Homemade Laundry Detergent Dispenser

Here's a great little gadget my mom discovered for storing and pouring her homemade laundry soap--the Coffee Mate creamer bottle.  They are pretty sturdy little bottles with a nice flip top lid and pour spout.  If you don't drink coffee, maybe you have a friend who would save a couple for you.  They fit nicely in the laundry cupboard also, better than the squatty plastic gladware bowl I was using.

And I've altered my recipe since the first post on it--here's the new one:
1 bar Fels Naptha soap shredded
1 bar Ivory shredded
2 cups washing soda
3 cups borax

That's it--almost the same as before.  I still use the generic crystal light drink mix tub to measure the amount for a load of wash--it is about 2 tablespoons.  I heap it and that's good for a load.  One batch of the above recipe lasts about a month around here.

Now off to do some more laundry. :)

Homemade Powdered Laundry Detergent

I'm trying out some homemade laundry soap. Laundry soap is one of the items I was afraid I'd run out of on the 2 week no shopping experiment, so I thought it would be nice to be able to stock ingredients and make me some laundry soap whenever I needed it. Turns out it takes up a lot less space than standard laundry detergent, which is a bonus in our little house.

Here's the recipe:

1/3 bar Fels Naptha Soap grated (approx. 1 Cup grated soap)
1/2 cup Washing Soda
1/2 cup Borax

You might have to hunt for these ingredients, but they should be on the laundry aisle of your supermarket. Washing Soda is not the same as baking soda. Fels Naptha is a bar soap, but it's made for laundry. And borax is a laundry "booster", so even though you think they might be elsewhere in the store, they really should be on the laundry aisle. Check near the top or bottom shelves, and if all else fails, call your friend who bought the same stuff a while back at the same store. Okay, if you don't have a friend like that, just ask someone at the store. Here's what the ingredients look like so you kind of know what you're looking for. This is actually an older box of borax, the new box was shorter and fatter but with the same design.
I tripled the recipe. Why not just grate the whole bar of soap? And we do a lot of laundry anyway.

You could grate your soap in your food processor if you want--I just used a hand grater on the small side since I still have the scary dangerous food processor.

After you've got the soap grated (it should come to about 1 cup of grated soap per 1/3 bar of soap, so 3 cups for the whole bar), add your Washing Soda and Borax and mix it together. The whole triple recipe fit in a largish cheapo gladware-type container.

Now, here's the kicker. You only need to use 1-2 tablespoons of the soap per load. ?????? says me. Is that for real? Yep. We have super hard water here, so I've been using an old "crystal light" style cup from the 2 qt. mixes that holds about 2 tablespoons as my scoop. The stuff doesn't suds up in the machine, but the suds aren't what clean your clothes. It is not miracle laundry soap--if I don't pretreat the koolaid, grass, etc. it won't wash out--just like any other detergent. But it has worked well at general cleaning of the clothes. We have a bed wetter and it does get the pee smell out of the sheets and jammies we're always washing, so I know stuff is getting clean with it. The soap is pretty much unscented, so if you want your laundry to "smell," you can mix some regular powdered laundry detergent in to get the scent you like, or use dryer sheets.

It took all of about 10 minutes to mix it all up, it's seriously cheap compared to regular detergent, and it's EASY to store a bunch since you use so little when you wash. Can't beat that.

Making Chocolate Soap

My mom found a recipe for chocolate soap, so I thought I'd give it a try with a few friends, because, be honest with me ladies, who wouldn't want to bathe in chocolate??? So here it is--chocolate soap:

40 oz olive oil
24 ox coconut oil
1 oz unsweetened baking chocolate
4 TB cocoa powder
8 oz lye
4 cups water

The process is the same for all soaps, this one just happens to be chocolate, so you could also use the plain ol' soap recipe here if you don't like chocolate or want to try a regular soap:

16 oz coconut oil
16 oz olive oil
32 oz lard
24 oz water
9 oz lye

Both of these recipes will fill a 9x13 pan--that's a lot of soap. You can cut them down as desired.

Step 1: measure your water in a glass bowl:Step 2: Put on your protective gear and measure your lye separately. Lye is horribly caustic--get your rubber gloves, apron, and eye protection on! I'm using my postal scale to measure the ounces, and I got my lye online from The Lye Guy.

