How to Get Started with Cloth Diapers

A Family article with View Comments posted 22 March 2009.
Tags: anneliese, cheap, chemicals, cloth diapers, diapers, environment, howto

Anneliese wearing a cloth diaper

Jennifer and I decided that we wanted to use cloth diapers for Anneliese, but if you look it up online, there is a huge variety of information. Some of it is contradictory, and all of it is confusing. So after having waded through the morass of hype, spin, misinformation, and genuinely useful stuff, I decided to put together a “how to get started” guide for cloth diapers that would skip the crud and just tell people what to buy. I’m not getting any money from the companies involved.

Our primary concerns were, in order, cost, re-usability, and environmental impact. What we’ve purchased is mostly the bare minimum: we’re home all the time, have easy access to our own laundry facilities, we don’t use daycare, etc. If your circumstances don’t match, you might need to buy more, less, or different stuff than what is listed here. This isn’t necessarily the best, cheapest, or most appropriate list – it’s just the list of stuff we did. I hope it’s helpful. Your Mileage May Vary, Offer Not Valid In Nebraska, etc.

Diapers
We bought 2 dozen orange-trimmed (smallest) and 2 dozen yellow-trimmed (next smallest) 4-8-4 unbleached Egyptian Indian cotton prefolds from Green Mountain Diapers. We pre-handwashed them with dish soap, then washed and dried them 5 times to break them in. For covers, we bought 5 extra-small and 5 small Thirsties diaper covers from Nicki’s Diapers. This will cover us up to 15 pounds or so. We also bought two wool soakers, but we haven’t used them much yet. The four Bum Genius All-in-ones we got are really handy in a pinch, and we think we’ll use them with babysitters who are unaccustomed to cloth diapering, but they’re extremely pricey.

Diaper accessories
To hold the diapers on, we got 8 Dritz metal-head diaper pins from Nicki’s Diapers. We might pick up more soon – several sites say that Dritz doesn’t make the metal pins anymore, and they’re great. We bought 2 Planetwise diaper pail liners and 2 Planetwise dirty diaper bags from Nicki’s as well. For a diaper pail we took our diaper pail liner to Lowes and picked up a step-open trash can that fit well.

Wipes
We just buy Huggies Natural Care from Target. They don’t stink like a lot of wipes do, they have aloe, and they are chlorine free. They’re not terribly much more expensive than normal wipes, too.

Laundry
We originally were going to use our normal All Free & Clear on the diapers, but while that product is free of perfumes, dyes, enzymes, chlorine, etc. (in fact, much more so than Dreft), it does have optical brighteners. Brighteners can make fabric less water absorbent, so All Free & Clear isn’t the best choice for diapers. It was also expensive – $0.181 per load. Instead, we bought 40 pounds of Country Save detergent from Amazon – free shipping! Country Save does an excellent job, has no icky additives or brighteners, rinses cleaner than most detergents, and in general is a great product. Cost per load was about $0.089 when we were buying it. We’ll occasionally add Oxy-Clean to our diaper loads, but an extra rinse is needed to get that completely out of the diapers before drying. The diaper covers and diaper pail liners dry well on a clothesline or drying rack, and they’ll hold up a lot better that way in the long run.

Other Tips
Dunking diapers in the toilet has got to be awful. We were very fortunate to have my dad build a powerful diaper sprayer and attach it directly to the toilet’s water supply. I’ve read that these can be purchased online, and they are really really handy. I don’t bother wringing them out before throwing them in the diaper pail, although we do keep a “dry pail.” We don’t have any problems with staining or odors that the Oxy-Clean doesn’t seem to handle.

Our total cash outlay for our initial purchases was about $300, and we expect to spend another $300 or so before Anneliese is toilet trained. That’s cheap, and fortunately, many of these items are reusable for more children. I hope you found this guide helpful – please let me know what you think in the comments section (especially if you follow it).