Trials

Once we had the different formulas made up for the detergents it was time to test each one. We ran several tests for each. Each load had a shirt stained with mud, was sweaty, and food stains. Not all of the detergents got out all of the stains. But one of the formulas got the stains and the smells out. Below are pictures of 2 of the trials.

This is to of the mud and grass stained shirts before the wash.

In these to pictures you can see that the dirt and grass stains came out of the shirts, but this load did not get rid of smells very well.

This batch was able to get rid of odors, but not all of the stains

We held many more trials that these 2 in order to come up with a working formula. We did finally come up with a formula after the 16th trial. This formula was able to get the moldy smell out of old towels, get rid of stains, and got rid of the body odor left from athletes.

Making the Detergent

Now that we have gathered all of the ingredients need, we began to experiment with different combinations. We quickly found that grating the bar soap would be the most difficult and time consuming task. Each soap gave us different results after being grated. As seen in the pictures below the octagon soap got much finer than the ivory soap, which resulted in a clumpy product. After grating several bars of soap we had enough to begin mixing the batches together. We had seven different bars of soap grated, and 2 different recipes to try for each. After combining all of the ingredients we had fourteen different detergents to try.

Getting Ingreients

• After looking through numerous recipes, Madisell came up with a list of ingredients to start with. To start we went to the local grocery store to purchase smaller amounts of each ingredient, because we were not sure which would work better with each other. We got the basic 3 main ingredients, which consist of borax, washing soda and baking soda. To add that extra bit of cleaning power recipes called for bar soap as well, so we got several different brands of soap to test which haas the best cleaning capabilities. Some of the soaps we tried were:
• Dial
• Ivory
• Irish Spring
• Octagon
• Dove
• and several others

Our next step will be to make several different batches of the detergent and figure out which has the best cleaning capabilities.

Getting Started

Madisell decided to make and sell laundry detergent. Currently people are paying anywhere from $0.20 - $0.40 per load of laundry when they use conventional detergents. Not only are these detergents expensive, but they are not very environmentally friendly. Madisell has found a way to make detergent that cost much less than the leading brands, all natural, environmentally friendly, and has no allergens.