Just another adventure in eco-friendly laundry detergents!
My latest interest was in Country Save Laundry Detergent so when I noticed it on the shelf at my local co-op, I decided to buy some and give it a try. Country Save is cloth diaper friendly, and contains no fragrance, dyes, phosphates, optical brighteners, or gluten, as well as being EPA certified. It is pretty concentrated and really does give you close to the amount of loads listed on the package, even with normal to hard water. The price varies quite a bit from store to store, but my co-op had the 80/160 load box for $16, which is pretty decent for that much detergent.
Country Save Powder Laundry Detergent Ingredients: Sodium carbonate, Sodium sulphate, Sodium Percarbonate, Sodium alkyl aryl sulfonate, Linear alcohol ethoxylate.
I currently use a Kenmore top loader with a large drum, so I used the full scoop of Country Save, sometimes even a scoop and a half for a large load of muddy clothing.
Country Save detergent does create suds, but not overly so. I like when a detergent makes a bit of suds since it is easier to tell if it is rinsing out well enough.
After two months of usage, I have gone though the entire box on a variety of outdoors wear, general laundry, and cloth diapers.
This detergent works great for my regular laundry and even the overly soiled stuff. It gets out stains and everything comes out clean smelling. Even my husband’s wick-away shirts he wears while biking come out smelling of nothing instead of the Eau de Armpit some detergents leave behind. However, the combo of Country Save and my hard water was not a good match for our cloth diapers. I have heard from other cloth diaperers that Country Save is not the best for really hard water, and I must say my experience was similar. We ended up with a lot of build up no matter how little detergent I tried and how many rinses I added. The kids developed some pretty bad blisters as a result. I tried stripping diapers multiple times and trying this detergent again and again, but it just did not work out on our diapers.
We are moving in the next few months though and the neighborhood we are going to has slightly softer water, so I do intend of getting reacquainted with Country Save when we get settled in. I think it will work much better in normal water as opposed to the white sludge we currently have flowing through our pipes. Luckily, Country Save still worked great for all of our other laundry, so I still found it to be a great buy. I do think it is one of the more effective ‘green’ laundry detergents.
That’s stuff is expensive.
http://www.thesavingswife.com
Compared to the budget detergents, yes. It is cheap for an eco-friendly one though. I usually pay that much for less than half that amount of loads unfortunately. Although we live in an area where everything is a ripoff.