Dish Soap

We used to use super-expensive "green" dishwasher detergent. Alas, like I said, it's super-expensive, and there is no room in the budget for expensive, much less super-expensive. I was curious as to whether there was something homemade that I could use.

I found dozens of "recipes" by googling homemade dishwasher soap. They all had some combination of:

Borax
Washing Soda (some actually used baking soda).
(is this reminding you of my laundry detergent?)
Kosher Salt
Citric Acid




The only ingredient that I had to purchase was the citric acid. I was able to find it at a local beer brewing shop. I think this pound was around $10.00, and it should last me a really long time. I've heard of successes either leaving it out, or substituting (brace yourselves...) lemon flavored Kool-Aid. I think I would rather leave it out and see what happened.

Recipe (taped to a container so I never lose it):


I use around 1 tablespoon per load.

Many of these sites suggest using vinegar in place of your rinse aid, but when we did this, we got a huge rust stain draining out of the rinse aid container. I've tried to see why this would happen, but I can't come up with any answers. It doesn't seem like anybody else has had this problem. Maybe my Jet Dry hadn't been used up and there was some strange chemical reaction. Who knows? If you try it and it works, let me know, maybe I'll try again, because Jet Dry is ridiculously expensive if it can be replaced with vinegar!