Doing Laundry with Vinegar, Baking Soda, Citric Acid, and Salt instead of Regular Laundry Detergents & Fabric Softeners: Different Methods & Their Results

With all the information about the unhealthy aspects (hormone disruption, respiratory issues, allergies, etc.) of standard laundry detergents & fabric softeners, I decided to start using more natural ingredients for washing clothes, towels, and bed linens.

I've never seen borax (a highly recommended natural cleaner) or ammonia here in Israel (which either means they aren't available in the areas I've visited or else they're sold under a completely different name in Hebrew), so I use the following products instead (the ch in Hebrew-English transliteration represents a guttural sound not found in English):

• white vinegar (known in Hebrew as chometz sinteti—synthetic vinegar)
• baking soda (known in Hebrew as sodah l'shtiyah--soda for drinking)
• sea salt, both regular and coarse (known in Hebrew as melach yam or melach yam gass)
• powdered citric acid (known in Hebrew as melach limon—lemon "salt")

The above are found in every grocery store in Israel.

Note: If you're totally new to any of this (as I once was), please be careful to not use anything but the clear vinegar because the coloring in other vinegars can stain your clothes (although I've successfully used the synthetic colored vinegar with dark laundry. But I wouldn't try it with white or pastel laundry.)

BTW: I never saw citric acid in America (except for in ingredients lists), so I was surprised to see it in the spice section of every Israeli grocery store, and initially wondered what it was for. Israelis use it to get rid of the hard water build-up in kettles and urns. There is also an Iraqi soup that calls for lots of lemons, but people use citric acid instead.

Yeah, the water in Israel is what's called "hard" water (I never knew there were different kinds of water like this—i.e., hard vs. soft—until I came to Israel), which basically means that white or gray limescale deposits build up pretty fast in your kettle, urn, faucets, sinks, and washing machine.

(White vinegar & powdered citric acid each help get rid of those deposits.)

Note: All the following applies to a side-loading washing machine using hard water, and then putting the wet laundry through a dryer.

(An added benefit of using the above products is that, when they clean your clothes, they also clean out the hard-water limescale from your washing machine and plumbing.)

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Dark & Colored Laundry

​What I use:

• ​½ cup baking soda & ¼ to ½ cup sea salt (regular or coarse) ​
• ¼ cup white vinegar in the fabric softener dispenser (with or without 10-20 drops of lemon/orange/lavender essential oil)

OR

• 1 cup baking soda
• ¼ cup white vinegar in the fabric softener dispenser (with or without 10-20 drops of lemon/orange/lavender essential oil)

Results:

• Both mixtures cleaned both dark laundry & white laundry just fine.

 

• I didn't notice any colors damaged with either mixture.

 

• The clothes came out smelling fresh & clean with both mixtures.

​

• ​​If I burrowed my nose into the clothes and inhaled deeply, I sometimes sensed a vague not-sure-if-this-is-my-imagination whiff of vinegar. But other than that, they didn't come out smelling like vinegar.

 

• The citrus/lavender scent from the essential oils did not last—not through the dryer & not even after being hung to dry. 

 

• However, the essential oils did seem to neutralize even that vague ​not-sure-if-this-is-my-imagination whiff of vinegar. Clothes came out of the dryer smelling clean & fresh.

​

• The clothes came out feeling soft using either mixture.

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White Laundry

​What I used:

• ½ cup baking soda with ¼–½ cup sea salt (regular or coarse), along with ¼ cup powdered citric acid  
• 1-2 tablespoons of citric acid in the fabric softener dispenser

​Results:

• This cleaned my white laundry overall. 

​

• It really did brighten the whites. (Both baking soda & citric acid brighten whites.)

 

• ​The clothes came out smelling fresh & clean.

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• The clothes come out feeling soft.

 

• HOWEVER, stains (like ring-around-the-collar or stains from grape juice or tomato sauce, etc.) did not come out unless I treated the item with a non-bleach oxygen stain remover FIRST.​​

Note: My brief research showed that citric acid might fade colors, so I only use it with white laundry. 

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A One-Time Experiment Using Salt Only

​
​What I used:

• 1 cup of coarse sea salt (no fabric softener, nothing in the fabric softener's dispenser)

Only once did I use coarse sea salt alone: to clean a load of very dirty cleaning rags.

Results:

• It all came out clean enough. In other words, using coarse sea salt on its own didn't do better or worse than any other laundry detergent, natural or commercial.

 

• HOWEVER, the laundry lacked the fresh & clean smell that the laundry usually gets from baking soda, vinegar, or powdered citric acid.

So based on this, I would not generally use salt on its own as a laundry detergent.

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What I Continue to Use

Here are my conclusions:

• Personally, I will keep using vinegar in the fabric softener dispenser for colored clothes WITHOUT essential oils (unless I decide to completely neutralize any possible whiff of vinegar). But mostly, I found that the laundry comes out smelling fine without essential oils.

 

• I will also continue to use the above combination of salt, baking soda, and citric acid (or even just baking soda & citric acid) for white laundry. Even with effective detergents like Tide, I still needed to treat stains on whites prior to laundering. So continuing to do that? It's all the same to me.

 

• Based on what I read, salt is more abrasive. So for delicates, I would either use just baking soda as the detergent—or something even gentler, like a natural soap.

Reminder: All this laundry was done using a side-loading machine & hard water, not the soft water more common in the USA. That could make a difference in the results.

I hope you found this helpful.

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