Cloth diapers - not all they're cracked up to be?

[LD_TAndK]

~~~ Premise ~~~
I don't think the vigor with which friends, family, and the internet have proselytized cloth diapers matches with reality.

~~~ Cost ~~~
Walmart brand disposables range from .10 to .17 cents per diaper, say an average of .14. We use about 12 a day so it'd cost $1.68 a day or $615 a year.

Let's say you inherited your cloth diapers for free (I did, but looking up the full set of green mountain diapers I have it probably cost over $400 with accessories)

We run loads of 24 diapers so we'd have to do about 180 loads a year. As a very conservative estimate let's say it costs us $1 per load (we wash on hot + extra rinse + add oxyclean to get the stink out) (we don't own a dryer which would bump the cost even higher).

So best case scenario you get your diapers for free and you do laundry super cheap so you do 180 loads of laundry to save $435 a year. Doesn't seem like a great deal.

~~~ Environment ~~~
Stuff in landfills doesn't matter, carbon emissions DO matter.

It's hard to find exact numbers but one study I looked at came out to .2 lbs CO2 per disposable. That comes to 876 lbs CO2 per year for us or the equivalent of 44 gallons of gasoline.

Emissions from doing laundry vary wildly but the point is the amount of emissions prevented vs the labor required has to be vanishingly small, if not possibly negative for the most wasteful launderers.

~~~ Conclusion ~~~
Cloth diapers are definitely cheaper and usually better for the environment. If you're a hardcore environmentalist penny pincher who does cloth exclusively I salute you, but it's hardly a slam dunk (I still do about half cloth anyways).

[GuitarStv]

We tried to do cloth diapers exclusively, but ended up doing about 50-50.  I didn't think they were all that impressive either when running the numbers but thought I might have been adding things up wrong.

You need to change cloth diapers much more often than disposables, they're more difficult to put on the kid than disposables, they're gigantic in size so you might find that clothing doesn't fit properly when using them, they take more time and time is precious when you've got a baby, and we had more problems with diaper rash when using them.  And most daycares just refuse to deal with them, so you'll be using disposables anyway eventually, which seems to be when most parents give up entirely on cloth diapers.

They were good in that (if perfectly put on the kid) they seemed to leak slightly less, they have to be better for chemical exposure, and it makes me happy to add less to landfills and reduce microplastics being spread around our planet.

[RFAAOATB]

My conclusion after our attempts with cloth diapers is that they are for people so poor they need the money savings or people so rich they hire help for the nannying and laundry.

[Freedomin5]

We used them about half the time. Basically, we used them when we were home and used disposables when we were out because I wasn’t about to carry a giant, bulky, stinky, poopy diaper in my bag for hours on the subway/bus or in the park or restaurant. The idea of cloth diapers is nice, but sometimes they’re just not practical.

[Bartlebooth]

Walmart brand disposables range from .10 to .17 cents per diaper, say an average of .14. We use about 12 a day so it'd cost $1.68 a day or $615 a year.

I thought your prices were about 1/2 of what I pay and not plausible.  Turns out Costco's Kirkland diapers are not very cheap.  Size three for example: Kirkland is $0.20 and Parent's Choice is $0.13.  55% more expensive at Costco.  Somebody face-punch me!

My gut says 70% chance that the Costco diapers are superior for whatever reason.  So do I try to get better about comparison-shopping and comparison-testing stuff like this (and convince DW to play along) or just accept the price of laziness and mostly better-quality goods?

[economista]

Walmart brand disposables range from .10 to .17 cents per diaper, say an average of .14. We use about 12 a day so it'd cost $1.68 a day or $615 a year.

I thought your prices were about 1/2 of what I pay and not plausible.  Turns out Costco's Kirkland diapers are not very cheap.  Size three for example: Kirkland is $0.20 and Parent's Choice is $0.13.  55% more expensive at Costco.  Somebody face-punch me!

My gut says 70% chance that the Costco diapers are superior for whatever reason.  So do I try to get better about comparison-shopping and comparison-testing stuff like this (and convince DW to play along) or just accept the price of laziness and mostly better-quality goods?

I also found that the costco brand diapers and pullups were more expensive than the Target brand or LUVS from Target. We tried cloth diapers and I did not inherit any and spent a fortune on them and used them maybe 10% of the time. We actually had an alarm set for every 15 minutes on my phone and would check my daughter to see if she was wet so we were essentially immediately changing her and she would still get a rash. She also had a rash anytime we used disposable diapers that I would call "cottony" like pampers, Costco brand, etc. We had to use exclusively LUVS which are much thinner and turn into a gel when they get wet instead of staying fluffy. She was just so sensitive.

