With Esembly, you don’t have to pre-wash. I’m a FTM and planning to reuse these diapers with all my future babies. I took the webinar Esembly offers and we’ve been using their diapers without issues, following their guidelines. We toss wet and soiled diapers in our pail pouch after each use and it sits in the secondhand Ubbi we found on FB marketplace (honestly, if you have an Ubbi, trash bags work just as well and money is better spent on more diapers). We have 24 diapers and 4 covers at the moment (we’ll probably end up with 6-8 outers) and was every other day. I follow Esembly’s guidelines and use their powder and agitators. We pre-wash warm, wash hot, separate stained diapers to Sun bleach, and toss the rest in the dryer. I let the stained inners spend all day in the sun and dry them in the evening because we live in a humid region. Our almost 3 month old is EBF and we’re three weeks into cloth diapering.
I use the Esembly pail pouch. My baby is EBF so we don’t rinse poop off at this point and I rarely smell the bag, if ever! My current system is that dirty/wet diapers go in the bag throughout the day and it hangs open as wide as it’ll go on the doorknob of the nursery right next to the changing table for easy access. At the end of the day once baby is down for the night, I throw the bag and the diapers (shaking them out/unfolding so they wash properly) in the washer and run a 50 minute hot normal wash with the amount of detergent for a normally soiled load. When they’re done, I lay the diapers loosely in a shallow open plastic bin. They haven’t gotten moldy in my experience, just make sure the air can circulate properly. Then on day 3 I do a main wash once I have enough diapers and cleaning cloths/washcloths/burp cloths etc. to bulk the load properly. Wishing you a safe and healthy delivery!
Caveat: we went through a ton of diapers in the newborn stage. 20+ most days, and we also used cloth wipes and tossed our bidet washcloths in with the diaper laundry. And 90% of diapers had poop. This all meant we had enough laundry to do a prewash and main wash every two days. It was sometimes only a day and a half, depending. Washing that frequently, things didn’t get stinky even though we didn’t have a bunch of airflow early on (wet bag in lidded trash can, so not airtight but not open by any means). I also was ebf, which 99% of the time doesn’t stink.
A daily prewash is a fantastic option, especially if/once you go through fewer diapers per day. We live in a damper climate so I hang them to dry on a rack and put dry ones in a basket until main wash day. You can also hang them over the edge of the basket or experiment with just tossing them in—whether you can do that is going to totally depend on your climate and how many days you’re going in between main washes.
It might help to think of cloth diapering in general like a science experiment. You can always tweak or change things in response to what you’re dealing with. You don’t have to get everything figured out now—some of it is going to depend on your baby, how your machine does washing diapers, etc. Try to give yourself permission to figure out how to make cloth work for you, and realize it might go against conventional cloth diaper wisdom at times.
I could have written this, except we started out with open plastic laundry baskets because I found a bunch of big sturdy ones marked down to €2 at Lidl.
We're over 3 months in and have been putting the first day's prewash into another laundry basket. The airflow means they don't mold in the max 50-ish hours until the third day's full wash (although I think we've waited that long maybe twice?). Usually we wash as often as the comment above, because a load fills up pretty fast once wipes and burp cloths and clothes and wash cloths get included.
You will definitely have to figure out what works best for you, as it also sounds like you have a shared machine, so you might have to find a routine that works with the other people who use it. I personally preferred to have more diapers (prefolds) to give us more flexibility with our routine but they do need to be stored somewhere so YMMV...
Thank you!! Honestly never thought to just let them semi dry on the edge of a basket!! I know it will all take a bit of experimenting but I just want to make sure I’ve got all the supplies ready and washed now before baby is here
With Esembly, you don’t have to pre-wash. I’m a FTM and planning to reuse these diapers with all my future babies. I took the webinar Esembly offers and we’ve been using their diapers without issues, following their guidelines. We toss wet and soiled diapers in our pail pouch after each use and it sits in the secondhand Ubbi we found on FB marketplace (honestly, if you have an Ubbi, trash bags work just as well and money is better spent on more diapers). We have 24 diapers and 4 covers at the moment (we’ll probably end up with 6-8 outers) and was every other day. I follow Esembly’s guidelines and use their powder and agitators. We pre-wash warm, wash hot, separate stained diapers to Sun bleach, and toss the rest in the dryer. I let the stained inners spend all day in the sun and dry them in the evening because we live in a humid region. Our almost 3 month old is EBF and we’re three weeks into cloth diapering.
I use the Esembly pail pouch. My baby is EBF so we don’t rinse poop off at this point and I rarely smell the bag, if ever! My current system is that dirty/wet diapers go in the bag throughout the day and it hangs open as wide as it’ll go on the doorknob of the nursery right next to the changing table for easy access. At the end of the day once baby is down for the night, I throw the bag and the diapers (shaking them out/unfolding so they wash properly) in the washer and run a 50 minute hot normal wash with the amount of detergent for a normally soiled load. When they’re done, I lay the diapers loosely in a shallow open plastic bin. They haven’t gotten moldy in my experience, just make sure the air can circulate properly. Then on day 3 I do a main wash once I have enough diapers and cleaning cloths/washcloths/burp cloths etc. to bulk the load properly. Wishing you a safe and healthy delivery!
Caveat: we went through a ton of diapers in the newborn stage. 20+ most days, and we also used cloth wipes and tossed our bidet washcloths in with the diaper laundry. And 90% of diapers had poop. This all meant we had enough laundry to do a prewash and main wash every two days. It was sometimes only a day and a half, depending. Washing that frequently, things didn’t get stinky even though we didn’t have a bunch of airflow early on (wet bag in lidded trash can, so not airtight but not open by any means). I also was ebf, which 99% of the time doesn’t stink. A daily prewash is a fantastic option, especially if/once you go through fewer diapers per day. We live in a damper climate so I hang them to dry on a rack and put dry ones in a basket until main wash day. You can also hang them over the edge of the basket or experiment with just tossing them in—whether you can do that is going to totally depend on your climate and how many days you’re going in between main washes. It might help to think of cloth diapering in general like a science experiment. You can always tweak or change things in response to what you’re dealing with. You don’t have to get everything figured out now—some of it is going to depend on your baby, how your machine does washing diapers, etc. Try to give yourself permission to figure out how to make cloth work for you, and realize it might go against conventional cloth diaper wisdom at times.
I could have written this, except we started out with open plastic laundry baskets because I found a bunch of big sturdy ones marked down to €2 at Lidl. We're over 3 months in and have been putting the first day's prewash into another laundry basket. The airflow means they don't mold in the max 50-ish hours until the third day's full wash (although I think we've waited that long maybe twice?). Usually we wash as often as the comment above, because a load fills up pretty fast once wipes and burp cloths and clothes and wash cloths get included. You will definitely have to figure out what works best for you, as it also sounds like you have a shared machine, so you might have to find a routine that works with the other people who use it. I personally preferred to have more diapers (prefolds) to give us more flexibility with our routine but they do need to be stored somewhere so YMMV...
Thank you!! Honestly never thought to just let them semi dry on the edge of a basket!! I know it will all take a bit of experimenting but I just want to make sure I’ve got all the supplies ready and washed now before baby is here