What do you soak cloth diapers in? Options & reasons why

ByAurora
My laundry treatments

Some people use different things to soak their cloth diapers in for general cleaning purposes, and others never soak their cloth diapers at all.

Typically you soak cloth diapers in bleach or other laundry treatments to remove build up that causes stink and other problems.

I personally don’t soak my cloth diapers in anything on a regular basis, but once in a while the situation calls for it.

If you are interested in learning more about cloth diapering check out my article ” Do cloth diapers make the house smell”

Read ” Do cloth diapers make the house smell” now

Soaking cloth diapers to strip them

When you strip cloth diapers it basically means you are “stripping” all the stuff that isn’t cloth diaper out of your cloth diapers.

This is usually done when you

  • Buy used cloth diapers
  • Are preparing to sell your used cloth diapers
  • Are having a problem with smell
  • Have loaned your cloth diapers to someone
  • Have just gotten back cloth diapers you have loaned to someone

There are 2 main methods to strip your cloth diapers.

Homemade stripping mix

The first is to soak your cloth diapers for around 2 hours in a mix of Borax, Washing soda, Calgon ( which is a water softener) and a little bit of your detergent.

To remove any minerals that may have built up in your cloth diapers because of washing in hard water, or to fix smell and other build up from a not great wash routine.

Then do a 30 minute bleach soak.

But you do want to proceed with extreme caution here, bleach is very hard on cloth diapers.

So when the instructions say not to let them soak for more then 30 minutes, 45 minutes maximum, they freaking mean it.

Make sure to set a timer, and make sure you are home when the timer goes off so you can drain the bleach water quickly and rinse it out.

Premade stripping mix

The other method is to buy a premade laundry treatment.

RLR and Grovia Mighty Bubbles are the only 2 I’ve heard of.

RLR comes in a pack of 10 little packets of powder, you will need 3 packets per load you want to strip.

You wash your cloth diapers like normal then soak your cloth diapers in hot water with the 3 packets of RLR for 2 hours then rinse and bleach soak.

My personal favorite premade stripping method is Grovia Mighty Bubbles.

Grovia Mighty Bubbles are basically a detergent pod that you throw into a really long hot wash, then rinse, then bleach soak, then done.

Grovia Mighty Bubbles

For me this is the fastest and easiest method.

Keep in mind that if you have a good wash routine you shouldn’t have stink problems and build up.

What did people used to soak cloth diapers in?

Back in the day storing dirty cloth diapers in a ” wet pail” was very normal.

It was just water with a little bit of detergent mixed in to try and keep the cloth diapers from staining.

But today with modern laundry detergent and washing machines wet pail storage actually ends up doing more harm than good.

Storing your cloth diapers in a wet pail

  • Is very hard on your cloth diapers
  • Promotes bacteria growth
  • Promotes fungal ( yeast) growth
  • Promotes stink
  • Can be a safety hazard for small children

Modern detergents have built in stain removers and modern washing machines have far better cleaning abilities.

So while wet pail dirty diaper storage may have been beneficial many years ago, the pros just don’t out weigh the cons anymore.

Soaking cloth diapers in bleach

If you are wanting to kill yeast or sanitize your cloth diapers then the most effective method is a bleach soak.

The number 1 thing you need to keep in mind here is,

Make sure your bleach isn’t expired.

If bleach is expired it won’t be anywhere near as effective at killing yeast and bacteria, assuming it does anything at all.

This is a store brand bleach, on an actual name brand bottle the expiration date is a weird code you will have to google to decode

You could spend all this time bleaching everything your kid was even near to try and kill off yeast that’s causing a diaper rash.

Only for the darn thing to come right back (or never go away to begin with) cause you used expired bleach.

Now keep in mind no matter how you diaper your baby, yeast is a horrible, evil, pain in the butt, that is going to involve a lot of bleach and hot water.

Soaking cloth diapers in vinegar

Many people use vinegar to help with smell in their cloth diapers by adding it to one of the wash cycles or to a rinse cycle.

Also vinegar can be used to remove fabric softener residue from your cloth diapers.

However in both these situations the vinegar would be added to a wash cycle or rinse, the cloth diapers wouldn’t be soaking in it for very long.

Vinegar is very hard on elastics and PUL/TPU, plus I don’t think a full on vinegar soak would actually do much more than just adding some to the wash.

Resources

Some of the links below are affiliate links, meaning I receive a small commission (at no additional cost to you) from qualifying purchases made through those links. * Indicates an affiliate link

Link to Stripping instructions on Fluffloveuniversity.com

Link to bleach soak instructions on Fluffloveuniversity.com

Link to Grovia Mighty Bubbles at thenaturalbabycompany.com *

Link to RLR on Amazon.com

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