[PMG]

I panic bought cloth diapers when pregnant in the middle of the first covid shut downs and diaper shortages! By the time we had a baby the shortages passed and both our jobs were so busy there was no way cloth diapers were feasible! I came to the same conclusion many of you did that it just wasn't worth it. I don't regret having them on hand, it did take a mental weight off to have a back up when so many things were uncertain. 

We used target brand diapers up until they were unable to keep up with overnights, then we switched to Huggies for night time and target brand for daytime. I find the pampers smell so cloying.

And a hot tip, pull-up/training diapers are considered an incontinence tool, and therefore a medical necessity and can be purchased with FSA funds, and if you go thru the FSA stores you can get medical brands which could be a cost saver. I learned this when I left my job midyear and had $3000 in FSA funds to spend in two weeks. We switched to pull ups even though our two year old is not really working on the potty yet (we did try.. but now I've let it go and decided to just go for it when she tells me she's ready). I have a mountain of boxes of pull ups in the basement, so it has definitely taken the financial motivation to start potty-ing away.

[kanga1622]

My kids were 100% cloth diapered once we came home from the hospital (although it's been about 8 years now since we've needed one) and they were a lifesaver for us. Yes, they took more work and we'd sometimes have a few leaks when we had a growth spurt and hadn't adjusted our settings just yet. But we NEVER ran out of diapers. We were very lucky though that our home daycare provider was happy to use cloth as long as we had our pocket diapers all stuffed and ready for her to just snap on.

My kids have very sensitive skin and I react very badly to disposable products so the cloth was much easier to control for all the allergies/contact dermatitis. We probably didn't save a ton of money because we washed a load of diapers every day but I know we saved in reduced creams/copays for rashes. And we are still using the cloth wipes for cleaning purposes.

[PoutineLover]

I used cloth diapers during the day for most of the first year with my first kid, but we had to stop when she started daycare because they didn't change them often enough and she was getting bad rashes. I want to start soon with my second kid, he's probably big enough now.

I got my diapers for really cheap from marketplace so the cost was barely a factor, and most electricity in my province is from renewable sources so it really is the most environmentally friendly option I think. With two kids in diapers we are tossing 2-3 bags of garbage each week so any reduction is a huge plus. More laundry is annoying, but manageable, and I'm home on mat leave anyway.

[Cranky]

I used cloth diapers almost exclusively, back when diaper covers were almost exclusively wool. I split the initial cost with a friend who had a slightly older baby and picked up more covers at the thrift store. I made most of the inserts myself. It worked out to be around one extra load of laundry/week.

I had three kids which really made the start up costs worth it.

In my own observation, kids who are cloth diapered potty train earlier because they are able to connect feeling wet with peeing.

[La Bibliotecaria Feroz]

I had 2 in cloth diapers at one time. At the time we had free utilities with our free housing so it was a no-brainer and probably saved us a ton of money. 7 years after potty training I had another baby. I planned to cloth diaper again but when I went to register for them, I just felt a deep NO well up in my soul.

They smell terrible, did NOT help my boys potty train any earlier (neither was independent until past 3), and I didn't have a good place to store them before washing in my house. And I live in a drought zone. For the amount of trouble that they are, I really wanted them to be an environmental slam dunk... and they just aren't. Experts disagree on the benefits. So we didn't do it that way.

[franklin4]

As part of a naturally frugal family it was no big deal to raise 3 kids using cloth diapers. This was 10-15 years ago so the relatively fancy cloth diapers and not the ones my parents used on me. I want to say the diapers were about $20 each and some were bought cheaper used on craigslist. What the heck, cloth diapers are meant to be reused! With the little kids we were home a lot so time-wise the additional laundry was no big deal. Yes, the disposables seemed to hold more pee and there was probably leakage now and then but no big deal.

As I consider this, I would probably gift my kids cloth diapers if/when they have kids unless they express disinterest but who knows. I do think there's plenty of value in making things last and not buying things and throwing them away. There are many factors to consider!

[Blue Skies]

I used cloth diapers with my kids.  Between them they were in 5 different daycares, none of which had any problem using cloth (pocket diapers, so the easy kind).  No issue with diaper rashes.  I wfh, so the added laundry didn't seem like a big deal.  I enjoyed not having to worry about whether I was running out of yet another thing.

[maisymouser]

I think I spent about $200 or $250 on used cloth diapers when we had our son in 2018. I spent an additional $50 to $60 on liners that proved to be super useful for number twos and basically made the cloth diapering experience viable for us. Throw in an extra $40 for hemp inserts for overnight use and a diaper sprayer attachment for the toilet, and we probably spent less than $400 on cloth diapering.

We didn't do it 100%, definitely leaned on disposable diapers for travel and whatnot, but when I ran the calculations back then I was really pleased that we were saving money.

At the end of the day though, it seems really wasteful to use disposable diapers to me. Not to say that I didn't get use out of them occasionally, but I wouldn't have been able to stomach doing disposables full-time.