Step 3: Open a window or take the whole operation outside, and add the lye to the water while stirring. Seriously bad cough hack ick fumes here. Maybe a mask of some sort would be helpful. When you add the lye to the water, the mixture gets really hot. Don't be holding it on your lap!

Step 4: Let the lye water sit and cool down while you melt your oils in a double boiler. Big pot inside a bigger pan with water in the pan and the oils in the pot:

Heat your oils until they all melt. What you are trying to do is get the lye water to cool down to 110 degrees at the same time the oils hit 110 degrees. Not an easy task!

See? I got it too hot, so I had to put cold water and ice in my bottom pan to cool my oils down quick.

Step 5: When the oils and the lye water are both 110 degrees give or take a degree, add the lye water to the oils while stirring with your stir stick (used to mix milkshakes) or spoon if you're real ambitious. DON'T turn the stir stick on yet!

Step 6: When the oils and lye water are combined, do a little pulsing with the button on the stir stick, gradually increasing to holding the button down all the time while stirring the stuff in the pot.

If you use a spoon, just keep mixing. It will take an hour or more to get to the next step. The stir stick gets it done in about 20 minutes.

Step 6: Mix until your soap reaches "trace". This is when it's kind of thick like pudding, and it leaves a "scar" when it's dripped across the top of itself. Like this:

Trace is when you add any extras like essential oils for fragrance, oatmeal, flower petals, etc. We just added the cocoa powder. You could add some orange essential oil here and have Pim's soap, or peppermint EO and have peppermint patty soap. Might try one of those next time :) Mix it all in.

Step 7: Line your pan or molds with wax paper, parchment paper, or a light coating of spray oil to help the soap get out when it's time to come out. I've also been told if you use a flexible mold, you can put your soap in the freezer and it will pop out of the mold easier. We're sharing this batch of soap, so everybody brought a bread pan to put her portion of the soap in.

Step 8: Pour the soap into the molds, then wrap in a towel to keep it warm and let it sit for 24-48 hours.

The regular soap was hard enough to come out in 24 hours, but this chocolate one was still pretty soft since it had a higher proportion of liquid oil to start with, so I let it sit about 48 hours before taking it out. Strange thing, as this soap hardened it turned from a milk chocolate color to a dark chocolate color. Still looks yummy :)

Step 9: Cut the soap into useable size pieces, then put it somewhere where you won't be bugging it every day and let it cure for 4-6 weeks. The regular soap we made was ready in 4 weeks, this one might take longer since it's so soft still. Don't leave it sitting on your table or anywhere that's high traffic in your house, or your son might come take a taste (just a little lick, mom) and realize it's not really chocolate after all. :-)

Delicious!

Guest Post--Ladies ONLY: The Keeper, Diva Cup

Today I was going to post about dehydrating onions, but instead I'm going the easy route and posting an email I received from my sister who lives in Baton Rouge, Louisiana (hurricane land). Men, if you are still reading, this letter is women specific, so unless you want to read on for the women in your lives, TURN BACK NOW. Okay, you have been warned, here's her email:

So I was thinking about your blog the other day, and I was feeling very lame because I did not do much stuff for myself. And I thought – man, we have two hurricanes a year here, and if anyone should be prepared for that crap, it’s probably me. But before I could feel too lame, I remembered that I DO have useful, frugal knowledge about some stuff, I just forgot about it. So I thought I would share it with you!

Last September when Hurricane Gustav came, I was without power for three whole weeks. The stores were closed for two weeks solid, and the city services - like garbage removal – didn’t come for two weeks either. So, something that I learned: periods are not fun in a disaster. You never think about tampons until you need them. And can’t get them. ANYWHERE.

So, you’d think it would make sense to stock up on tampons just like you do toilet paper, etc. But here’s the thing – when the garbage isn’t getting picked up for weeks, and it’s 100 degrees in your house because you have no air conditioner, having a bunch of used tampons laying around in the garbage gets really really gross. Plus you run out of tampons very quickly if you are me.

So after the hurricane mess was over, my girlfriends and I were talking and I found out that a lot of them had the same problem. So we all got what’s called “The Keeper” (cheesy, I know) www.thekeeper.com. It is VERY awesome. It’s a little rubber cup that catches all the mess. You buy it once and it lasts ten years, so it’s WAY cheaper than tampons. And you just empty it, rinse it, and use it again. (Of course – this assumes you have running water.) Anyway, you never run out of tampons and you don’t have gross tampon trash filling up your house and eventually filling up the landfills. And they’re way comfortable. They don’t look like it, but I promise they are. There’s also the Diva Cup www.divacup.com, but it’s made in Canada and the Keeper is made in the U.S.

