Can you use solid dish soap in hard water?

Have you tried our solid dish soap yet? It's an economic and environmentally friendly way to hand wash dishes. Even though we have a dishwasher now, we use this soap almost daily. Either there's a pan too big to fit or a certain bowl that needs to be washed ASAP, so I keep a bar of this next to the sink and at the ready. This is also the soap I use to wash greasy salve and deodorant dishes (with the help of some washing soda and hot water). I wrote more about that process here.

Solid Dish Soap for Sustainability

Why is this soap environmentally friendly? The big advantages of solid soap over liquid soap is packaging and shipping. There's no need for a large plastic or glass jug and it is much more economical to ship. Our cardstock soap labels are recyclable and biodegradable and I use brown paper (much of it recycled!) for shipping materials.

Even if you take into account that fact that Fat Chance Soap is shipped to your house compared to purchasing liquid dish soap at the store, we still come out ahead! Liquid dish soap in stores may be shipped more efficiently on pallets in trucks but there is still a lot of water and packaging being shipped around compared to a solid 4 oz. bar of soap. Then you still have to get the liquid soap to your house, which sometimes involves an inefficient car trip. Meanwhile, the postal service and other delivery companies drive the most efficient routes possible to make large numbers of deliveries per trip.

Once your liquid soap is empty, you're left with an empty container that will likely end up in the recycling. It then takes energy and resources to make that plastic or glass usable again.

Hard Water Build Up

If you have hard water, you're probably familiar with the white mineral residues and soap scum that can build up over time. Soap especially can have a chemical reaction with the mineral ions in hard water that results in lower suds and more build up.

One solution to that is to add citric acid to the soap recipe. While the amount of citric acid doesn't significantly change the pH of the soap, what it does do is bind with the minerals before they can interfere with the soap suds or form soap scum on your sink, helping the soap do its job better and keeping your sink cleaner!

I wrote in more detail about suds and citric acid in soap here.

Using Solid Dish Soap

If you've never used a solid dish soap bar before, don't worry, you don't need any special tools! You can keep the bar in a soap dish or any empty plastic container. To wash, you can use whatever tool you already use for dish washing - brush, sponge, or cloth. Just wet it and scrub it across the top of the soap bar, then wash dishes as usual. Re-soap your brush or sponge as needed.

Dish soap can also be used for other cleaning tasks around the house. Also, did you know our stain stick is made of the same stuff? Read more about other ways to use dish soap here. It's for more than just dishes!