Homemade Citrus Rinse Aid for Dishwashers

Reasons to make your own dishwasher rinse agent:

• Rinse Aids at the store are expensive!  Those tiny bottles cost so much and are used up quickly when you refill your dishwasher compartment.  This recipe costs less than a dollar to make 12 ounces.
• Commercial rinse aids are unnecessarily full of toxic chemicals that have no place coating our “clean” kitchenware, steamed out into our air, or into our oceans and water.
• Once you make your own dishwasher detergent (and you absolutely CAN – check out my Lemon Tea Tree Dishwasher Tabs recipe here to get started), it is really hard to justify buying this one other unnatural dishwashing component.
• It is fun and empowering to know exactly what is in your products.  We are bombarded with exposures to chemicals everyday.  Limiting/eliminating where we are able to can make a huge difference.
• Store-bought products come with poison warnings and labels.  Using natural ingredients at home is much safer for children to be around.
• Most importantly, this easy recipe really works well!

DIY CITRUS RINSE AID (makes about 12 ounces)

• 1.5 cups distilled white vinegar(non-GMO would be the ultimate preference, but I/you can’t win every battle)
• 1-2 drops of Orange Essential Oil or similar (where to get it)

That’s really it.  Gently shake well until the oil eventually dissipates.  I reused an old witch hazel bottle that was perfect for squirting into the rinse department.  It’s pretty much just vinegar so you could make it in any amount you need, and even just vinegar alone is an excellent option to add into the rinse aid slot.

I chose Orange oil not just because it smells refreshing, but because therapeutic-grade Orange oil (and various other citrus oils like Lemon) has Limonene, which is a wonderful natural cleaning agent.  Environmentally friendly and actually beneficial? Amazing!  This is much preferred over petroleum-based by-products in synthetic creations.  It is also great to use other cleaning-power essential oils like lemon, grapefruit, Citrus Fresh, Thieves, Purification, etc.

COST BREAKDOWN: My vinegar turns out to be about 7 cents per ounce, so $0.84 cents worth in this recipe.  And my Orange oil is only 5 cents per drop for a grand total of about $0.90 for 12 ounces.  Less than a dollar for over a month’s worth of rinse agent (depending on your washing frequency and dishwasher model, I suppose).  I can usually refill my compartment 3-4 times with this bottle, meaning it’s about 30 cents per rinse refill…which lasts a couple of weeks for me.  Between using this and my dishwasher tablets, it costs less than $5 for a month’s supply of dishwashing stuff…less than a quarter per load!

And although I do not encourage/suggest/recommend this…even if my toddler somehow drank this, I would not have an emergency on my hands with these two dietary ingredients.

I do hope you’ll try this out or other homemade products to get your started!  Big life changes start with small, everyday decisions.  Our difference now could make a huge impact on our future generation’s world.  Even just a simple rinse aid.

See my short video of how I make this recipe here.

Questions, comments, or ideas are desperately welcome below 🙂

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