Washing Diapers

There are about as many opinions on washing cloth diapers as there are opinions on the diapers themselves. In general, we do a cold soak or wash without detergent. This helps to avoid creating any stains. Then we follow up with a hot wash cycle with detergent and a cold rinse. Then we dry on low heat or line dry.

Following are step-by-step details on our washing routine and we have not experienced any problems with staining or functionality. Please see How Many Diapers and How We Cloth Diaper for our daily routine of arriving at a hanging diaper pail filled with a day`s worth of dirty pocket diapers.

To wash we take the hanging diaper pail to the washing machine and turn it inside out, emptying the dirty diapers, inserts and wipes into the washer. We then throw the hanging diaper bag in and wash that too.

Our washing machine doesn’t have a rinse/soak cycle so we do the following:
1. cold/cold wash without an extra rinse – no detergent
2. hot/cold wash with an extra rinse – with detergent
We alternate between Allen`s Naturally and Purex free and only use half of the recommended amount of detergent.
3. dry on low heat
We have found that dryer balls greatly decrease drying time.
4. hang on a line outside for sunning
We typically do this about two times a week. However we did not always have a line so for the entire first year of diapering this was not in my routine.