My Cloth Diaper Wash Routine

Raise your hand if you hate doing laundry…

I despise it. Like to the point where John often has to go to the dryer for clean socks or underwear. Or the basket that has been stuffed with three full loads of clean clothes.

Surprisingly enough though, I actually really enjoy doing diaper laundry.

Before I started using cloth diapers, I swore up and down that having to wash poopy diapers was more of a hassle than it was worth. Now, with my cloth diaper wash routine down, I have clean diapers all the time, with out having to spend a cent on buying them weekly.

Living on base was a huge part of the reason that I finally made the switch to cloth. Since we don’t pay for electric or water I don’t have to worry about diaper laundry costing me anything extra. Most people swear that they haven’t noticed a change in their utilities bills when cloth diapering though.

Anyway… Getting clean diapers may be much easier than you think. Believe me, if my laundry hating self can do it, I think anyone can. I wouldn’t be cloth diapering if it was a ton of extra work, and after a year and a half at it, I still love it!

Cloth Diaper Wash Routine

I do diaper laundry once every four or five days. There are about 25 BumGenius Freetimes in my stash, so I wash when I start to run low (about two clean diapers left). Juli probably get’s changed 5-6 times a day and I don’t change her overnight.

I start with the dirty diapers straight from the pail. I use a plastic trash can with a lid from Walmart, and a washable pail liner. Pee diapers get tossed directly into the pail after a diaper change. Poopy diapers get dumped as best as possible into the toilet ( I don’t rinse or dunk), then into the pail.

Rinse

For the rinse I use cold water on the largest setting with a scoop of powdered Tide, to the first line. I set the machine to the rinse cycle and let it run completely.

Mixed in with the diapers are cloth wipes and usually some clothes or a towel or blanket. The pail liner gets flipped inside out and tossed in as well. It’s important that everything have space to move in the machine, but also that it’s rubbing up against other pieces.

Wash

Following the rinse, I start a heavy duty wash cycle with hot water on the largest setting. I add another scoop of Tide, this time, filled up to the third line, for heavily soiled objects. Most of the time I also add a quarter cup of Borax and a quarter cup of Washing Soda. Homemade laundry detergent isn’t recommended, since there isn’t any real detergent in it.  Every once in a while I’ll throw some bleach into the mix, but it isn’t necessary to do every wash. The wash cycle on my machine does the hot wash followed by one cold rinse.

Rinse

Most people don’t recommend a second rinse following the wash, but considering all the soap that goes into cleaning the diapers, I feel better about adding another rinse to make sure all the chemicals are washed away.

On my mom’s washing machine, there is a setting for two rinses, but since we have a cheap machine, I have to go back and manually turn the dial to the rinse cycle.

Dry

Depending on the time, I do one of two things to dry the diapers. Normally, I take them out to the back yard to sun and dry them. You’d be amazed at what the sun does to stains. They vanish! If I’m short on time and need diapers now or if there’s no sun out, I toss the diapers straight from the washer into the dryer. I dry them as I would and regular laundry, but you have to be careful not to stretch the elastics while they’re still hot.