[maisymouser]

Oh, and I wanted to make a plug for elimination communication. That eliminated a lot of diapers for us. I also suspect that between elimination communication and cloth diapering, we had a more smooth potty training experience than we would have otherwise.

[MMMarbleheader]

We used them while breastfeeding. Once food was introduced it got nastier and we switched to disposable. Plus one kid you get rashes from peeing in them for some reason. Ah, how much you forget..

[AMandM]

My conclusion after our attempts with cloth diapers is that they are for people so poor they need the money savings or people so rich they hire help for the nannying and laundry.

We cloth diapered our first two (twins), way back in the day, using a diaper service, which is basically hiring out the laundry. We weren't rich (both grad students at the time), but my colleagues gave us six months of diaper service as a shower gift. The diapers were all flats, pinned with actual diaper pins until newfangled clips were introduced, and worn under plastic pants. (Do diaper services still exist? Maybe not, now that cloth diapers are so individualized.)

My aunt, a generation earlier, used cloth diapers on a cross-country camping trip when my cousins were small. Every day she would wash the diapers by hand in a bucket and hang them up to dry overnight. I don't know what happened if it was raining.

[shelivesthedream]

We do the Hovis method: "best of both"! Disposables when they are teeny weeny, then "birth to potty" all in ones when they're a few months old, but only during the day at home (disposables for out and night), then disposables again when they're about two and outgrow the cloth nappies.

It works well for us. But... I'm a SAHM so no nursery to contend with. And we have certainly spent under £100 total on the entire cloth nappy setup (nappies, boosters and liners cost £30 for 30 on Facebook marketplace; two XL wet bags cost about £30 on eBay; I made wipes out of an old sheet; then we probably bought something else I forgot about).

We bought all the nappies for our second baby and had to retire about five by the time we'd finished with our third baby because they weren't waterproof any more. (Bear in mind they'd been through at least one baby before ours!) And in a few months we'll start our fourth baby on them. I suspect I'll get fed up of the toddler poos earlier with this baby so might not use them until he grows out of them, but I imagine we'll spend a solid year on our Hovis regime.

I do think people are too fervent about cloth nappies. They're good but not as good as disposables in terms of absorbency. But they're also not as gross as people like to make out.  And they are widely available used so you really don't need to be spending $400 on them to start with. Plus you can resell if you don't have many kids actually wearing them out.

Part time cloth nappying should be more of a thing.

[Sugaree]

I used cloth exclusively at home, but daycare made me send in diapers and wipes.  I did splurge on a $111 portable washing machine off FB marketplace to be a dedicated diaper machine.  It was plumbed directly into the water heater and sewer line in the bathroom.  That was convenient because we could just use it as a diaper pail until it was time to run it and if there was a smell between wash days a quick rinse would take care of it. I had a small stash of Green Mountains when he was a newborn, but switched to mainly All-in-Twos once he outgrew those.  I think I had 6 covers and 18 inserts for those.  A quick google search tells me that runs about $225 now, and if I'd had him in them full time then I would have needed about twice that.  I was able to use those all the way until he was out of diapers.  Then I sold them to the neighbor.  When I did the math, I figured out that even with the washing machine and having to send disposables to daycare, I broke even when he was about 2.  If we'd had a second kid, then the cost would have been negligible.  But honestly, the best thing to me was the fact that if I was running low on diapers at 10 p.m., I didn't have to leave the house to go buy more.  That was a huge deal, especially that first year.  And I can say that in the whole time we used them, I had exactly one blowout with the cloth, but it was a weekly occurrence with the disposables. 

[cambridgecyclist]

We've used cloth diapers with two kids except for overnight, when we use a disposable.

- We've been given about half of our cloth diapers for free, and most of them were gently used or practically new. We were able to trade in used ones that we didn't want for store credit to purchase higher quality diapers that we prefer.
- We use prefolds and diaper covers that have gussets. The prefolds save a lot of time, and the gussets are critical to preventing blowouts. None of the other variations on cloth diapering (all-in-ones, cheaper covers, unfolded diapers) have proven to be as effective or efficient. I have a slight preference for velcro closures instead of snaps, because they are a little faster and quicker to reposition, but both are fine.
- After practicing the changing technique, and setting up the changing station thoughtfully, diaper changes with a wet diaper take marginally longer than using a disposable (about a minute and a half for a wet diaper, including getting the kid dressed again). Dirty diapers (every other day) take about five minutes; they are easy to manage since we have a spray attachment on the toilet that helps us rinse dirty diapers in the toilet. This saves a lot of mess and time when doing laundry. It's more work to set up your changing station to handle cloth diapers, but once it's set up it saves time.
- We do laundry every three days. Yes, there's more laundry. It doesn't need to be expensive if you make large batches of your own detergent. For smelly loads we add a little enzymatic laundry deodorant.
- Rashes used to be an issue until we started keeping a shaker of cornstarch at the changing table and using it at any sign of a diaper rash.
- We do a diaper change every two hours during the day, and immediately if it's #2 or the kid seems uncomfortable.
- Potty training with our older child started at 2 1/2 and went well with #2 but not so well with #1. I don't know that cloth diapers made any difference here.

