About a year ago I started a thread asking about cloth diapering. I got wildly dissenting opinions about cloth vs disposable diapering, and also some awesome advice from Enderw24 about using Kawaii diapers.
Birdman and I ended up using a rental package of Kissaluvs newborn size diapers from itsybitsybums.blogspot.com which worked great, and are now using the above mentioned Kawaii, as well as flats with diaper covers. If anyone else was thinking about cloth, or wondering why anyone with a brain in their head would want to wash and reuse diapers when they make perfectly good disposables, please ask away!
Do you launder them yourself, or do you use a service?
If you do it yourself, how often do you wash them (and how do you do it)? The biggest reason I haven’t tried cloth is that we live in an apartment building with a shared laundry room.
Well, “Itsy Bitsy Bums” is the name of a shop, not a brand of diaper. I guess for the brands, all the sensible names like Huggies, Pampers, and Luvs have already been taken.
We do our own washing, we have a HE top loading washer and a not terribly fancy dryer. I try to line dry the covers to keep the elastic happy, our basement is arid as a desert so I can do it inside. Right now we’re washing every other day, but back when we were on the rental we were every three days, and we will be that way again soon when we get our next order of diapers next week. We were trying out a small number of a few of the Kawaii labels, and once we found the ones we liked we ordered more of them. We will have 22 daytime and 4 overnight diapers and we should be able to wash every three days that way.
I highly recommend you try cloth on a small-scale basis. You can get a dozen prefolds or flats and a couple covers for less than $30 a lot of places, including Kawaii or Itsy Bitsy Bums, and try those out in the apartment washing machine. They will be really quick and easy to wash and even line dry if you don’t want to drop the coin in the machine.
When I read about cloth diapering, it sounds terribly complicated and overwhelming. You have to “strip” the diapers, you have to do it a certain way but you have to experiment to find your right certain way, have to try various chemicals to do it with, may have to order those chemicals online, meanwhile the diapers smell like a cat box… jeez.
With natural fibers like cotton, hemp, bamboo, etc, you have to wash the diapers a couple times on hot to pull out the natural oils before they are fully absorbent. It wasn’t a big deal, just ran the washer all day one day. If you are doing doublers, flats, prefolds, or anything else without elastic you can boil them for a while with a little Dawn and then give them one final wash in the machine instead of the multiple washes.
I have heard all sorts of sob stories about diapers stinking and repelling moisture, and I think it’s mostly the fault of people using the wrong detergent. You don’t want anything that foams very much, and you only want to use a very small amount. I don’t use detergent, I use a laundry soap a lady makes locally. It’s this same recipe: Welcome savvybrown.com - BlueHost.com, without the essential oil. I have very sensitive skin, so I use it for all our household laundry, not just the baby’s and I’ve never had issues with it. I don’t use nearly as much as she recommends–the amount in this recipe would last us nearly a year, so it’s worth making yourself if you can’t buy it.
With the natural fibers you can also use a tiny tiny amount of natural fabric softener, like 7th Generation, to keep them soft and lovely. Never use any with the synthetic fibers tho, just clogs them up.
I guess it’s possible my diapers might eventually need stripping from build up, and apparently it’s just a matter of washing them on HOT with some Dawn and then washing a few more times just with water until the detergent is gone. I’ve never had any issues with absorbency or smell yet, tho.
Out of curiosity, how old’s your child? There’s a definite (unpleasant) difference between breast-fed children’s poop (kind of like bad yogurt) and that same kid’s poop once they start eating food (like adult crap).
What sort of “cushion” do cloth diapers give against infrequent changes?
The reason I ask, is because some of the better disposables have reserve capacity for multiple peeings without leaks or diaper rash.
Also, what do you do when you change them away from home? Bag them up and stuff them in the diaper bag?
Is it actually cheaper in terms of money plus labor-hours to go cloth? Is it actually better for the environment? That’s a lot of time and soap and water (and shit) to process, and it makes me wonder how much worse disposables really are.
I did cloth at least part of the time for all three of my kids, and I can answer this. Yes, as long as you do not go completely insane with buying high-end specialty cloth diapers (yes, such a thing exists), cloth diapering is way cheaper than buying disposables. That is the sole and only reason I did it first time around, because we were broke as ass at the time. The cost of labor is a non-issue, because the time I spent laundering diapers wasn’t time I could have otherwise been spending at a lucrative job or whatever. If I had a lucrative job then, I wouldn’t have been using cloth diapers. (Besides which, the time involved is minimal. You do a few extra loads of laundry per week. It’s not like you’re slaving over a giant boiling pot of diapers over the campfire for six hours a day.)
And to answer bump’s question about leakage, I actually switched to cloth diapers with my second baby even though we could have afforded disposables by then, solely because she kept wetting through her disposable diaper at night. I found that a pocket diaper with a thick insert kept her dry for a six-hour period at night, thus allowing her (and us) to sleep longer.
Why do the diapers need to be boiled and how do you do it? I’m picturing a huge kettle and everyone waiting for supper because the diapers aren’t done.
I once saw one on eBay that played music. I’m not sure how that worked with washing it, but frankly that’s about the least of the problems with a musical diaper.
I didn’t cloth diaper, but if you have a baby, your washing machine will end up with lots of baby shit in it. That’s the nature of babies. Poop and vomit.
You rinse the poop off before putting it in the pail. The handiest way seems to be with a spray nozzle attached to your toilet supply line. Drop solids into the bowl, rinse with the nozzle, then flush. At most you should have a few skidmarks left over for the machine to deal with.
The process we had was : cold wash, rinse, hot wash, rinse, extra rinse. That’s basically 5 times through the machine, by that time, there’s nothing left.
Kid #1 was sorta “fun.” I would come home from work (in the summer) and see the Mrs. hanging all the diapers on the line. It felt sort of classic 50-60s lifestyle - dad the bread winner, mom running the show at home, blah blah.
But that has worn off for me.
And even though the Mrs. does 99% of the work when it comes to diapering (We both work full-time, but she isn’t paid for her work because her job is full-time mom), I’m “done” with cloth.
My daughter’s room smells like a hippie music festival port-a-john most of the time.
There’s definitely a big cost savings - I’ve read anywhere from $2,000 to $4,000 per year assuming you launder your own. I don’t have exact numbers because we haven’t done the math ourselves. And I have no idea how it figures with labor-hours factored in.
There’s a bit of debate about enviro-friendliness. Some argue that any enviro-gains with cloth are lost with the energy used in washing them. But with a HE washer, I dunno. The landfill issue though is a no brainer.
In my mind, you’re just sacrificing convenience to save money, which is basically true for pretty much anything. And the $$$ savings has worn thin on me. I’ll take the convenience.
BUT - since the Mrs. runs the show at home, we’re sticking with cloth to the end.
There were costs saving to be made but also the cloth nappies were more secure and the rare occasions we used disposables coincided with mega poo explosions. All the clothes had to be changed plus the bedclothes etc. etc. etc. a real pain.
The mechanics were fairly straighforward, use a flushable liner that gets most of the poo off, perhaps a quick rub with some toilet tissue. Then stick it in a sealed bucket ready for a wash.
When we did a load of nappies we only really did one wash. Perhaps a rinse first if it was really bad but that was rare. We washed on 90c in a standard Bosch machine and never had any problems with stray poo or with other clothes. It worked out pretty well. Well ended up selling the £400 of nappies on ebay for £250 so we didn’t do too badly, £75 per child (plus whatever it costs for the washing loads)
My wife reckons her favourite benefit was that it gave the children cute chubby bottoms as well.
