Fixing my foaming soap dispenser
Mostly I wash my dishes in my dishwasher, but when I hand-wash the things that need hand-washing, I use a foaming soap dispenser.
The contents of a foaming soap dispenser are watered down relative to “regular” soap. When the manufacturer does it, this is a ripoff (you’re paying them for water replacing 80% of the soap), but when you’re the one doing the watering-down, it becomes a tremendous cost advantage. I save so much money on hand-wash dish detergent, because I barely use any of it; I buy a new bottle every few years. I don’t even buy the big jugs like I used to.
To make your own foaming soap refill with dish soap, add four parts water to one part dish soap (e.g., 240 ml water + 60 ml soap), pour that into an empty foaming soap dispenser, and mix. (Some soaps might require a different ratio.) I use this soap in this dispenser that screws onto a mason jar.
If I were buying the jar today, I’d get a plain-looking one from Dollar Tree or Daiso.
Recently, my dispenser stopped dispensing. It wasn’t stuck, which is a common failure mode for this type of soap dispenser (the pump gets stuck down and doesn’t pop back up); in this case, I could still pump it like normal, but all it did was squirt air into the jar rather than squirt foamy soap onto my hand/sponge/thing-that-needed-cleaning. Or if I did get any soap foam, it was an unusably-small amount, probably back-fed from the foam that accumulated in the jar as the pump squirted more and more air through the jarful of diluted soap.
I fixed it by filling a bowl with warm water, dipping the whole upper half (but most especially the hole where the foam is supposed to come out) upside-down in the water, and pointing the dip tube away from me, then pumping away until the dip tube started shooting squirts of plain water.
Basically, if your pump gets into a state where it only pumps air backward into the jar, lean into that and pump water backward through it instead. That should rinse out whatever dried soap (I guess) is fouling the mechanism.
Once I did that, I was able to put the pump back on the jar, then do a few more pumps to re-prime it with soapy water, and now it gives the same excellent foam it used to.