Saving $$ on Laundry and Staying Green at the Same Time!

With the new year coming up and the holiday rush quickly passing us – many of us are looking at our budgets and realizing that money is tighter than ever! And it may have nothing to do with purchasing Christmas presents!! This past month we had over $600 EXTRA in medical bills – which is more than $600 we don’t have! But don’t be discouraged – just keep working hard at stretching your budget and finding new and creative ways to save!

Before I started blogging we used coupons – a lot. In fact we never bought anything without coupons. Now that it’s several years later and life has gotten even busier we are finding that we tend to use coupons a bit less. Between this and moving towards a more natural / non-chemical approach for our household expenses are a little more than they used to be.

 

The biggest way I have found to save money on laundry (and be “green” / chemical-free) is by using Oransi’s Robby Wash ball. (It’s a little ball you throw in the wash that charges the water and ionizes out the stains and it really does work!) It cost about $32 but last for an entire year – plus it’s environmentally friendly and really works well! Even my husband’s and kids toughest stains comes out with this unique little ball. I NEVER need laundry detergent now and I do not even use fabric softener. If you want extra softener for your towels I suggest throwing in a laundry sheet fabric softener in the dryer. (many people also reuse fabric sheets) The Robby Ball definitely is not a traditional “soap” so it took me a while to get used to the idea but we exclusively use it now and love it. I learned about this by reviewing it last year but have no other ties to the company. I am totally sold on this product and once I completely run out of my regular laundry detergent that we stocked up on with coupons last year I will never go back to laundry detergent again. In fact I actually hate using regular laundry detergent now that we’ve used the Robby wash ball – sort of weird huh?

If you don’t have a lot of allergies in your family you can dry your clothes outside on a clothesline (or even in the garage / inside the house if you can find places to hang them!). We never used to use our dryer at all in the summers until we realized how bad our kid’s allergies were! Now we have to either use our dryer or hang things around the house creatively.

If you do use the dryer try to do as much of your drying back to back as possible – this prevents the need for your dryer to continually “warm up” saving a little bit of electricty. I’ve also heard that the dryer balls do well at saving money since it dries things faster but we have not tried this yet either. To save on heat you can try the air fluff cycle or if you’re lucky your dryer may have the auto-moist sensor and automatically turn off when it’s done drying.

I know some people swear by the Eco Soap Nuts but I have not tried this yet. It is eco-friendly but does not seem cost effective in my opinion.

Do you save money on your laundry another way? I’d love to hear about it and what has worked for you!