But it gets better! We all thought – what about the last couple days of your period when the flow is really light and you don’t want a rubber cup up there for barely anything. Normally you’d just use little Carefree panty-liners or something like that. But those get gross in the trash too, and are cheaper than tampons but still pretty pricey over your lifetime. So you go back to the old times and MAKE YOUR OWN! Wahoo! There are patterns everywhere online for homemade pads, and you can make them as thick or thin as you want them, and you can make them to fit your own underwear. AND they stay put with little Velcro wings or snaps. Way cheaper and way more handy in a disaster than the disposable ones. (This also assumes you have water to wash them with.) My friends hand-sewed theirs, but I refuse to do that, so I just told mom to make me some. She thought it was gross, but I think it’s useful.

Anyway, that is my one preparedness tidbit that I learned the hard way.

Love,
Mariah

Note from Angela: I have been stocking feminine hygiene supplies in my storage, but they'll only last so long, and then what? Hmmmm. Might be worth checking out. Here is a site with patterns and instructions for making your own pads (I'm not sure I'm quite there yet, but interesting nonetheless).

Catch Up (not Ketchup)

A post with a bunch of randomness thrown together (aka "what's been going on around here").

I've been using the soap I made with my church girls. It's pretty nice, but could have used more essential oil. When I put it in I didn't measure how much I added, and the whole church kitchen smelled like lavender so strongly some of the girls had to leave the room (that, or they were just looking for an excuse to go play in the gym). Seems the scent dissipates over the curing time, so next time I'll try to add more. Wish I'd measured how much I put in . . .

The polls I put up forever ago were really interesting. I'm not too good at analyzing results scientifically, but some of us need more food storage and a bunch of us are amazingly talented! I think any of you who said you could not do anything else useful were a bit too hard on yourselves! And I'm planning to learn to knit something or maybe crochet at some point . . . (my amazing mom can do both, so I guess I better learn).

I got some non-hybrid seeds from can't remember the place in a "survival seed bank" which gave a nice variety of heirloom seeds to try out. It said it would plant a full acre garden and since I didn't need a full acre, I split the cost and the seeds with a friend in town. However, whoever put the pack together must plant in rows and not beds, because there really aren't THAT many seeds in the pack, even though there are the hundreds of seeds they say they have, 50 tomato seeds look like nothing in a packet. SO, I have ordered more seeds a la carte from another can't remember the place to supplement some of the seeds I got in the seed bank. The seed bank did come with a very nice PDF file of instructions on planting, growing, and harvesting heirloom seeds that hopefully will answer all my questions. Should be fun. I got the peas planted finally, and am planning on starting my other plants this weekend or maybe the next in the little Jiffy seed starter kit my sweet husband picked up for me while HE was in town last week. I didn't want to start them too early--I've heard to start them 8 weeks in advance, then 4 weeks, and also 2 weeks, and I'm still a good 5-6 weeks before safe transplanting time around here, so no hurry. I also got my baby gurney's replacements in the ground so hopefully they'll live this time.

We have a place to put chicks! My husband very graciously volunteered one of his big wooden boxes that is almost empty after I put "build a chick box" on his list. I just need to clean it out and put another board in the bottom of it since it had oily stuff in it like the chainsaw. So it should be a fine place for housing some chicks in the next week or so. (here's me doing the happy chicken dance--too bad you all can't see it!)

Went to the grocery store today (by myself--amazing, I know), and they have started carrying food storage stuff! Wahoo! They had a whole variety of #10 cans of freeze dried and dry goods plus buckets, lids, buckets of wheat, water barrels, etc. Very nice. I think I'll talk to the manager and make sure he keeps stocking some of that stuff. Almost bought some, but wasn't in the budget this week.

I spent a good part of this last weekend watching LDS General Conference. Some amazing messages were given--very timely. The video and audio archives are available on the LDS Church's website. Church President Thomas S. Monson, after discussing the difficult times we live in, said, "The future is as bright as your faith." Love his simple yet profound messages.

