Clean Your Lint Screen

As much as I love the idea of being one of those awesome off-the-grid type survivalist home makers, I am not.  I love my appliances.  I know that I probably COULD get by without them, like in a nuclear war type emergency, but barring the zombie apocalypse, I do enjoy labor-saving machines.

For instance, my dryer.

I know what you're going to say.  I should line dry clothes and save money and energy, but I'm not there yet.  We have an itty bitty little yard, and I will try to set up a clothes line this summer.  In the meantime, I am in love with the dryer.

As with anyone I love, I want to see it happy and healthy.  The lint screen is super important for this.  I clean it out after every load...but is that enough?  Some times we use dryer sheets, and I have heard that this can leave a film over the lint screen that makes air move through less efficiently.  Let's check.

That's not good.

If the water is having a hard time passing through the filter, so is the air.  That's unfortunate.  It means that the dryer is not able to work as efficiently because it is not getting proper air flow.  This can BREAK YOUR DRYER.

(I can't handle that thought.  Did I mention that I love my dryer?)

Thank God and the internet that there's an easy fix!  Coincidentally, it's the same fix for most of the build-up issues in my house: white vinegar.

I sprayed the filter down with vinegar, and gave it a quick scrub.

The water runs right through now!  My nice, clean lint screen is back in my dryer, catching lint like a boss.  Hopefully my dryer will work even better for it, and lasts for years to come.

Did I mention that dryer service calls start at $147 through Sears?  I just hopefully prevented a problem for less than a penny.  Sounds good to me.

It's a Pre-Treater!!

In my efforts to try to have a healthier home, I have been making a lot of my own laundry and cleaning chemicals.

First, I made a spray cleaner that tackles EVERYTHING.

Then, I made cheap, awesome laundry soap.

Finally, I started using vinegar as fabric softener, and made a safe and effective bleach alternative.

To further my efforts, I have been looking for a replacement for Spray and Wash. My kids are murder on clothes, and I am constantly spraying grass-stained pants, or food-stained shirts.

My first attempt at this was a home run. Here's what I did:

1) Bought a spray bottle. ($0.97)
2) Filled it with the bleach alternative that I already made.

That's it.

It's wonderful! I tried it on a very stubborn stain on Husband's gardening/work shorts.
Before:


After:


I love how little things like this make me enormously happy.

Check out other great ideas here:

Bleach Alternative: First Test

Remember when I said that I am giving up bleach? Well, today launches my first foray into finding a bleach alternative!

The most common type of recipes that I am seeing call for hydrogen peroxide and an acid, specifically vinegar. I have a concern with this:

Hydrogen peroxide reacts with vinegar to give you peracetic acid.

Peracetic acid is a wonderful biocide. This means that it is very effective at killing living things like bacteria and mold. This quality makes peracetic acid a wonderful sanitizing agent.

Here's the problem. PERACETIC ACID IS VERY EFFECTIVE AT KILLING LIVING THINGS. I'm not sure I trust it in any real concentration around my kids, especially because they are wonderful at figuring out the locks on doors and cupboards. Peracetic acid has some pretty harmful side effects, which can be found by reading the MSDS.

Instead of going with an acetic acid source (vinegar), I've opted for a citric acid source: lemon juice!

Yay! I love lemon juice! Mainly as lemonade! Sometimes in tea! Yay!

The recipe that I am using, which can be found at Frugally Sustainable, is easy to prepare and yields a gallon of bleach alternative. It also didn't cost me a cent as I already had the ingredients: lemon juice, hydrogen peroxide, water, and a container.

Here's a sum-up of the steps:

1) Take a gallon-sized jug (I used an empty vinegar bottle that had been rinsed well).

2) Pour in 1.5 cups of peroxide

3) Pour in 0.5 cups of lemon juice

4) Fill the rest of the jug with water.

5) Scribble out "vinegar" on the bottle and scrawl "bleach alternative" on it instead.


I love when the authors of those other blogs make beautiful, original labels (with neat printing and scalloped edges, and nice designs) for all of their homemade things. One day I'll learn how to do that. Not today. Today, I scribble with a sharpie.

