Overview
The diaper challenge described here: http://dirtydiaperlaundry.com/take-the-flats-and-handwashing-challenge-may-23-30/ really resonated with me. I always wonder why people really short of money don't use cloth diapers. Disposables seem like an endless drain and I can understand the temptation to leave them on a little longer -- I did it (although not to an extreme) when I've used them. But it's not that simple -- laundry isn't nearly-free for everyone and cloth diapers have to come from somewhere. The challenge puts everything together to see what it would really be like to wash without a machine using the cheapest diapers possible. We’re at the family cabin, which has iffy plumbing and no laundry available. In the past, I’ve gone to the laundromat in town every 3-4 days when we’ve had a child in diapers. I would use every diaper we own to go as long as possible, then wash everything in the biggest washing machine. I think it cost about $4 to wash and a dollar or two to dry. So to use cloth diapers and machine wash them while on vacation cost us about $10 for the week and about 5 hours including driving time. It hasn’t been too big an ordeal – there’s a playground across the street and one of us would bring the kids there while the other dealt with the washing. If we’d used disposables, there would be the cost of the diapers themselves, then the cost of throwing them away – we have to haul our garbage home or pay $4/bag to drop them off at the general store.
This year, I borrowed 2 dozen flats and about a dozen preemie prefolds from a friend. I have an additional dozen regular/premium prefolds and 8 fitteds. My plan was to use a fitted each night. During the day, I’d use a flat, possibly doubled up with a second flat or a preemie prefold. The regular prefolds were mostly backup in case I bailed on the challenge. At home we use the regular prefolds (I have 2 dozen) and Trimsies medium and large fitteds (I have 20) with Mother-Ease AirFlow and Thirsties PUL covers for my 19 pound 11 month old. Most of the medium fitteds will be outgrown before too long and if using flats goes well, I’d consider getting flats instead of more large fitteds.
I don’t expect to keep hand-washing after the week is over but if I like flats, I would be able to hang diapers to air dry – I don’t like how crunchy fitteds and prefolds feel after they are hung to dry so on nice summer days, my diapers are the only load of laundry I put in the dryer. Since I have about 40 diapers in my rotation, I usually only have to wash diapers every 3-4 days. Washing daily will be something to get used to.
Days 0, 1, and 2
The day before I started the challenge was the day we drove to the cabin. I did my last load of diaper laundry in mid-afternoon. Tim went through a couple prefolds before I switched him into a disposable for the drive and overnight.
On Saturday, I switched to flats. I found that just one flat with no doubler got pretty soaked – enough to leak out onto his clothes through a cover once – even though I was trying to change him promptly. Folding the flats wasn’t too big a deal, although I did need to remember to fold them before lying the wiggly baby down. I used the origami fold and began using either a folded flat or a preemie prefold down the middle for extra absorbency. That gave it some extra bulk, but not much more than my standard regular prefold or fitted with cover.
By evening, I figured I’d wash the diapers once Tim pooped, which he hadn’t done since I washed Friday afternoon. He never did, so eventually I decided I might as well wait until the next day when drying them in the sun would be faster anyway. I ended up changing his diaper twice overnight when he kept waking, so I used a fitted and two prefolds.
Sunday we went to church and did some errands in town (and he still hadn’t pooped), so it was 3pm before I washed the diapers. I’d brought a 5 gallon bucket and detergent and used the plunger and the single rubber glove I was able to find.
I tried putting all the diapers in the bucket, but after a day and a half, there were too many to allow them to agitate well, so I took a few out. I ended up washing 14 wipes, 3 preemie prefolds, 5 regular prefolds, 8 flats, and a fitted. It would have been better to wash fewer, especially if I’d had poopy ones to deal with.
I agitated the diapers for 5 minutes in cold water with a little detergent, dumped that water out, put in hot water (a mix of cold leftover, a pot of almost-boiling from the stove and a pot of hot tap water) and a little more detergent and agitated those for 5 minutes. Then I dumped out that water and put clean cold water in for another 5 minutes of agitating. Then I dumped out the water, wrung out the diapers, and hung them on the line. They didn’t smell like much of anything (although they did still smell of pee as I dumped out the hot water).
