M&J

Two Years Of Laundry Solutions

 

    Since my son was born and I decided to use cloth diapers on him I have discovered many tips and tricks in the laundry department. Combined with trying to save money and be environmentally friendly, this information should be helpful to everyone, not just parents. Some things are super simple and others take just a little work to get set up. I have a very old washer and dryer. I desperately need to upgrade, but have not made the plunge yet. Chances are I will only buy a new washer since I rarely use the dryer.

 

    The first thing I did was only use cold water when washing. I will use hot water to wash diapers, but that is it. Even then I will wash a small load of diapers on hot, then turn the washer to cold and throw in more laundry so that the diapers get washed twice. I also bought a wonder wash. It is a barrel that you hand crank to wash your clothes. I use it once in a while. It works well on laundry of average dirtiness. Dirty diapers and toddler stained clothes don’t come out great with it. It also leaves the clothes very wet. I have learned to squeeze the water out as much as possible, then I put it in the washer for a short spin. Doing this uses much less electricity, but it is much more labor. My son does like to spin the washer. I haven’t used it recently, but now that it is warm out I will use it outside more often. I separate the clothes into groups of more and less dirty. The less dirty stuff I can do in the wonderwash. When I started using the wonderwash I saw a $40 decrease in my monthly electric bill.

 

    I have also been through many different laundry detergents. When I first started cloth diapering, there was a list of soaps you could use on diapers. I tried a few on the list, but they were always so expensive. They worked fine, not great, but they did the job. I also tried some that were not for cloth diapers, and they seemed to work the same as the “safe” soaps. My diapers were still absorbent and clean. Mrs. Myers soap worked well and smelled good. The price wasn’t bad if you order online and get free shipping. I found ECOS detergent online also. This is what I am currently using. It is just under $9 and is made in the USA (New Jersey actually). For the price and ingredients it works well. I have recently tried making my own detergent. I used a grated bar of laundry soap $1, a box of borax $4 (thoughts on borax: http://www.crunchybetty.com/getting-to-the-bottom-of-borax-is-it-safe-or-not), and a box of washing soda $4. It turns out to be the same price as the ECOS, but we will see how many loads I get. I also spent $4 on a plastic cereal container and $2 on a metal coffee scoop to measure out my concoction. I have done two loads of laundry so far and everything has come out very clean and fresh smelling. I almost forgot, SOAPNUTS! These things are great. I thought they were hilarious, and figured they would never work. They had them on sale at my local healthfood store, so I bought a box. They actually work great! Amazingly enough I have not tried them on diapers. I guess I will have to do that soon!

 

    So now that your laundry is washed, you are only a third of the way done. The next task is getting it dry. Yes, this simple way is to throw it in the dryer, but who wants to make things easy. I do have to admit that the dryer does get used occasionally. There is always the emergency pair of pants that you want to wear that day that will get thrown in the dryer. When using the dryer I do use wool dryer balls. They speed up the drying process by moving things around in there. You also don’t need a dryer sheet because they also get rid of the static. I also have to use the dryer to get rid if any lint or dog hairs off of the hubbys black/dark tshirts. Evidently this makes him crazy, so I do it so that I don’t have to hear him getting ready for work in the morning muttering about lint. After it line drys I toss it in the dryer for a few minutes and it takes care of the problem.

 

    Everything else gets line dried. Well I guess you can’t call it line dried since there are not any lines involved, rack dried. I thought about getting one of those big umbrella things you stick in the ground. My grandmother has always used one of those. I just didn’t have a great place to put one up. Not to mention, I live in Connecticut. The weather isn’t always sunny. You can wake up to a nice sunny day. and a few hours later it is pouring. In the past few years I have bought a few wooden folding racks that I could move inside when it started raining. Those racks only lasted a year or so with so much use. I taped, nailed, and ziptied them back together quite a few times to get them to last just a little longer, only to find the rack collapsed and all my clean laundry on the ground. So this year I built myself a PVC rack. It is 5 feet tall, 4 feet long, and 2 feet wide. It has three tiers and I put it on wheels so that I can roll it in and out of my basement door depending on the weather. It works great and have made a few for friends when they saw it. PVC is very cheap and easy to work with. I probably spent $30 on everything (wheels,PVC tubing, PVC fittings, and screws) I did screw it together because it does pull apart when you moved it around. I decided not to glue it because I can take it apart if i ever need to. In the summer I roll it outside and in the winter I park it over by the woodstove and everything dries very quickly.

 

    **UPDATE** I finally bought a new washer and dryer! I got a High Efficiency set up. It uses a ton less water and electricity. My electric bill has dropped $50 since we got them and a new refrigerator. The amount of water is a quarter of what my old washer was and the amount of lint that comes out in the water is such a fraction of what it used to be. I have been very happy with the long awaited upgrade. I do find that the cold water wash is not as good as the old one, but with the decrease in the cost of running this machine I usually use the warm mode. I still mostly line dry everything the same way and then just fluff them in the dryer for a few minutes.

    I hope this has been useful and if you have any questions or comments please contact me. Hopefully i can get some pictures of my drying rack in action soon!