Taking Care of Your Cloth Diapers

Your bundle of joy (or too cute toddler) is absolutely adorable in their cloth diapers, but how do you keep those cloth diapers cute? A very wise thing I read once on Diaper Swappers was something along the lines of, “Stop treating your diapers like precious gold, and instead treat them for what they are: poop covered clothing.”

Of course, we want our diapers to last a long time, especially given the financial investment you put into them! Here’s some tips to keep them fresh, and lasting a long time:

Wash as often as you can handle. You definitely don’t need to wash every day, but the less time your diapers sit before being washed, the easier it is to get them clean. My wash routine is about every three days, then in the washing machine I do a rinse, wash, and extra rinse.

Pre-rinse before putting them in your diaper pail. I always rinse my diapers by hand before putting them in my Diaper Champ. I still do a prerinse before the actual wash in the washing machine, but this way urine isn’t seeping into my diapers and covers for a couple days.

Avoid machine drying anything you can. I dry my diapers because I just don’t want diapers hanging in my basement, making my 1970’s basement even more creepy and musty, though hang drying them helps them last the longest. The best way to dry your diapers is in the sun. The sun is great at getting out stains like you wouldn’t believe! Typically your covers are going to be far more expensive than your diaper inserts, so I always hang dry my covers on one of these Ikea hangers.

Use covers more than once, if you can. The only two types of diapers that you can’t do this with are the AIO (all-in-one) and pocket diapers. For all the other types of diapers you can rinse the cover, assuming there’s no poo on it, and hang dry it to use later. I use each of my covers twice before putting them in the diaper pail with everything else. When I got all my inserts to the newer Grovia inserts with the TPU backing, I may up this to 3 uses until washing.

The larger the stash, the longer each diaper lasts. Of course, if you aren’t washing each diaper every other day, they are going to last longer. One could argue that it doesn’t actually save any money to buy extra diapers instead of just replacing a few as they wear out. The main advantage is you can buy a set of diapers and not have to think about buying more diapers until at least one more kid, or possibly two!

Hope this helps you keep those diapers clean, and lasting a long time! What other tips or questions do you have?