Water Water Everywhere!

If you read the last post, you'll know that our battle against diaper rash has caused an escalation of unguent. Since the heavy-duty creams are harder to wash out of the diapers (though they have succeeded in staving off the rash), I have had to "break down" the diapers - meaning wash the s*** (literally and metaphorically) out of them. I do this by using a hot wash or two. That works pretty well.

I have been washing the diapers on cold only - heated water being the second-most energy intensive part of cloth diapering next to heated drying. So I tried an experiment - not to break down the grease film, but to expand the time between break-downs.

Normally after a cold wash in a small amount of water (adequate for the entire first 9 months at least) a film, or ring of diaper-grease would form around the inside of the wash at the top of the water line. The cold water couldn't keep the residue dissolved until it drained - so it stuck to the washer instead (as far as I know, the inside of the drain pipes look like Dick Cheney's femoral artery...). This film was also indicative of what was left on the fibers of the diapers.

There are two ways to increase the carrying capacity of the water to dissolve the solution: increase the temperature of the solution, or increase the amount of water. So I'm experimenting with washing the diapers in the next-higher water setting. Seems to work so far - no ring around the washtub.

Of course, which of these methods you use might depend on where you live. If you live in an arid area, but you have access to passive solar - use hot water from the roof! If you live in a cold area (like me) with more water than you know what to do with - and you have to heat it with $3.50/gallon #2 heating oil - it makes sense to try using a little more cold water.

Hope that was refreshing!

Tao of Poo

Funny thing about having a kid, a job, and another blog: you don't get much time to write (or reflect).

Mr. Whippersnapper is nigh on 14 months now. Much has changed - especially the consistency of his poo - which, now that he is eating more human food, is more like the kind of poo you step in on the sidewalks of NYC than the innocuous cheezy custard of his early months.

Current solution for removing sticky, sat-in poo from a diaper: old rubber spatula in a jar behind the john. Works pretty well. I'm still laundering the same way more or less: less line drying (hard to time everything out with the job and the sunny days). Mobile kids also eat up more time and 14-month-olds are awake a lot more, so that's even more of a jam.

The sticky older baby poo also seems to increase diaper rash problems, which requires the use of more heavy-duty cream - I use A&D Ointment - a combo of lanolin and vaseline, basically - for the base layer, and then a thick paste of off-brand Desitin - essentially 40% strength zinc oxide.

It helps.

I've also virtually eliminated the bowl of warm water at this point. The frequent wetting and rubbing of the bum exacerbated the rash problem. Instead, in the event of a poo, I use off-brand scentless, alcohol-free wipes (note: these say "flushable", but I accidentally put one through the wash, and it came out in perfect condition. Wouldn't flush these if you really care about your plumbing - definitely a no-no if you're on septic).

After the wipes, I smear on gob of A&D which works like a make-up remover and odor-eliminator. I wipe some of that off and then apply the zinc cream. I have to do this pretty much every time because he's a pretty regular kid, and you never know when he'll drop the bomb.

If he pees and things look pretty good, I just reapply some ointment and cream and go with it. That seems to cause less damage than all the cleaning.

The use of the heavier creams has made the laundry a little scummier, which brings me to the title of the post. Rather than subscribing to some formula for getting things clean, listen to your diapers. Watch your washer. They are telling you a story about poo and goo. Go with the flow - use different amounts of soap, switch between hot and cold water if you think it's necessary. Don't wash your wife's pretty things right after the diapers.

If you can, line-dry. It's still the best energy saver and smell-and-stain remover.

May the poo be with you. Always.

1.19 x 10^57 atoms pack a lot of cleaning power

Bleach. HA!

Hot water. HA! HA!

Dryer? meh.

Check out the awesome atomic power of our own sun!
This is a cloth cotton diaper stained with poop. I washed it in cold water with 7th Generation liquid and some vinegar. This picture is post-wash just after I hung it up.


Then I hung it in the sun. Not even the direct sun. It was pretty overcast, but bright. Below is the result.


It hung out there for about 5 hours. During that five hours, I did other things while the atomic power of the sun did its thing. It's too bad my cell phone can't record smells because a line dried diaper should have its own cologne. Maybe I'll pitch it to J-Lo.

Save your money, save the planet. Line dry some stuff.

Unctuousness

Isn't that a great word. It means a lot of things, (like insincere) but it also means "oily."

Whippersnapper has developed a stubborn rash, and so we're trying on some different diaper creams. We used to use some olive oil based balm from a great place in the St. Lawrence river valley (which smells great and works very well on garden variety diaper rash. It also came in handy for use on cradle cap, various dry spots, and dad's hands and cuticles).