And one last note, I just this week opened a jar of pre-salmonella scare peanut butter marked "best by Jan 28 '05" (in case you can't do math in your head, that's more than 4 years ago) and it was still fine. Amazing. (And in case you're wondering, there's only one of us that likes peanut butter, so no, we do not go through it very quickly.)

And one last, last note, because I like pictures in my posts, here's one of the snow dog (kind of a puggish dog, kind of looked like the sphinx) we made when it snowed (again) last weekend. Good thing the sun came out and melted it all before that evening.

Whew. I feel better now I've updated. :) Have you bought your wheat grinder yet? If you're local or feel like a trip to the sticks, you can come try mine out--I'm sure you'll love it!

Save Some Cash--Cut Your Own Kids' Hair!

Sorry for the trouble, but this post has moved to our new blog location.  Click here to go straight to Cut Your Own Kids' Hair.  Thanks!

Soap Update and a Warning

The soap is getting slightly harder this evening, so I thought I'd try and get it out of the mold again. I will be lining whatever molds I use next time with butcher paper or wax paper or something--this is ridiculous!

And here's your WARNING: Never use a cheapo knife to try to pry soap out of a gladware container!

Soap Making Adventure Part One

I wasn't going to post anything on soap making until I had it figured out a little better, but had such a good laugh at Lisa's recent soap making experience (far too similar to mine!) that I thought I'd post how it's going at this point, which is why it is Part One, and I promise I'll write this up in easy to follow directions when I get a few more pictures of the process.

I watched my mom make soap about a year ago and so have been mulling over doing it myself for a while now. Well, I work at church with a group of 12 and 13 year old girls and we do an activity every week with them and they thought making soap would be fun, so we put it on the calendar. Then I had to find the ingredients, and living out in the boonies, odd ingredients like lye are difficult to come by. In fact, nobody within 45 miles had even contemplated carrying lye in their stores, so I ended up ordering it online from The Lye Guy and paying for hazardous materials shipping to get it here. I figured since I had to pay the hazardous materials fee, I might as well order more than one bottle of the stuff, so I went for his buy 5, get one free deal and now have LOTS of lye. :)

Then I got a recipe online for some lady's favorite soap that had coconut oil, palm oil, cocoa butter, and lye water in it. Lye water--check. Cocoa butter--check (I have this in my lip balm supplies). Coconut oil--checkish--I had some, but would need more to make the amount of soap necessary for 8+ preteen girls to take some home at the end of the activity. Palm oil--big ol' no check, but it just so happened I was going "over the mountain" to the BIG town 2 1/2 hours away and I knew they had a natural foods store so I'd just stop in there and pick some up along with some more coconut oil and maybe a nice scented essential oil since I have peppermint and orange for my lip balm, but that's all and I thought maybe lavender would be nice for soap.

Well, long story short, the natural foods store did NOT carry Palm Oil, and I went home with my coconut oil and lavender oil in a snowstorm and a bit of a panic since the activity was planned for the next night and I had already told the girls we'd be making soap and to come with their safety glasses, rubber gloves, and apron--how could I possibly dissapoint them? So I called my mom in the morning (good thing for moms), and she said I didn't need Palm Oil--it was very expensive if I could even find it, and I could use lard instead--it's real cheap and lathers well and I could just get it at the grocery store. Oh. Okay. Well, not MY grocery store, so I had to drive 10 miles to the next slightly larger grocery store where they did have it but hiding in the meat cooler section, so the soap making activity was officially on for that evening.

I got my girls all together and we got started and as I'm telling them how to measure the ingredients on the scale in some bowl that was left in the church kitchen, one of them pipes up and says, "Have you ever done this before?" How dare they doubt my authority??? ;) Uhhhh, well, not exactly, but I've seen it done . . .

Here's the recipe we ended up using:
16 oz Coconut Oil
16 oz Olive Oil
32 oz Lard
24 oz Water
9 oz Lye
Lavender essential oil

First we measured out the water and the lye on my handy postal scale and slowly mixed the lye into the water. Then we real quick opened the window in the kitchen and half the girls left the room coughing from the fumes. Outside would be better . . . or under your range hood with your fan that vents to the outside, not like my range hood that vents right back into the kitchen.

The Lye water gets really hot, so we moved it over by the open window to cool down and hoping for fewer fumes that way.

Next, we measured the oils into somebody else's bowl (good thing they left it there) on the scale so we knew how many ounces we had.

