There is another major mistake floating the internet and it is the recipe for do-it-yourself Dawn PowerWash, a product I mocked initially but have come to rely on and love.
But it is $5 a bottle.
For this once spendy gal now turned cheapskate, there had to be a better way, because it only took a minute of mental math to realize this alone could prevent me from a proper and timely retirement.
So, I set out to make my own in a giant-sized jar.
Being the kind of person who must keep my regulars on hand like soap, oil, pantry staples, trash bags, Ziplocs, life’s essentials for quick grabbing, I couldn’t chance having to remake this anytime soon.
Truly, I cannot be trusted to stop what I’m doing at the moment to get more of whatever it is I need and will make do with some awful other option just to save time and effort.
For the sake of convenience, I am, above all else, a little lazy. I will always opt for the path of least resistance during the flurry of my life.
I mean heck, I have been known to order the digital version of a movie from the basement when I have it on DVD upstairs and cannot bear going all the way up there to then hunt it down.
I cannot lie, sometimes it’s laziness, and other times it is that I am mentally exhausted and cannot be bothered.
Don’t judge-LOL.
I do work hard and need a bit of ease in my life sometimes, and just had to make a boatload of this DIY power wash for future convenience. Luckily I’m not dumb and knew to make a small batch to test before I go full gusto into the half-gallon jar I plan to fill-with this kitchen gold.
First stop, Google! and I was not disappointed with over 2000 results. So naturally I picked the top listings and clicked away. I wanted to be sure and verify that this is indeed the correct recipe and so it seems, it was!
Over 30 pages touted the same exact formulation which gave me the utmost confidence in it.
The internet instructs you to use the following recipe when making the homemade-dollars-saving-power wash: four tablespoons of blue Dawn soap, two tablespoons of rubbing alcohol, then fill to the top of your original but empty bottle.
I whipped up my test batch and started using it everywhere, like I usually do. It’s such a great little cleaner. So versatile. So nice.
I went spritz, spritz, spritz all over my usual places but immediately knew it was all wrong. It created a gooey grime that left clouds of sticky residue all over my countertops.
I then spent an inordinate amount of time unfairly kicking myself as I so often do– flogging myself with phrases like:
Didn’t you double check it?
Did you read it wrong?
And oh no, the whole bottle is wasted!
Perfectionism is a beast. And, it had reared its ugly head in that moment. From there, I morphed into a master scoffer only to scapegoat my fellow man.
Asking myself, how can so many people blindly copy this formula without noticing the mistake?
How does this happen so quietly to this degree, without protest?
Are people in a coma?
Did they not test it?
I pondered the layers, the facets, and the fact that this doesn’t bode well for all of humanity.
This blind-leading-the-blind approach on such a large scale cannot spell success for our future as a people.
Who copies others’ info from the internet without attesting to its true quality?
It’s not the blind leading the blind. It was the dumb leading the dumb, I thought to myself, and I was done.
What a hassle! This crap was nowhere near the store-bought power wash. Now I had made a bottle’s worth of this useless sludge. Feeling pressured to use it up as not to be wasteful because I am, above all else, a careful person.
So I spent the whole next week delightfully spritzing my syrupy PowerWash wherever I could just to run the bottle down.
It wasn’t all a waste, though. I smartly used my spritzing time to contemplate the ideal properties of store bought power wash. Using my scientific powers of observation and deduction, I determined that rubbing alcohol provided the necessary evaporation and quick dry-time, Dawn soap provides ideal degreasing effects, and then water provides proper dilution.
Now I had a framework for success, and luckily the crappy internet recipe was a good starting point.
The rubbing alcohol must be 70% concentration because the 91% formulation evaporates too quickly to be effective. I decided to double the alcohol in the original internet formulation and cut back on the Dawn soap by a considerable bit because I knew it was contributing to the soap residue left behind. And because the dilution was close, I only needed a little more water in my version.
I tested it and voila! The new formulation is much closer to the commercial version than the internet’s version.
Try this recipe: three tablespoons of blue Dawn, three tablespoon of the 70% rubbing alcohol, and 16oz of water.
Stir.
Double it, triple it, or even quadruple it so you have plenty on hand when you need it.