ha!

My Tide Challenge: I’m trying to see how many loads I can squeeze out of a “64 load” bottle by diluting with WDV every time.  Today I ran load #44 and I’m maybe 25% through the bottle (its hard to tell because you can’t see a liquid level through the plastic, so I can only go by weight and looking in the top).

I use a teeny amount of Tide:

add the WDV:

and go!

64 loads? i’m hoping to get at least three times that out of this bottle.  Maybe even more.  Do you realize how much money that saves?  The big old bottle of Tide can cost around $20 here.  And the big bottle of vinegar? Around $2.  Its crazy talk how much money this one little trick is saving us.

I’ll keep everyone posted to see how far I can get!

 

UPDATE UPDATE: I finished the challenge.  Read my post about finishing the bottle of Tide and just how far it went!