Make your own laundry pretreater / pre-treater for pennies : Make dreft laundry treater for almost free: We ran out of Dreft pre-treater for the laundry. With the little ones allergies, I did not want to use something else, so instead of paying x.xx dollars for another dreft spray bottle, I noticed the ingredients in the bulk Sam’s Club jug and the spray bottle were the same, maybe formulated differently, but read on…
So I took the old empty spray bottle, poured one cap full of dreft soap from the huge jug into the bottle, then slowly filled it with warm water and gently shook/rolled it around until it was decently mixed. I shake before every use to make sure its still mixed.
I gave it the ultimate test tonight… the boy has been sick and has had several “blow-outs” in his outfits from the daycare. We had about 5 days of such outfits in baggies in the laundry room. I sprayed the poopie spots with ‘fake’ dreft pre-treater, didn’t even bother to let it sit, just tossed it in the washer set on hot, medium wash cycle cottons and VOILA, they came out like new.
It worked just as well on the set in poopie stains as the expensive pre-treater.
In this case I used dreft, but you could use any soap…Tide…Era…whatever.
Let me know what you think.
You can do the same thing with a bucket of water if you don’t want to stand there & spray- just put a detergent in, add some water (maybe like 3 parts water to 1 part detergent, or even more diluted), throw the clothes in, and come back about 30 min later and launder as usual. I often end up leaving the bucket for a couple of days because I forget about it, and it doesn’t hurt. Also, you can try a stain stick, because they allow you to come back to it after days if you don’t get around to it! Rub it on, let it sit for at least 5 min (or several days!), then launder as usual. With poop stains, I usually get it wet before the stain stick, to be sure it penetrates.
P.S. We have detergent allergies here too, and I finally worked up the courage to try All Free & Clear instead of Dreft because of the price difference. Since there aren’t any dyes or fragrances, it doesn’t bother anyone’s skin in our house! I usually buy the All 3x, not 2x, concentrated because it’s smaller and much cheaper, ounce for ounce. Plus you can usually find a coupon! 🙂
I never buy pre-treaters, because I realized a long time ago, that this method is so much cheaper, and actually works better! Thanks for posting this.