Okay, so my village didn’t do it ALL on its own. It’s no secret that I’ve been battling funk in my FuzziBunz for a while now. It started about six months ago and we’ve had issues on and off ever since. Every time I thought I’d beat it, the ammonia would come back and my little girl would be stuck with raw, red haunches. Toward the end of last year, I started adjusting the amount of detergent a little, I was starting to see some improvement.
And then at the beginning of December, the stink reached an all-time high that even my new detergent amounts couldn’t fix. What was happening? My issues went from bad to worse – almost overnight – and my little girl was wearing a disposable almost as often as her cloth.
Almost by chance one day in January, I read an article in the hyper-local newspaper that covers our village. In passing, the article referenced a change in our water composition and as soon as I read it, things began to click… All the clues were there:
- Our diapers were driving me crazy because they never seemed clean.
- My hair was a feeling a little different lately (nothing dramatic, but I had noticed a change).
- I’d recently had a repairman out to the house to look at our dishwasher because out of nowhere there was white residue everywhere after a load.
Those of you with hard water know where this is going…
We had always had pretty good water. Not too hard, good tasting and a good balance of minerals (which I knew from the annual water quality report we get in the mail). My town is unique because we treat and supply water from our own wells to residents instead of pulling from nearby Lake Michigan like most of the surrounding towns.
But that “water independence” was now working against me and my FuzziBunz. After a little more digging I discovered that our water treatment facility is undergoing a significant improvement project to upgrade to a Reverse Osmosis system (it’s a big deal and very costly for our little municipality – I’m not sure how I missed the announcement in the first place). In the meantime while the treatment plant is under construction, they cannot soften the water and can only minimally treat it. So for the next year, the water flowing from our tap is harder and more mineral-ly than ever.
Aha! So, just as I started to get our cloth diaper washing routine down, battled the stink and started to win… and then my water composition changed. Great. It feels like I have had to start over in the last couple of months figuring out what works for my front-loading HE machine and our newly HARD, mineral-ly water.
It’s amazing to me how much a small change in water can change your diapers. To try and combat, I’ve stripped the diapers and have a new routine and detergent that is starting to show promise – I’ll update you when I’m confident with it… And then come this November, I’ll be starting over again with our NEW AND IMPROVED reverse osmosis water.
Maybe then it will be time to potty train.
Have you relocated and had to completely redesign your cloth diaper washing routine? Or did your local water supply change without you knowing it? How did you deal?
Sarah is a mom of two and blogs about her adventures in motherhood, cloth diapering and everything in between. Catch her “Cloth Diapering Unwrapped” series on the FuzziBunz blog every Tuesday.