Then we put all the oils except the lavender into my fancy double boiler setup (big frying pan with water in it, big pot inside with oils in it) and heated it up. Sometimes you just have to make things up.The idea is to get the lye water and the oils at 110 degrees or thereabouts at the SAME TIME. Now I used my meat thermometer to check the temperature and I only have one, so we had to keep checking and washing and checking and washing so we didn't mix any lye water with the oils prematurely. Of course we heated our oils too hot and had them about 125 when our lye had cooled off to about 115 so in a panic we put cold water in our big frying pan and added some ice hoping to cool the oils off quickly, meantime spilling water all over the stove top when we put the pot of oils in it. Magically, the oils cooled off to 110 about the same time the lye hit 110, so then we slowly added the lye water to the oils and mixed it up.

You can mix them by hand, but apparently it takes a very long time, so I used my mom's method and mixed it with an electric stir stick like you use for making milkshakes (you can kind of see it at the far left of the "measuring oils" picture above). Only forgot to let go of the button as I was lifting it up once and got oil/lyewater mess on my pants and shoes (of course it missed my apron completely). After about 15-20 minutes with the stir stick, 3/4 of the girls had left to play in the gym and the soap finally reached "trace" which is where it leaves a line or scar looking thing if you drip some soap on the top of itself. It's about hot pudding consistency at this point. This is where you add any extras like essential oils, rose petals, whatever you want to fancy it up.

Then we poured it into little cheapo gladware containers so the girls could all take some soap home and wrapped them in towels to keep them from cooling off too quickly. I told them to pop the soap out of the molds in 24 hours and then let it cure for 4-6 weeks. Well, this morning (it's been at least 36 hours) I tried to pop my soap out of my gladware and it is stuck in there like nothing else! So I knifed around the edge and it still won't come out. So I called my mom again and she said do not panic, just give it some more time to harden and it will come out. Phew. I haven't gotten any calls from my girls that their soap wouldn't come out, so either they figured out how to get theirs out or they've forgotten what's in that little towel bundle by their bed . . .

At any rate, I'm planning on making soap again with my prep ladies group, so I'll take more pictures then (did I mention I was trying to keep track of a bunch of 12-13 year olds AND take pictures this time?). And I'll keep you posted on the soap progress.

Homemade All Natural Lip Balm

Here it is, the post you've all been waiting for (even though you didn't realize it). The almost fully illustrated guide to making your own lip balm for WAAAYYY LESS than $2.50 a tube or whatever the going rate is.

Start by eating some canned goods. Seriously. Just a small can--like a veggie can--we ate green beans, but you can have whatever you want. A soup can would work fine also, although the ones with the pop off tops might be a bit more difficult to shape. After you've emptied your can, wash it out and bend the edge of it into a spout like this:Now gather the rest of your supplies. The recipe I use is fairly versatile, so you can choose and alternate ingredients. Here's the recipe:

20% Beeswax
25% Solid at room temperature oil (Coconut Oil, Palm Oil, Shea Butter, Lanolin, etc.)
15% Brittle at room temperature oil (Cocoa Butter, Palm Kernel Oil, etc.)
40% Liquid at room temperature (Sweet Almond Oil, Olive Oil, Avocado Oil, etc.)
Essential oil of your choice

You'll also need a scale, a small pot with water, and containers for your lip balm. I have a postal scale, but you can use whatever scale you have that will measure small weights. And for the containers, Google "lip balm tubes" and you'll find places that sell them. They are like chap stick tubes. I purchased mine some time ago and can't remember where I got them, but they had a great deal on a gross of them (yep 144) so I bought that and let me tell you, it takes a while to use 144 lip balm tubes! You can also find little pots if you prefer that type of application.


All the measurements are by weight, you can do any amount and measure in any weight increment (ounces, grams, pounds, etc.)


Today, I'm making about 2 oz. of lip balm and putting it in tubes. The tubes hold approx. 0.15 oz each.