Hand-washing in a bucket is not something I would do in nice clothes. My legs and arms got splashed. The baby cried because I wouldn’t let him play in the water and he was desperate to nurse. I was pretty tempted to jump in the lake when I was done but the cranky baby was calling so I just washed all my limbs with soap. The whole process took 30-40 minutes.
So far, hand-washing seems pretty annoying and time consuming. At the cabin, we have more time and less to do, so spending an hour washing diapers is feasible, but at home I’d have a lot of other things I’d rather do. And I haven’t had to deal with poop yet. I do find that I’m putting the baby on the potty more often than I would at home in hopes of avoiding an extra diaper to wash. We’ve quasi-EC’d both Tim and Leo, mainly putting them on the potty after waking up or if we noticed they were dry after a long chunk of time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Now that Tim’s eating more solids, I’m more inspired to catch poop in hopes of sparing myself a disgusting clean-up.
Of course, Tim pooped almost immediately after I finished washing the diapers. I’d brought a rubber spatula to aid in scraping poop into the toilet, which helped a little. I decided I’d rather prewash the poopy diaper than have it get the rest of the diapers dirtier, so I put the diaper, messy cover, and wipes I’d used into the bucket and half-filled it with hot tap water and agitated them for a few minutes. I dumped out that water and rinsed them a bit before putting them in the diaper wetbag. I plan to wash again in the morning before accumulating too many more to clean. Right now, this seems like too much work to do on a regular basis, but I probably would for the one week a year we’re here instead of going to the laundromat.
Day 3
The prefolds and fitted were finally dry in the morning, 18 hours later. On a calm day in mostly shade, the flats took 2 hours, the 2-layer wipes took 5 hours, and the prefolds and fitted were barely dry by morning.
Tim pooped again first thing in the morning and I prewashed that one as I had the day before. Then I washed all the diapers I’d accumulated using the same approach, maybe taking a little longer and being more thorough because I was dealing with poopy diapers this time. When I went to dump the hot dirty water into the toilet, I used a gloved hand to remove the diapers first to prevent any from pouring into the toilet. I fished around a second time to make sure I hadn’t missed any but as I dumped out the bucket, I’m fairly sure I saw a wipe slide out.
The cabin toilet has been barely functional for a long time – we don’t put toilet paper in it to avoid clogs. But this year, we’d needed to add another big bucket of water every time we had to flush solids. So you’d think that if I went fishing for a wipe in the bowl, I’d be able to get it out. But no. The toilet eats wipes but nothing else. I tried plunging it a few times before I got the nerve to tell Dan what I’d done. He was able to get the toilet to flush, but with even more difficulty than before. At that point, he asked if I would please stop washing poopy diapers in buckets. I agreed.
The two big problems were the time it took up and the yuckiness of the dirty water. 30+ minutes for washing plus 15 minutes for each poopy diaper became a lot even for a vacation where we have no demands whatsoever for our time. I asked Dan if he’d be okay with a new approach – I would put anything poopy into one wetbag and all the wet stuff in another. Once I ran low on clean diapers and wipes, I would wash all the wet supplies in the bathtub. I’d save the dirty diapers for either the llaundromat or until we got home (on day 8). If too many covers got pooped on, we’d need to go to the laundromat. I brought 7 covers. My theory was that washing lots of diapers wouldn’t take much longer than washing one day’s worth and would probably be easier to spread them out and agitate them. I wouldn’t have to worry about getting poopy water everywhere. Finding places to dry them all might become difficult on our one clothesline here (I have a big clothesline and an indoor drying rack at home), but I could do the flats in shifts if necessary since they dry so quickly. Although I’m no longer following the challenge exactly, I could see someone doing this if necessary – washing by hand 2-3 times a week and bringing the accumulated dirty ones to a laundromat once a week with the rest of their clothes. I’d dump the poop into a toilet first like I did, but I do that once a baby’s on solids no matter where I wash diapers. The biggest hurdle would be having enough diapers, but receiving blankets and old t-shirts can be converted into flats without a sewing machine or accumulated over time. I believe the good ones are a dollar or two each purchased new. 3 dozen flats of some sort should be enough to last half a week. But hand-washing daily seems to be too much to ask of anyone.
