Cloth Diaper Laundry: The First Six Months (or while your baby is exclusively breast fed) by Sheryl M.
One of the main concerns that people have when they start using coth diapers is that washing them will be gross and that it will take a lot of extra time and effort. These are both false myths. Before reading this, I must make the disclaimer that I was lucky enough to be able to exclusively breast feed. I do not know the cloth diaper "rules" for formula fed babies.
Isn't washing cloth diapers time consuming?
Not at all. You can throw a load of laundry on and then do some other stuff while it is running. Yes, it requries you to be home to add the soap and start the extra cycles, but you will find that you do spend a lot of time at home with the baby anyways.
But isn't it gross to wash a poopy diaper? I don't want to rinse it in the toilet!
You don't have to! When a baby is breast fed, it's poop is water soluable and liquid-ish. This means that you can take the diaper right off the baby, put it directly in the dry diaper pail, and then on laundry day, throw it directly in the washing machine and it will wash right out. With top loaders, it's best to do a cold rinse without soap, a hot wash/rinse with soap, and a final extra cold rinse cycle to make sure the diapers are rinsed well. Front loaders are use much less water than top loaders so instead of doing a cold rinse cycle before and after, do a cold wash cycle before and after so you use more water.
What type of detergent should I use?
There are so many types of different detergents. For the first 6 months, using soap nuts worked well for us. We didn't need the extra strength of specially formulated cloth diaper detergents because the poop easily washed out and she drank and peed so much that it was not concentrated at all. Before you use any detergent, please check to see if it is suitable for cloth diapers. Some say that they are natural but that doesn't mean that they are good for cloth.
Ew! My diapers have a poop stain on them , isn't that bad?
Not at all. As long as you've washed them, the diapers shouldn't have any poop left on them. The stain is just a stain and doesn't mean anything. If you really don't like them, the best way to get rid of them is to put them out in the sun for a few hours and let it bleach those stains out.
Can I use diaper cream?
We were lucky that our baby didn't get a diaper rash at all in her first year. I don't really have much advice there. We used some cloth diaper safe-ish cream (it wasn't the best that is out there but it didn't cause huge amounts of buildup in the diapers). When we did use cream as a preventative measure, we used a flushable liner to protect the diaper.
My diapers don't work anymore! What do I do?
If you find that your diaper is repelling or leaking, it means you have buildup in your diaper. It means you have to strip the diapers. One of the most common recommendations you will read online is to use a tiny bit of original Dawn to wash the diapers and then rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse, rinse until there are no bubbles left. (This is done on the diaper you've already washed because you don't want to strip poopy diapers!).
Thanks so much for contributing to the Tiny TreeHugger blog Sheryl!
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