So after you eat your veggies and get your ingredients and supplies together, it's time to begin. Put a bit of water in the pan and put it on the stove to heat up.You can measure the ingredients separately and add them to your can, or you can just measure them into your can. If I have helpers, I put a paper cup on the scale and have them measure out the right amount of each ingredient separately, then add them all together, but today, I'm just measuring right into the can. So I put my can on the scale and zeroed the weight so it will only be weighing the ingredients.Next I added the beeswax. You can also get beeswax online, or maybe your health food store has it. I got mine from my mom who bought a big ol chunk of it and had plenty of excess to share with her daughter. Beeswax is extremely hard, so you may end up with shavings instead of a slice and that's okay because it melts faster if it's in little pieces. I wanted 0.4 oz of beeswax for my recipe and put in 0.5 oz because I like my lip balm just a little more solid :)
It really doesn't matter in what order you add your ingredients, so I'm just going in the order I happened to add them. Next, add the solid at room temperature oil--I used Coconut Oil. It's just what I had. All these oils can be found at your local natural foods store type place, and some even at your standard grocer.I added 0.5 oz. + Okay, the scale says the total now is 1.1 oz., so maybe I added 0.6 oz.Next add the brittle at room temperature oil--I used Cocoa Butter. It smells yummy--kind of like chocolate--mmmmmm.
Would have been 0.3 if I did my recipe just right, but again, I added a little over. (My scale has an auto reset after a certain time--that's why it shows 0.4 oz instead of the total weight which would have been 1.5 oz at this point).Next add your liquid at room temperature oil--I used olive oil.Now I was trying to make it a little stiffer than this recipe had made in the past, so I went a little light on the olive oil and probably only put in 0.7 oz instead of 0.8. You see, the recipe is not set in stone.Add your favorite essential oil. I used peppermint. About 10 drops per ounce of lip balm, so I added about 20 drops.At this point you could also add a bit of vitamin E, which I couldn't find at the time I made this, so I left it out. When I do add it, I just poke the end of one or two of the vitamin E capsules with a pin and squeeze the oil into the can.

Now, put your can into the pot of water and let it heat up and melt all the oils. You can stir it if you want to help it melt--I usually do. I kind of like things to happen NOW if at all possible.

While the oils are melting, get your lip balm containers ready. I like to put mine on a paper towel--I know how good I am at pouring and I'll probably over fill one or two tubes and have lip balm all over the counter . . . When the stuff in the can is all melted, take the can out of the pot. It will be hot--use an oven mitt.The can cools off pretty quick, so then you can just grab it at the top and pour the liquid into the tubes.
I filled these to the top, but if you fill them a little less, you can come back and top it off before it hardens and get a flatter top.

As the lip balm hardens, it kind of sinks in the middle. If you want it all pretty and smooth on top, you'll need to top it off. It's best to do that by not filling it quite all the way the first time and then topping when it's not quite all cooled off. Your lip balm will also start to harden in the can as you're pouring. If it gets too hard, just put the can back in the pot of water and melt it again.

Once it is all cooled off, put your lids on your tubes and voila! Fancy schmancy lip balm! If you're real fancy, you can work up some kind of label for your tubes. I just don't bother with that, but if you made more than one variety at a time, you might want to label them somehow so you'd know what you were about to put on your lips . . .

Yea! Happy Lips! :)

Emergency or Camping Shower

Here's a great way to clean up in the woods--the Camp Shower. If you're like me, a couple of days without a shower starts affecting my mood and there's only so many ways to wash up in the woods most of which are a pain in the neck and use lots of water. One year while camping, there was a guy camped near us that had one of these and my crafty mother looked it over and made one for herself, then this year made one for each of her kids for Christmas. I know, you want my mom, but you can't have her! She's mine!
Anyway, here it is:It is made from a 2 gallon weed sprayer (only use a fresh one--you don't need old weed killer residue in your shower) and a kitchen sink spray nozzle. I'm not sure what hardware you need to hook the hoses together, but I took a picture of it and maybe you can figure it out. OR just ask at your local hardware store and they should be able to fix you up with something that will connect the two hoses together.My mom also has access to an industrial sewing shop and put together a nice little carry bag with shoulder strap and a mesh toiletries pack and washrag hook attached. LOVE IT! To use the shower, heat up some water and fill up the sprayer. Pump the top to put pressure in it and use the sprayer to spray the water. When the pressure gets low, pump it up again.

The guy who we copied this from had a one gallon sprayer and he put it in a black bag in the sun and it would heat itself up. Two gallons has proven to be too much for the sun to heat, but one gallon is not enough for us girls to get clean with, so we've got a two gallon sprayer and have to heat water without relying on solar power to do it.