You mean I'm not married to those Finish dishwasher pods? The blues ones with the red round thing in the middle--I didn't make a "till death do us part" vow to those little toxic wonders? Shockingly, I didn't.
As much as I LOVE my dishwasher, I have never felt 100% good about putting those detergent pods in the compartment, closing it and trusting that all the harmful chemicals would be washed away in the rinse cycle.
Well thanks to my cousin's best friend who reads this blog and is a mad healthy DIY-er herself, I finally bit the bullet and attempted to make my own chemical-free dishwasher detergent. I never would have been brave enough to take that step without you sending me the recipe, Moana, so thank you!
The ingredients are basic and you probably only need to go to Amazon for two out of four of them:
Note: for this recipe I didn't use the coarse Hawaiian salt, I used fine sea salt. But I was too lazy to take another pic.
Did it work? Did it get my dishes sparkling clean? I would say it got the dishes very clean, but not necessarily sparkling. Not that my traditional Finish pods did any better. I think I need to just scrub the dishes better before I put them in because there were still cloudy spots on the glasses.
But you know what? At least I know it's not cloudy spots of poison. Like you know you can literally get chemical poisoning if you eat one of those pods? So I do ask myself why am I okay with my family ingesting tiny bits of residue off my dishes each time we use a "clean" dish or cup or utensil?
So I'm gonna use this DIY stuff for now. We'll see how it goes. I'll post updates if anything changes. The moral of this whole blog post is that IT'S TOTALLY DOABLE! I thought it wasn't but it IS. Recipe below!
DIY Dishwasher Detergent
Ingredients 1 1/2 cups citric acid 1 1/2 cups washing soda 1/2 cup baking soda 1/2 cup sea salt
Directions Mix to combine. Store in an airtight container. Use 1 Tbsp per load.
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*UPDATE 2/3/21:
I stopped using this dishwasher detergent and also the laundry detergent I made. Why? Because the powder quickly turned into a BRICK of dense, hardness. Not convenient at all. That's what you get when you don't use preservatives. I know there are ways to preserve the freshness and powdery consistency, but I gotta stick to my Finish pods and Tide for now, ganfunnit.