Well, it's taken me a while to write this... and to admit it to myself. I so wanted to use cloth diapers, I wanted to love it, I wanted it to work for us. And it fact I did use them, I did love it... but it didn't work for us. I tried about a million different ways of washing the diapers, and they never smelled quite clean. I tried more detergent, I tried less, I tried extra washes, extra rinses, stripping... I tried everything. Maybe it is because we have a high-efficiency washer, but something just isn't working for us. C will have the diaper on for a short time and there will be an extremely strong urine smell. Then I take it off and his little bottom is all pink. I can tell a rash will develop soon if I continue with the cloth, so I put on a disposable and he's all cleared up. I don't know why they are irritating him, but I can't have that. My main reason for wanting to use cloth was so that C would be comfortable, but he's not if they are irritating him. So, I will be selling my cloth diaper stash. Hopefully I can sell them easily since they were only used for a total of like 2 months.
Anyway, I believe I posted before about how little disposables actually cost us because of my coupon shopping and finding deals, so when you consider how much water (and money) I am probably wasting by trying to get the cloth diapers clean... it makes more sense to give up :( Any suggestions would be great, but I just don't know if it's going to work out for us.
3 comments:
I throw our inserts into a wash with some bleach....just make sure that there aren't any covers/wetbags with PUL in with it as bleach will eat away the plastic coating... I do that about once a month or so and it takes care of most of our issue I've found, we use a lot of prefolds and AI2's so it's mainly the inserts and such that are right next to our babe's skin and they can be bleached occasionally to help with the ammonia issue. Hope that helps.
The type of detergent you are washing with can make the biggest difference. Rockin Green is the best for Cloth diapering.Check out their website at rockingreensoap.com. They have a great FAQ's section and on their facebook page have very helpful people willing to answer questions.
good luck
I struggled with stink like that for a while, too - ammonia burn all the time! first time, I ended up throwing away the diapers (they were well over 2 years old). Second set of diapers, I've been using Rockin' Green hard rock with some success. I have to rock a soak more frequently. I also have an HE front loader.
Some other things you might try - soaking the inserts only in oxyclean, sunning (even if it's rainy! check out the knickernappies blog), and possibly switching to something like Tide - I know it's not commonly recommended, and I've never tried it, but apparently it works well for a lot of people. Just be aware that it might impact warranty. If you have a diaper sprayer, you could try rinsing out every single diaper before putting it into the pail - that can help prevent ammonia from building up to start with.
Also, you could just take a break for a few weeks/months, and come back to it. I found that my children's urine changed over time, causing bad stink for a few weeks, and then it resolved itself.
good luck! remember - cloth diapers is not a hill to die on - if you decide to use disposables, it's not the end of the world.
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