Now to test it out!
This picture is of a wash cloth that I used to scrub my sandals (more on that later).


I took this wash cloth and soaked it in a 2:1 solution of water and bleach alternative.

Here's what it looked like after soaking.


And here it is again after I popped it in the wash.


Hooray! The stains are gone! And so is some of the color! ...whoops.
Edited to add: Hey, guess what! I'm an idiot! The first two pictures show the wash cloth WET, but the third shows it DRY. This is why it looks like some of the pink had faded. I just wet it to clean up another mess, and it's dark pink again. (I'd photograph it, but it's dirty again.)

Next step: testing it in the washer.

Will it be strong enough to remove stains even when diluted? Let's find out! I'll let you know when I'm done.

Doing Laundry on the Cheap

We do a lot of laundry here. A lot. Somehow the boys go through about 3 dozen outfits a day. Okay, that may be hyperbole, but so is our amount of laundry.

We have an HE front-load washer. HE stands for High Efficiency, meaning that the machine uses less water to do its job. The lower water level means we have to buy specific soap without the extra ingredients that encourage foaming (BTW, foaming isn't necessary for cleaning your clothes). For six years we have been using the All Free-and-Clear HE detergent. Even buying it at Walmart, this stuff gets pricey.

See what I mean? That's the big size, so there's enough detergent in there for 110 loads. At $12 for this bottle, that's about 11 cents per load (assuming that all loads use the minimum amount of soap. Given that my children are in love with mud, this is not likely.)

To the INTERNET!
In my search for a home-made laundry detergent I found a ton of recipes, but all of them were basically the same. I chose to follow the exact steps I found on The Duggar Family's website.

As an aside, I watched their show maybe twice. I know that some folks have plenty of criticisms with their choice of reproductive frequency, but I simply don't care either way. Anyone who can have a bazillion kids and still be debt free can teach me their laundry detergent recipe any day.

Back to Walmart!

For those of you playing along at home, buying one of each of these three items cost me a total of $7.59 (not counting tax). According to the recipe, it makes enough detergent for 640 loads of laundry. This is about 1 cent per load. Yeah. Less than a tenth the cost of the All.

Hm...I wonder how long it takes to make. Let's try it.

First is the lovely task of grating the Fels-Naptha. Out comes my mandolin slicer with the nifty shredding bladey thing. (Technical term.)

To be clear, many of the recipes I looked at mentioned using equipment that you didn't plan on cooking with in the future "just in case". None said it was mandatory, or stated any specific danger. I chose not to. My reasoning is that it is soap - not plutonium. Have you noticed what we use to clean our dishes? Yeah. Soap. If having extra equipment makes you comfortable, go for it. I'm too cheap to.

Once I got started grating the soap, it took maybe five minutes (with frequent breaks for sipping my coffee. I started this project at 8:00 a.m.)


Almost immediately I realize that we have a problem. Fels-Naptha has a STRONG perfume to it. I happen to be allergic to most perfumes (which is why we went for the Free-and-Clear detergent originally). Okay. A little allergy medicine and I'm re-evaluating this. In the end I decided to continue. My logic is that this one bar of soap is ultimately going to be diluted into 10 gallons of laundry detergent, of which I will only be using 1/4 cup for an entire load of clothes. If my shirts and stuff smell strongly of perfume after being washed in this, I will be surprised.

For the record, next time I will be using a bar of unscented castile soap. It will be about $4 a bar instead of the $1 dollar for Fels-Naptha, but I doubt it will break the bank.

After the soap was grated, I had to stop taking pictures. This is because I had a toddler who was convinced that this was really shredded cheddar cheese, and that I had been holding out on him. There was no way for me to stir the pot with the soap, wrestle away an angry kid, AND hold a camera.

The total time commitment was way less than I thought it would be. Start to finish, this project took me a half hour. Grating the soap took five minutes, melting it in the water took 20, and mixing everything together in bucket took five. Not bad.

The five-gallon bucket is resting in the garage, and today I'm finishing up the last of the store-bought soap. By tomorrow I should be able to test this and give you a report.