I am largely a creature of habit in my shopping choices, and so for many years I have been purchasing the same cheap brand of laundry detergent, well contented with its ability to combat my bodily effluvia. Today I was mildly acerbated by the discovery that the local supermarket no longer carries that brand. Alas.
However, this state of affairs also caused me to sit up and take notice of a larger change: by and large, laundry detergent no longer exists in powder form. At long last powdered soap appears to have been outcompeted to the verge of extinction by the liquid variety, at least in my neck of the woods. Oh, there are still a few econo-size tubs of the powdered stuff for extended Catholic families, but the rest have vanished, down the drain as it were.
What up with that? Was there some great social upheaval-- some dire ecological catastrophe threatened by powdered soap, and I just didn’t hear about it? What’s so damn sexy about liquid detergent?
The powdered stuff is too much of a pain, I’d guess. You can get that super-concentrated liquid now, and the powdered doesn’t always dissolve all the way and you get a little shower of it in that balled up sock.
Although I’ve never had to develop or deal with laundry detergents, I’ve had experience of the same for dishwasher and other detergents.
Basically, handling solids is a pain in the ass. Lots of the processes I dealt with for making flake, granulated, or agglomerated dishwasher detergents actually started out with liquids, then had to add extra processing steps to get them into solid form. I would imagine that laundry detergents have the same problem.
It is easier for manufacturers to pump liquid detergents around than it is for them to move solids around. Often, solid detergents have specifications on particle sizes – as you move them around, their particles can break down, giving you a finer detergent, which is not optimum. Easier, again, to just deal with the liquid.
And bulk liquid detergents occupy less volume than bulk solid detergents. Particularly if you’re talking about flake, or something other than powder forms. From what I’ve seen of laundry detergents recently, it looks like they’re getting really good at concentrating the detergent without having it fall out of solution – which further reduces the bulk and weight that needs to be shipped.
Liquid is probably just easier and cheaper to deal with.
I hate liquid laundry detergent. It is becoming more prevalent on store shelves, but thankfully, I can still get powdered laundry detergent at Target or K-Mart. I use Cheer Free (or Tide Free if they are out of the Cheer).
I don’t like liquid laundry soap, as it is more expensive per load use than powdered soap, messier and the container sizes are either way too small or freakin’ huge.
‘They’ can have my powered laundry soap when they pry it from my cold dead hands!!
My mother-in-law swears by Fresh Start laundry detergent, she has to order it on the internet now, as no stores in Las Vegas seem to carry it anymore.
I use powdered Gain. I love the smell, and the liquid stuff is much much heavier than the powdered. I buy the largest powdered I can find, usually at Wal Mart or Sam’s.
-Lil
powdered is cheaper so we buy powdered. I found a brand that actually dissolves in cold water and gets the kid dirt out so I buy that. Luckily, powdered still has a good amount of shelf space at the stores around here, although, liquid is growing. I have also noticed that powdered “HE” detergent doesn’t exist, or at least not at my store.
I was about to say the same, but then I did a quick check -
At Amazon, in the category of:
Any Category > Grocery > Household Supplies > Laundry > Powder Detergent
two of the top three powders are HE.
It’s not at all economical, even with the free shipping. 124 loads of Tide HE powder for $35 or 96 loads of liquid Tide HE that I bought yesterday at the local grocery store for $18.
OTOH, Amazon also carries a brand called Country Save that’s apparently popular with fanciers of cloth diapers - no scents or dyes, and you’ll get 640 loads worth (40 pounds of the stuff) for $51. A far sight cheaper than the Tide HE…I should try to find one box for a test before committing to 40 pounds of the stuff.
Powdered detergent is cheaper? It hasn’t been in my experience. Of course, I don’t live in the USA, so maybe the prices are different but, looking up prices online (not in a supermarket at the moment, I’m afraid) 1kg of liquid Ariel (refill bag) costs 348 yen, whereas 1kg of powdered Ariel costs 399 yen or more. They both claim to handle the same number of loads, so I always buy the liquid.
The first bottle costs marginally more because you have to pay for the bottle, too, but after that, the refill bags are cheaper (and easier to throw away) than the boxes of powdered detergent.
ETA: Oh, gotpasswords’ post slipped past me. The liquid is cheaper in the US, too, apparently.
When I was in college, Fresh Start detergent was sold in single-use packets where the packet was made of dryer sheet material. So I could just throw one of these packets in the wash and leave it with the clothes when I moved them to the dryer. Since I was living in a dorm and the laundry room was in a different dorm on the other side of the quad, I could just carry two packets of detergent with me (which was a lot better than lugging a whole bottle of detergent),
And I thought there was a previous thread about laundry detergent where someone described how she made her own from soap flakes. Frankly, whatever the savings, it sounded like way too much work.
Edited to add, here is Ferret Herder’s description of how she makes detergent from bar soap, borax and washing soda (whatever that is).
Washing soda is sodium carbonate, Na[sub]2[/sub]CO[sub]3[/sub]. It is the sodium salt of carbonic acid and is closely related to baking soda which is sodium bicarbonate or sodium hydrogen carbonate, NaHCO[sub]3[/sub].
I heard about this on the news. The signing of the peace treaty, the repatriation of PoWs… I think everyone is breathing a sigh of relief that the Laundry Soap Wars are over. I understand that negotiating the cleanup was the most difficult part. Even the terminology was troublesome; you had the ‘soap’ partisans versus the ‘detergent’ technocrats, and then of course there was Lever Brothers off to the side giggling zestfully and throwing monkey wrenches into the works. It will be a different landscape though. Liquid is triumphant; powder has accepted terms of surrender, and everyone’s jostling around to stake out new positions. Liquid’s triumph may not last long though; I expect to see irregular incursions by southern powders beyond their beachheads in the dollar stores any day now. The likes of Sunlight and Tide have become just too complacent, and in a tight economy, they’ll be vulnerable to any price advantage the inexpensive imports can throw at them.
It’s not actually much work at all. I’m not currently making my own, but I have in the past, and will probably do so again when the current jug of stuff is nearly gone. (I quit because I had some major health garbage going on, and I was interested in everything being as easy as possible there for awhile.)
I use a kitchen grater to grate the soap into a bowl, and then mix in borax and washing soda. Store in Rubbermaid container. Ten minutes, tops, once a month or so.
