Oven Cleaner
Store Bought: $.27 per ounce
Homemade: $.01 per ounce
Homemade Recipe: How to Easily Clean Your Oven
Conclusion: Make your own! Jillee’s oven cleaning method just calls for water and ammonia. It’s extremely inexpensive and in my opinion, works better than store bought oven cleaners.
Swiffer Sweeper Replacement Pad
Store Bought: $.23 per pad
Homemade: $.71 per pad – but they are reusable!
Homemade Recipe: Make Your Own Reusable Swiffer Pads and Cleaning Solution
Conclusion: The homemade Swiffer pad is actually a store bought fuzzy sock – so I guess it’s not really a DIY. But it is cheaper in the long run than the regular Swiffer pads. And a bonus – it’s a little more green since you can reuse it over and over again.
Swiffer Wet Jet Solution
Store Bought: $.11 per ounce
Homemade: $.08 per ounce
Homemade Recipe: Make Your Own Reusable Swiffer Pads and Cleaning Solution
Conclusion: This one is a bit of a toss up for me. It’s not a huge cost difference and it’s a bit of pain to get the top off the Swiffer bottle to refill it with the homemade solution. I would say you only really need to DIY this one if you’re on a really tight budget.
Dishwasher Tabs
Store Bought: $.26 per ounce
Homemade: $.07 per ounce
Homemade Recipe: Make Your Own Dishwasher Detergent Tabs
Conclusion: Unless you just have to have dishwasher tabs instead of loose detergent, I would recommend buying store bought detergent. The tabs are time consuming to make and store bought detergent is only about $.03 per ounce. Just make sure to put a small dish of vinegar on the top rack of your dishwasher to keep dishes from coming out cloudy.
Dishwasher Detergent
Store Bought: $.03 per ounce
Homemade: $.01 per ounce
Homemade Recipe: Homemade Dishwasher Detergent Revised
Conclusion: Go for store bought. For me, the price difference isn’t big enough to go to the trouble of making my own dishwasher detergent.
