Are you married to your branded washing detergent?

Hi David, we would not be able to say without testing it – but personally I’d be wary. I’m not sure if I would trust myself to mix a perfect blend of washing detergent, and should you accidentally ruin a wash or damage your machine (should it froth up and block the inlet valves in the detergent drawer for instance) you wont be able to hold others accountable.

Also, I saw it stipulated in a washing machine warranty last week that it was a violation of the deal to use ‘unsuitable detergents or chemicals’ in your wash, which home made remedies could fall into.

Thanks for your comment whitegoodshelp – and I must admit it has sparked a bit of a heated debate in the product testing department! I’m sorry to say we currently do not have any plans to test home made detergents. Though it would be very interesting to see if we could concoct our own detergent that is cheaper and more effective, we do have an issue with recommending the mixing and storing of chemicals.

We also have to factor in that store bought goods are vastly more popular, and so we are concentrating our efforts in testing the supermarket and big brand cleaning detergents available and will be publishing our results in the June issue of the magazine, and online on our Laundry Detergents reviews pages. (The current results we have online were last updated in January of this year.)

Hi David, I’ve done a little investigation and though was told that the manufacturer recommends professionally made detergents (as you’d expect)… but when I listed the ingredients they said it all sounded fine – except for the oxygen bleach, which seems a little strange as that is found in some professional cleaning detergents anyway. I think the answer here is that if you’re thinking of making your own washing detergent and you’re worried about the warranty on your machine, it would be worth phoning the manufacturer to see if you’re covered – seems a little extreme but could be worth erring on the side of caution.

To date we have not had any feedback asking us to test home made washing detergent, although we have often compared traditional cleaning methods (i.e. salt and fizzy water versus carpet stain removers) in our magazine articles.

The difference with this idea is that it would involve mixing up household chemicals and creating the product that we would test, which is not the first step that most consumers are prepared to make. We would not be able to recommend a carefully formulated, tested and controlled retail product, but instead a chemical recipe. Even if we did track down the best concoctions on the web, we could not guarantee that people would be able to replicate it perfectly, especially those with no prior knowledge of the individual ingredients. The bleach issue is a good example, should people confuse oxygen and chlorine bleach they could do damage to their machine or more importantly to themselves.

My previous comment does mention that oxygen bleach is found in some laundry detergents, which is why I thought it was strange that it would void the warranty from the manufacturer I approached.

I’m sorry to deliver disappointing news, we do try to test products that Which? members ask for – but we don’t have an unlimited testing budget and have to make sure the majority of members would be interested and benefit from the money that we spend on research.