Homemaking Tuesday: Failures

There have been a couple of things on here that we have talked about that have FAILED...

The biggest one, being the shower experiment trial one. Remember that?

Currently, trial two is going great, YAY!

The Fail:

The actually fail, I want to talk more about is dishwasher detergent...

In April I told you about making your own dishwasher detergent.

I really liked this detergent, but there was ONE MAJOR flaw.

It turned into a ROCK!

I thought I had pictures, but I can not find them...

I thought, if I throw it in the microwave, the increase movement of the water molecules will soften it and I can try to salvage it...

That DID NOT WORK!!! It was bubbling!

So I let it cool, and harden again and then I chiseled out some for each load. 

Wonderful Man decided this was ridiculous, and told me just to buy some dishwasher detergent. So we now use

It is a little pricey for dishwasher detergent, but I made a list of what I wanted out of a product and this fit the bill. (Check out EWG.com's rating for this)

So what went wrong?

CITRIC ACID

The main problem, was that citric acid is a moisture absorb-er  and so when in a sealed jar, it took the moisture out the air. Every time you opened a new jar, new moisture rich air was added... This caused the the ingredients to soften and combine into one solid mass. Add enough water (not just moisture) and it would dissolve...

How to solve the problem?

Shake and stir OFTEN! One place I read (which I can not remember now to site) said, if you leave it open for a few days and stir it often, it will prevent the rock from forming. I also saw people saying if you a those moisture bead packs from almost any new item you buy, they help too.

If this is something you do, what do you do to prevent a solid chunk of dishwasher detergent from forming?