Why do we make our own homemade products? It all started with our first batch of homemade laundry detergent, since then we've been hooked! Now we're on a mission to make as many household products as we can. It saves money and gives a sense of joy and accomplishment. Up this week is homemade dishwasher detergent.

You know the feeling: You've got a loaded dishwasher brimming with crusty plates and sauce-splattered spoons. They've been there for a few days, in fact, compounding their grime and taunting your nostrils with their semi-mildewy scent. The buildup has become unbearable. It's time to wash the dishes... However, there's one small problem: you're completely out of dishwasher detergent.

We recently encountered this very issue � and while we could just hand wash them, we found another solutions, using just a few meager ingredients in our kitchen cupboard:

A quick search for �homemade dishwasher soap� turns up all kinds of recipes, from simple ones involving just regular dish soap and baking soda (which apparently helps soften hard water) to more souped-up concoctions with borax, washing soda and citric acid.

We used the simplest possible recipe, to model the typical lineup of ingredients we already have in our kitchens. This DIY dishwasher recipe uses just dish soap, baking soda and salt � and it WORKED.

Here's what to do next time you're in a dishwasher pickle:

Place dirty dishes in dishwasher as usual (grime, goo and all).

Add about three drops of regular dish soap to your dishwasher's detergent cup.

Fill the cup 2/3 of the way with baking soda.

Add salt until the cup is nearly full.

Run your dishwasher as normal.

Yay! No catastrophic, sudsy overflow!

...and your dishes turn out nice and sparkly.

Making your own dishwasher soap is also cheaper than buying buckets and boxes of powdered dishwasher detergent � this recipe, for example, claims to cost one cent per load, as opposed to 13 cents with store-bought detergent � and as long as you have these three ingredients around, you'll never have to worry about running out of dishwasher soap again.

Washing your grease covered dishes can be a hard job, but with the right tools and the right dish soap, you will be able to get all of the grease off of your dishes and leave them sparkling clean to use again.

The best dish soap for grease is usually a tough grease fighting soap like Dawn dish soap. Dawn has often been called the best dish soap for grease and they have put a lot of work into refining their product so it really cuts through oils. They also have helped out in wildlife rescue when there are oil spills in lakes and other bodies of water, and found that their dish soap is the best dish soap for grease that has gotten on the wings of the birds. The Dawn dish soap does really well at lifting the oil slicks from the feathers of birds, and so it will also be a wonderful soap to use when taking the grease off of any dish you need to wash. You can use the best dish soap for grease, but without some nice, clean, hot water, your dishes will still tend to come out a bit greasy. So make sure that while you are washing your dishes, you use the hottest water possible to clean them. Soaking the dishes with some dish soap also helps to loosen the crust and great from the dishes. Try out Dawn dish soap and see if you think it is the best dish soap for grease that you have used.