Day 4
No washing today. Still lots of diapers, wipes, and covers available to use. Now that I’m trying to make the diapers last as long as possible, I’m using single flats for the most part and it hasn’t been a problem. Tim must have had a couple really heavy pees when I tried it and he got soaked before. At night I either use two flats or a prefold.
Day 5
No washing.
Day 6
I was down to my last few flats and although I could have switched to primarily prefolds and fitteds, three days’ between washing seemed like a good place to stop before I ran out of places to dry them. There are only 3 dirty diapers in the second wet bag but I’m ignoring them for now.
Instead of using the bucket, I put all the diapers in the bathtub and filled it with cool water until they were covered. I added some detergent to both the first cold wash and the following hot water. I found that agitating with my feet was easier than with the plunger (in either the tub or the bucket like I had previously). I could stand up straight and even had Tim in the Ergo on my back to keep him out of the way. I was able to move them around a lot and felt like they were probably better-agitated.
For the hot wash, I used the hot tap and a pot of almost-boiling water. I went back to the plunger for the first few minutes until it cooled down a bit.
When I drained the hot wash, I tried to squish the water out of the diapers to make sure as much detergent-water got washed out as possible. Then I covered them with clean cold water and agitated by foot again.
It took 10 minutes for each round, with 5 minutes of agitating and 5 minutes of draining and refilling. As I drained the cold water, I wrung each thing out and put them in the bucket to hang outside. I was able to fit most of it on the line and used the picnic table edge at the end. From beginning to end, it took an hour to wash and hang them.
With 3+ days of washing, I had 13 flats, 8 prefolds, 1 fitted, 21 wipes, and all 6 PUL covers. The dirty wetbag probably has 2 flats, a prefold, a cover, and a dozen wipes in it. For me at least, it appears that I could use 2 dozen diapers and expect to go 3 days without washing.
It was breezier today and the flats were dry when I came back to check on them 3 hours later along with the wipes. The prefolds were dry within 8 hours when I ran outside to get them as it started raining at 11pm. The fitted wasn’t dry yet.
Day 7
Our last full day at the cabin. I kept using mostly flats plus a few prefolds.
Day 8
I used flats and prefolds until we left at 3pm, when I put Tim in a disposable to hopefully sleep for most of the car ride home. His nap only lasted half an hour. I switched him to a new disposable at 6:30 when we stopped to eat. We got home an hour later and he wore fitteds and disposables until the next morning.
Day 9
In mid-afternoon, I did my last hand-washing in our tub. It included most of 3 days’ worth of diapers, minus the few disposables from the day before and the poopy ones that accumulated. I skipped the boiling water, just using hot from the tap for the second round. The wash included 9 flats, 3 preemie prefolds, 10 regular prefolds, 3fitteds, and 34 wipes. I was able to hang them on our sunny clothesline on a hot day in the wind. The flats were dry when I came back in an hour, along with the wipes in direct sunlight. Clouds came in at that point and I ended up having to bring the prefolds and fitteds inside to dry when a storm threatened.
Afterthoughts
I like flats, at least the pretty tie-dyed ones I borrowed. I like the versatility and the super-fast drying without crunchiness is great. Line-dried prefolds are so stiff that I have a hard time fastening them well. My velour fitteds are less soft air-dried but not as annoying as the prefolds. If I get flats, I suspect I’ll use them a lot when the weather’s nice but skip them in the winter when I rarely line-dry.
I found that I didn’t necessarily reach for my fitteds at nighttime, I’d just double up on flats and that was sufficient. I wouldn’t knowingly use a single flat (at least origami-folded as I used them this week) if I knew I wouldn’t be able to change the baby right after he peed, but a second flat or any sort of doubler would be fine.
Hand-washing I’m glad to be done with. It wasn’t too bad when I took the poopy diapers out and only washed every three days, but I want my washing machine to take care of the poopy ones for me. For me, if I had to choose between leaving disposables on way too long or using flats and handwashing, I’d find a washing machine to deal with the poop once a week and handwash the rest as infrequently as able based on the size of my diaper stash. Although I had more than 5 covers, I never had more than 2 pooped on simultaneously and could have gotten by with 5 without problems.
