Saturday, September 6, 2008

Stretching Your Dish Detergent - tip of the day

You don't really have to purchase dish detergents at crazy prices. Here are a few tips to stretching your dishwasher detergent and your dollar at the same time.

Tip#1 - If you choose to purchase a regular dish washing detergent from the grocery store you can still stretch it to make it last twice as long or longer. The recommended amount to use is way more than you actually need. When running your dishwasher try only using 1 TBS in each compartment. This should be plenty for a thorough washing. If it isn't enough experiment by upping the amount just a little at a time.

Tip#2 - Try mixing your regular powder detergent with equal parts borax and baking soda. Then only use 1 TBS per compartment per load of dishes. Don't be fooled by the small boxes of borax and baking soda. These powders are heavy and go a very long way.

Tip#3 - We just use a borax and baking soda mixture - equal parts of each, 1 TBS in each compartment. This works just fine for us but, depending on your water type you may want to use tip#2 instead.

Tip#4 - Use vinegar as your rinse aid. Vinegar works very well for this job and is very inexpensive.

Tip#5 - Lemon Kool-Aid (not the sugary stuff, just the little mix packet) can give your dishwasher a nice lemony fresh smell while running.

Do you have any other great kitchen cleaning tips? I would love to hear them and I am sure my readers would like them, too. Either leave a comment or add write about it on your blog and add your link to Mr. Linky below. Just remember to link back to us here at Frugalheart.blogspot.com in your post.

1 comments:

Sandra said...

Clean burned on coffee from your coffee pot by adding a little salt and some ice cubes. Swish it around a little and let the ice melt. It will loosen the burned-on coffee. Wash and rinse as usual