Time on your hands? Make some DIY dishwasher tabs...

In an attempt to use less chemicals in our home, reduce waste and our environmental impact we trialled some DIY dishwasher detergent recipes... as you do...

Nurdles and microplastics, forever chemicals, and ultra-processed foods have been on my radar for a long time. I’m on a mission to try and reduce the number of unnecessary chemicals my daughter comes into contact with.

I’ve usually viewed making your own stuff as a bit of a luxury but as work in January had been slow this changed. And so, in our household we have been experimenting with two DIY dishwasher detergent recipes.

This first recipe I presented to my daughter as a chemistry experiment – that seemed to help get her involved. It relies on a vinegar and bicarbonate reaction (primary school parents will recognise this as one of the volcano experiments).

The mixture goes from sandy, to wet and squishy, then like kinetic sand, before going hard. It has some great textures to squeeze but sensitive hands might need to duck out early or wear gloves.

We mixed the ingredients together, adding the vinegar in slowly, then put it in ice cube trays. You are supposed to fill the trays only half full and pack down and leave, then top up, which I didn’t do though my daughter did - I couldn’t really see much of a difference.

You were also supposed to leave the ice cube trays for a few days but impatiently we only waited a few hours. Alarmingly the reaction was still ongoing (we put our ears to the cubes and could hear it fizzing) but it didn’t seem to matter.

But did it actually clean the dishes? The Striving for Simple recipe seemed to work pretty well – the recipe didn’t state whether the constituents were in volume or weight. We went with weight, which might have been wrong.

I’m not that happy with our Bosch dishwasher anyway - apart from the fact that it is an absolute battleship at easily 12 years old and having survived my YouTube-assisted attempts to fix it – so the bar is pretty low.

Remembering we had Nancy Birtwhistle’s book Clean & Green, I opened that up to see if it included a dishwasher tab recipe. Her recipe is for dishwasher powder, which I didn’t know was ‘a thing’ but it looked pretty easy. Less of a chemistry experiment and more straightforward mixing.

So far, this does seem slightly superior as the dishes do seem cleaner. She does advise that you mix the powder each time you use it as it can separate by weight. However, I like that you can add in a scent in the Striving for Simple recipe, though I guess you could add in a fragrance to Birtwhistle’s recipe too.

After making Birtwhistle’s recipe we made up some more of the Striving for Simple dishwasher detergent and left it as a powder so we could compare like with like.

Fortunately we realised it was not a good idea to put the powder into a lidded, glass container in case it shattered. So we left the jars with the lids off until the fizzing stopped. We stirred the mixture a few times as it goes hard and you need to break it up into a powder consistency.

Is it really cheaper?

But are they cheaper than shop bought tabs? Our regular shop is at Aldi’s and their Magnum all in one lemon dishwasher tablets come in at £3.29 for 40 so around eight or 9p a tab, which is incredibly good value. You can get 15 Finish Powerball tablets in Poundland for £2, which is just over 13p each.

But given that I was trying to avoid plastics and chemicals it made sense to look at the cost of some of the ‘eco’ brands too.

A box of 30 Bio D Dishwasher comes in at £7.89 but delivery is £3.95 so that comes in at between 26p or 39p depending on if you include the delivery fee. A box of 25 Ecover tabs is £6 so that comes in at 24p a wash.

A 30 pack of Smol dishwasher tabs comes in at £6.30 so that is 21p per wash. These are pretty good value, work well, and is the brand that we usually use (we put our ‘creations’ in the Smol tin we usually use, see below).

Obviously buying in bulk will affect the price. I stuck to Amazon and Ebay to buy my DIY ingredients but obviously the cheaper you can get those the lower the cost of the end product.

I’ve put the links to Ebay and Amazon where I tried to find a reasonable deal for these ingredients. If you have a lot of storage space and are confident you would use it all up then you could buy in bulk and make further savings.

I’ve done a few rough calculations so don’t quote me on this… Surprisingly, both recipes seem to compete fairly well, at least in price, with the commercial products. The Striving for Simple recipe worked out at about 14p per dose, and the Birtwhistle recipe about 8p a dose. (You can see how much I paid for the ingredients in the recipes above.)

Powder vs tabs?

However, I have a very small dishwasher and so I was using only half the recommended amount – which you can do with powder (I even cut the tabs we made in the ice block moulds in half because they were soft enough).

This is a valid consideration for smaller households as you can’t cut the conventional dishwasher tabs down easily so I was probably always wasting some of the detergent, and money.

However, this does also mean if you had a very large dishwasher you may need to use more so it may cost more like 28p and 16p a wash – which is still pretty good, especially compared to the eco brands.

Ultimately, I was also trying to create something that had less potentially harmful chemicals in it for me and my family as well as the environment.

I think that will be something to look at further. I’m also wondering whether the DIY recipes are better or worse for my dishwasher but I’m not sure as yet how to work that out.