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| Carson's old cloth diapers are in the trash :( they are useless now! |
After countless tests with detergents, water softening, different cloth diaper brands, sizing, stripping, washing methods and research (jillian's drawers, paddedtushstats, all about cloth diapers, etc), I just got new diapers. It's the same brand, Bumgenius 4.0 one size pocket diaper. Even having to buy new diapers after a year, it still saves money. But the question remains: Will I have to do this again in 2014? Will I have to keep destroying diapers before I figure it out? Will I ever figure it out?
When I compare these with my old diapers its easy to see that both the PUL (polyurethane laminate) and the insert are just worthless now.
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| Left: original cloth diapers, no PUL there! Right: New cloth diapers. See that shiny PUL? |
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| Old insert on the top, new insert on the bottom. This is not so much of a surprise to me. It seems like 1 year of use would do this! |
I don't know how some of this happened but I have a few guesses: 1) I washed them in super-ultra-hot water for most of the 1st year! 2) I used All Free and Clear, though from what I gather that doesn't seem to cause such extensive damage. 3) it's just the way they are made - 1 year warranty expires and so do the diapers! :P 4) moving to the sunny side of Louisville gave us severely hard water. I don't know if that's sufficient to destroy the PULs, but there is absolutely no PUL on any of my old diapers! Hence, when he peed, it went straight through the shot, non-absorbent microfiber insert and through the diaper shell onto my shirt.
We'll see what happens next time around. So far I am still using Charlie's Soap coupled with Charlie's hard water treatment, but not only are the ingredients a mystery, but they smell downright weird! I'd like to try Bumgenius's detergent or Allen's Naturally. (already tried Rockin' Green - that's a no-go) I'd also like to see if there is any kind of hard water treatment that I can use in the loads of cloth diapers no matter what the detergent. Calgon maybe?
Has anyone else out there been through this with bumgenius? I started out thinking that I would use these same diapers throughout all my children's diapering years, but I was wrong. They didn't even last through my first child's first birthday. A year of use and abuse did them in!
Any tips, hints, stories or tricks greatly appreciated!
Well I can't say I have any advice...but that first picture is adorable! :-)
ReplyDeleteThanks Melissa, I think so too, standing there kind of unstable with his chubby bow-legs! LOL
DeleteHmm... that is strange that they wore out so quickly??? Are you sure that the PUL is useless and that they just aren't still repelling? Sounds like you have tried a ton of stuff to get them fixed, but I am unsure if PUL can just dissolve or not??? crazy. My BumGenius diapers are holding up after over a year and 4 months of use (ish). Now we are getting ready to let our 2nd use them too. I have tons of diapers, though (somewhere around 50?), so they go through a good rotation. When it would leak out, would the pee come out the leg hole or could you literally see a wet spot on the diaper itself? Our inserts look like that too. That is just microfiber for ya! I will probably replace mine within the year, especially after Joelle is full time in one-size cloth. Oh, I just got Eco Sprout detergent (have been using bumGenius) and I really like it so far! Didn't have any problems with BG's detergent, just wanted to try something different! Ooh, one other thought. Do you always dry them on high in the dryer? Try hang-drying them once in a while! Ok, that's all for now. Good luck! Hopefully this time around will be better!
ReplyDeleteI thought it was strange too Tara!!! It really seemed to me that the pee went straight through the shell no matter what I did! I used RLR to strip them, as Jillian's drawers suggests. I also talked to them about "resealing" the PUL by putting them in the dryer on low or medium (I never put them in the dryer at all either!). This would also supposedly tighten the elastic, if it was leaking around the legs! But now matter how tight I made it it would still leak, and straight through! So weird!
DeleteThe thing is, we only had 22 and used the same 22 all the time. That also might be a factor!
Do you have hard water at all? Our water softener is broken and we have ridiculously hard water!
Hey Bethany,
ReplyDeletewe didn'nt use cloth until we got to potty training. we bought ours last year and they have worn out too.i think part of was because i put them in the dryer and they weren't supposed to be but line drying made them so rough. i have been taking them apart and sewing new PUL on the outside. my diapers don't look like yours, they look like underwear, and had the water proof layer on the inside, i think it cost me 15 bucks to buy the pul to fix them all. we used disposable because my kids had diaper rashes from the cloth ones. we still use pullups at night but using the cloth pullups during the day cut our spending down from 200 - 60/month for two kids. maybe this doesn't help. but if your guy is getting closer to potty training age maybe you want to think about switching before buying a whole new set of diapers. we started potty training at 16 -18 months. hope this helps a little