Add Borax or washing soda to your load of laundry

If you know you have 🪖 hard 🛘 water 💦 (meaning a lot of minerals in your municipal or well water), adding Borax (sodium tetraborate) or washing soda (sodium carbonate) can help your laundry get cleaner and softer!

Chemistry lesson! 🧪

Both act as precipitating water softeners: They chemically bind the calcium and magnesium ions that make water "hard," pulling them out of solution as an insoluble solid so the detergent can actually clean instead of being wasted forming scum.

Hard water is loaded with dissolved Ca²⁺ and Mg²⁺ ions. Those ions grab onto soap/detergent and form an insoluble "soap scum" film, so you use more detergent, get less lather, and leave mineral deposits on fabrics.

Washing soda locks those ions up, and the water behaves as if it were soft: detergent lathers properly, a smaller dose cleans effectively, and minerals no longer crust onto fabric.

Shake some into the wash bowl or primary detergent compartment. Clothes come out cleaner and softer for pennies per load!