It’s a been a while since I did an update on our cloth diaper washing routine. I thought I’d post our most recent iteration for those of you wondering about cloth diapering two children at the same time. It’s true that our routine for two in cloth diapers is different than just one. For one thing, I only had to strip our diapers about every 6-8 weeks when I had only one child. Now that there are two of them, I have to strip them about every 3 weeks. If you aren’t sure what I mean by stripping, please read my post about how we all need to be stripping.

So I’ll skip the stuff about stripping the diapers, which happens only occasionally, and go straight to the everyday washing.

When the diaper comes off the child, I spray the poop (if there is any) and put the diaper into a dry Mommy’s Touch or PlanetWise wet bag in a regular trash can. I also throw our cloth wipes in there. These are the same 2 wet bags and the same trash can that I started out with 2.5 years ago. Nothing wrong with any of them, still working great! For the most part, there is really no odor in the pail. I do keep an Arm and Hammer baking soda pouch in the pail, which I have rigged to be refillable. If the pail itself gets stinky, I spray it with a mixture of tea tree oil and water and set it out in the sunlight. The only smell problem I ever have is the trash can I keep next to the diaper pail, which holds disposables. I do not understand how people can throw away disposables inside their house – those things STINK!

When the diaper pail/wet bag is full (about every other day since I have around 25 diapers in my stash), I take the whole thing out and dump it directly into our front-loading HE washing machine. I do not really ever touch the diapers themselves, unless one starts to slide back out the door (ew!).

I am still using Charlie’s Soap, which I get on Subscribe And Save through Amazon. I do love Rockin’ Green, but it’s just too much more expensive than Charlie’s, and we’ve never had any trouble with Charlie’s. I also use it for all our clothes.

It goes like this: one “Quick Wash” Hot/Cold cycle, which I use as a pre-rinse. Then a full Heavy-Duty Hot/Cold cycle with Charlie’s Soap. Every other load, I add a half scoop of Bio Kleen Oxygen Bleach Plus. I started doing this because it turns out that my HE machine water does not get hot enough to fully sanitize the diapers.

That’s it for washing! I line dry the covers, either outside on our clothesline or on a rack indoors in our garage. I throw the inserts, wet bag(s) and cloth wipes into the dryer.

So it’s actually really fast and easy! The most tedious part is re-folding all the diapers afterward. Just like folding any laundry, really.

How do you wash your diapers?