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Anyone Use Soapnuts?

I was reading about using soapnuts as a laundry soap and a for general cleaning purposes and am intrigued.

Anyone here ever use these things for their laundry and if so, what is the good, bad and the ugly?
 
[I apologize in advance]

Is that anything like Beer Nuts or cotton balls?

Nope - they're actually soap berries - a berry with a lot of natural saponins.

You use them to do laundry either by putting a few in a cotton bag in the wash or making a liquid soap by boiling some berries in water to extract the saponins.
 
Nope - they're actually soap berries - a berry with a lot of natural saponins.

You use them to do laundry either by putting a few in a cotton bag in the wash or making a liquid soap by boiling some berries in water to extract the saponins.

My Grandmother said her mom used to do something like this, but I don't really know the details.
 
My wife bought some and used them for a while. She said they work but she hasn't used them for a long time so I think she really wasn't all that impressed.
 
I'd say they're worth trying to at least get your own take on them. We bought a bag from some from Maggie's and have mixed feelings about them. They clean normally soiled stuff pretty well and do make your clothes and sheets feel nice and soft. And as an added bonus, after you get 3-5 laundry uses out of them, you can store them up and make a liquid cleaner out of the used shells.

OTOH, on really tough odors they didn't seem as effective as my wife wanted and you aren't supposed to use them with bleach, so we still needed to have alternatives for whites and stuff she wanted to completely disinfect.

Also, we found it hard to actually know when to replace them. :huh: So, there were times that we weren't sure if we tossed them aside too soon or used them too long.

After using them for a few months, we eventually since switched to Nellie's soap powder and Dr Bronner's Sal's Suds and while we still have half a bag left we'll eventually use, we probably won't repurchase them.
 
I use them and think they do the job, but I dont have heavily soiled clothes. I think give them a go yourself and see, not sure about the US but here they are much cheaper than washing powder even more so since you can use them a couple of times. So since they are cheaper you could probably even use them less or put more in one wash to get a better effect. I only use them for two or three cycles and then throw them in the garden.
 
Wasn't impressed. The clothes didn't smell "clean". I guess what it boils down to is that in order for me to feel like my clothes have been washed, I want a faint fragrance.
 
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