We used Burt's Bees Diaper Cream and some regular old petroleum jelly. In response to the rash, we've upped the ante, using the goo more liberally, and we also starting using Bordeaux's Butt Paste. I just did a load of diapers after adding to our arsenal, and for the first time, there was an unctuous (but very sincere) ring around the inside of our washer.

It doesn't look too bad, but if it persists, I might have to find a solution. My first response was to get an old rag and wipe away the ring of oily stuff from inside the washer before it got too thick.

I'll post again about whether this becomes a persistent problem and if I discover any cheap, friendly solutions to it.

Also, as soon as I find my adapter, I'm going to post the awesomest before/after photo of a lined dried diaper that will convince you that bleach and heavy detergent is totally useless compared to the awesome atomic power of the Sun.

How do you keep a fish from smelling?

...Cut off its nose...

The offspring will be four months old tomorrow. During his first month, he was very small, and we were a little under-prepped for cloth diapering. We didn't start until he was 1 month old.

In my last post, I exhorted the efficacy of cold-water washing. I remember now, I left out a point - I wash on cold, but I use the "heavy soil" cycle so the diapers really get agitated. (They calm down again before we use them.)

In the last few days, I've noticed the offspring developing a pretty strong urine smell when he pees even a little, and after the last cold/cold wash, I noticed that a general baby-diaper smell was starting to accumulate and not go away so much in the diapers after the wash.

Today, I threw everything in for a hot wash with a tiny amount of Borax to break down some of the odors and stains. I'll see if that doesn't help with the accumulating urine odor. Keep in mind, that this is a single hot wash after three months of use - and all the diapers and butt rags are in there.

If you're trying to save on water or energy, and you mix in a hot wash every now and then, think about other ways to save energy and water:

• Are all your toilets low-flow? If not, a new toilet is only about $100 and very simple to install. If you can change a bike tire and connect a garden hose to a sprinkler, you have the skills to replace your toilet.
• Do you have CFL bulbs in all commonly-used lamps?
• Got night lights? How about LED night lights instead?
• How about a low-flow shower head (appx 1.5 gallons per minute)? Mine has a shot-off valve on the shower head, and I turn it on the get wet and to rinse, and off to lather up. (TMI?) Anyway, it save a lot of water!
  

And so on. I'll let you know if the hot-wash does the trick on the urine smell, or if the kid is just developing an odor internally.

Running Hot and Cold

NOTE: At the moment of writing, the little bugger is 100% breastfed, which has a certain mitigating effect on the condition and odor of the waste product.

I did a lot of reading about what would get diapers clean. I read about rinsing in the toilet, I read about a hot rinse in the washer, then a full cycle of hot wash, hot rinse, I read some stuff about vinegar and Borax and other hippie-type cleaning agents.

Here's what I did.

First, I washed with hot, rinsed with hot. I used 7th Generation laundry soap. I read complaints somewhere about residue and reduced absorption, but I haven't seen it. I added 1 cup of vinegar to the wash cycle, and another cup into the fabric softener cup. I read about adding vinegar in the rinse to remove odors, and I was doing that with regular laundry anyway.

I thought what a drag to have to go down there and figure out when it was rinsing, so I studied the mechanism in the softener dispenser and discovered that it only came out during spin cycles, which would work fine.

I also added about 1/4 of Borax to the wash. Borax is bauxite. It's mined. It's not man-made, so the hippies dig it, but it's still not good to eat or put in your eye. Bauxite undergoes a mild reaction in water and generates some H2O2 - hydrogen peroxide - which is a very mild bleaching agent. Bauxite also has a tendency to leave behind some alkaloids in the fabric, which cause rash pretty effectively.

The bauxite, hot water combo makes your diapers pretty stain free - sans chlorine.

I wash the diapers on the "Small" load selection to conserve water.

I dried the diapers on hot. They came out fluffy and soft.

Then I read the British LCA on cloth "nappies" and found that the best way to lower the carbon footprint of your diapers was to hang them dry. Now I do that. They're a little crunchy, but nobody minds.

Then I started washing the diapers in hot and rinsing them in cold. I cut down on the amount of Borax to ease the rash. They still came out really clean and smelled pretty good.

I also tried reducing the wash load to "Extra Small" - but that wasn't enough rinse water to get the soap out of the diapers. Back to "Small."

I then tried cold wash cold rinse. Got rid of the Borax (still with the rash). Now the diapers have noticeably dark stains and a very subtle, but not unpleasant, odor when they come out of the wash. By the time they're dry, the odor is gone and they smell pretty much like nothing.

I don't rinse them at all before putting them in the wash. This may change when we introduce some solids. I'm looking forward to better weather, when the UV rays can bleach and odor-eliminate for me. I hear that works quite well.