Soap Bubble Wiki
Register
Advertisement

A month or so ago, Megan on SBF, the Soap Bubble Fanciers Yahoo Group (RIP), mentioned that she had tried Dawn PowerClean and really liked it (at least compared to Dawn Ultra). I picked some up at the store last week for dish-cleaning since PowerClean has earned a reputation for making quick work of cleaning hard-to-clean dishes. I don't know if that is actually true.

Anyway, we are going on vacation and want to make bubble, but we don't want to lug around bubble juice or detergent if we can help it. I decided to see if substituting Dawn Ultra (which is pretty easy to find) into any of my favorite recipes would make acceptable bubbles. I was also curious how Dawn PowerClean would compare.

So, I whipped up two quick liter batches of my 'salty guar' mix (1000 grams water, 1.5 grams guar gum with 4.5 grams salt, 35 grams detergent and 1/2 heaping teaspoon of baking powder).

The conditions were very windy. The kind of brisk wind great for garland wands but not big bubbles. I used 32" topstring test loops: modular loops with full-ply RubberMaid rayon finish mop yarn and a bottom string made from a single ply of deconstructed mop yarn (a white strand).I shot some video with my DIY hatcam but haven't had a chance to review the footage. My sense in the field was that ultra made some nice bubbles but that PowerClean worked much better. It seemed like the tubes were

Powercleantube crop

This tube reached 35-40 feet before breaking.

2052 crop powerclean

A long tube broken up into smaller bubbles by the strong wind.

IMG 2053 dawn powerclean small

This is the 'flavor' of Dawn PowerClean that I used.

Advertisement