Attempted Homemaking: "Cloth" is Not a Four Letter Word (as in diapers), part 4

Tuesday, January 17, 2012

"Cloth" is Not a Four Letter Word (as in diapers), part 4

Daily Use and Care

I mentioned some of the daily use and care in part 3, but I thought I'd elaborate a little.
I wash the diapers every day. Most people wash every other day (beyond that and you get a lot of problems with stink and stains), but I wash every day because I don't have enough diapers to last for two!

To further reduce the cost, I hang dry them in our room on a drying rack.

For my wash routine:
1) In the even of a poopy diaper, I just shake the stuff into the toilet, no spraying or dunking here.
2)Every evening when I wash the diapers: dump diaper pail contents into washing machine
3)Put a little water in pail and swish around to get anything out of there, then dump that water in the washing machine (a lot of people have a washable pail liner in a lidded garbage can, which works great, I'm just using what I have)
4) Do a cold rinse to remove poo still on the diapers
5) Do a hot wash with about 1/4 the recommended amount of detergent
6) Do an extra cold rinse, chicking on the agitation to see if there are a lot of bubbles (indicating that I added too much laundry detergent before) and if there are a lot of suds I'll do another rinse.
7) Hand diapers, covers and wipes up to dry on drying rack. In the morning is they're still wet I'll put them in the dryer for a few minutes (NO DRYER SHEETS!) and they're ready to go!

So that's what's been working for us. Sometimes it would be nice to have enough diapers to wash every other day, but we're building up to that and I can use swagbucks to slowly build up a few more.