[Sanitary Stache]

Cloth Diapers - All that and More!

We cloth diapered three kids in quick sucession.  We did a mix of second hand and bought some brand new from green mountain diaper, which we ended up passing along.

Using some estimates above and some quick google estimates.

Years diapering = 6 (3 kids overlapping and diapering until age 3 for each kid)
initial Diaper cost = $250 ($50/dozen *5 dozen is likely an over estimate)

Laundry cost = 3 wash and dry per week @ 1.5 per run * 52 weeks * 6 years = $1,404

Cost if purchased = $615 per year per kid @ 3 kids for 3 years each = $5,535

Money saved by cloth diapering = $4,131

We also got shop rags out of left over not nice enough to pass along diapers, so another $150 saved.

And we turned free sheets into reusable wipes which, with our new found skill of washing poopy cloth along with remaining reusable diaper bages, we now use as TP exclusively (called "family cloth") for an apporoximate $450/year savings on not buying TP.  An add along benefit of cloth diapering changing our lifetstyle towards higher susainability.

We used bleach in our wash loads becuase if we didn't the kids developed yeast rashes.  We are in a water abundant area with effective and efficient waste water treatment, so I believe the externalized cost of throwing away diapers is significantly higher than that of extra water use.  In some parts of the US, the cost of water may change that relationship significantly.

Who can name all the ingredients in a disposable diaper?  Does anyone know which miracle (read cancer risk) chemicals are strapped onto your babies butt and then thrown into a landfill forevermore?

[PMG]

Did you have a stay at home parent during the 6 years of cloth diapers?  That seems to be key folks are identifying to making it feasible.

[Frugal Lizard]

We did the hybrid method. Mostly SAHP. And I was pretty in tune but not full on elimination communication. Both kids got rashes from some brands of disposables year round. #1 kid couldn't wear a disposable in the summer at all. His skin was really sensitive to heat rashes.

When we hit the eating solids phase, a disposable diaper liner was so convenient that we continued with cloth. Both kids were day time toilet users by 2. Neither of them liked being in a soiled diaper. The time between them being able to get to the toilet in time and being able to remove their own diaper was much longer than I wished. Still makes me shudder thinking about how gross kids can be.

[Sanitary Stache]

Did you have a stay at home parent during the 6 years of cloth diapers?  That seems to be key folks are identifying to making it feasible.

For 4 of these years we both worked full time or more. Then Covid and we hardly left the house.

[BiggerFishToFI]

With two working parents, we went with disposable. Buy in bulk from Costco when they are on sale.

I'm not convinced that running a washing machine daily is any better for the environment than using disposables (we live in a water scarce area), but admittedly I have not dived deep into this.

The $$$ aspect seems trivial compared to childcare costs at 5k per month for 2 kids under 3. When the youngest ages in to daycare that will drop to $2800, still trivial compared to the cost of diapers

[Sugaree]

With two working parents, we went with disposable. Buy in bulk from Costco when they are on sale.

I'm not convinced that running a washing machine daily is any better for the environment than using disposables (we live in a water scarce area), but admittedly I have not dived deep into this.

The $$$ aspect seems trivial compared to childcare costs at 5k per month for 2 kids under 3. When the youngest ages in to daycare that will drop to $2800, still trivial compared to the cost of diapers

This is a good point.  I used a portable washing machine so using a lot less water than a full-size machine.  When I ran the numbers, our water bill increased by an average of $5/month.  But where I live daycare isn't that expensive, so diapers were a much larger proportion of our baby expenses.  My "baby" is 11 now, but we were paying around $500/month for daycare and that was at the second most expensive center in the area.  My co-worker with a three year-old says he's paying $95/week, which is pretty close to what that same center was charging when my kiddo was a baby. 

[BeanCounter]

We were working parents so we really didn't have a choice. We used Target brand diapers. We had them daytime potty trained by age 2. Early potty training has the best impact both environmentally and financially.

[maisymouser]

We were working parents so we really didn't have a choice. We used Target brand diapers. We had them daytime potty trained by age 2. Early potty training has the best impact both environmentally and financially.

I just want to point out that there are a lot of households with two working parents who use reusable diapers My husband and I both work full time but used reusable. It helps that the daycare was open to it (I had to provide bags and clean the diapers) but it's definitely doable with two working parents.