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Yep. This was something that we’ve battled. Based on symptoms and things that relieved those symptoms we believe it to have been a build-up of bacteria in the nappies. The big clue was that they smelled a little funky but only got bad after they got wet (at which point the For a while, I’d perform anti-bacterial “strip washes” on my cloth nappies using engineered quantities of bleach or simply boiling but it was brutal on the garments. Eventually, a sustainable solution was a change in washing practices. I started switching off the “eco mode” on my washer (which was re-using rinse water – a bad idea for nappies) and also, and, in line with your finding, adding some laundry sanitiser per manufacturer instructions during the rinse cycle. Both Canestan and Pine-O-Cleen brands have worked for me here (the only two I've tried). This sorted things. Nuking in a tumble dryer isn't an option because I don't have one. The plastic pants got better too because they got the same sanitiser dose during the wash cycle. I only rinse the plastic pants between most uses but they go in the wash (with general nappies) around once per week. This may or may not work for you because based on what you've said, I can't be sure if it's the same root cause.

For sure they'll try and tilt the table but we've managed to produce standard crash test dummies so I reckon as a species, we could come up with a standarised analogue for having a pee. I wouldn't want "better" to become the enemy of "best". Almost any step in this direction would be a vast improvement on the current state 🤣

Ah, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation strikes again! Our looney-left taxpayer-funded sheltered workshop of a national broadcaster dedicated towards lecturing and hectoring the general population (which it despises btw) with an endless diet of social-justice “human interest” stories generally only of interest to the few dozen Kombucha-sipping inner-urban socialist wannabes who still pay attention to it. This article is typical of their output (which would be better placed in a PVC pipe) 🤣 It’s a nothing-story. But I got distracted. Australia is a technologically sophisticated and highly urbanised society but yeah, once you get off the beaten track, infrastructure is no longer a thing: something German backpackers seem to endlessly discover for themselves. It takes around 6 days to hike the Overland track (mentioned in the article) so I’d expect loaded diapers to become a fairly significant problem pretty quickly and washing off in a creek or river would be fairly uncool for hikers downstream of you since that's probably the only drinking water available. Plenty of solutions more practical than a PVC pipe though as even this rather pointless article intimates.

I came at this from the other direction. I developed nocturia within several months of going to 24/7 diapers. I went from needing to pee maybe once per night up to three times or more. Because I was in nappies, this wasn't really an inconvenience, just something I noticed happening. Assuming your plan is to diaper yourself and then simply NOT get up to pee then my experience is that yes, you may well eventually start bed wetting (some people don't so it's not universally true). I don't think it is truly incontinence though. I suspect that I wet the bed (ie: wet my nappies) in my sleep because I've re-patterned my sub-conscious that it is "ok" to do this. Sometimes now I pee without waking up. I wrote an FAQ about my experience at: A doctor is going to try to fix the nocturia which to be fair, is what a doctor would be expected to do. If you want your nocturia fixed, forget diapers (they just reinforce the wrong behaviours) and use a doctor. I wouldn't conflate the two and I wouldn't like to waste a practitioner's time. These days I suspect I have severe nocturia but it is completely masked by my diapers and so poses no inconvenience for me. I either stir briefly, wet and fall back asleep or simply sleep through wetting events (usually evidenced by unexpectedly-wet diapers, strange "pee dreams" or even waking to find myself peeing). In my case I've no doubt that 24/7 diapering potentiated this process as the holding capacity of my bladder dropped markedly. The usual disclaimer: there's no doubt that bed wetting can make things less convenient at times and once bed wetting starts, it is no respecter of place or time. It will happen when and where you may not want it to happen. You might want to pause and evaluate where you are in life, deciding whether this is something you truly want now or perhaps something you might come back to later in life after you've done the kind of stuff that's a lot easier to do if you're NOT dependent on night nappies.

It's far from perfect but I think elements of this could be drawn upon to create a hugely-more-relevant ISO

An interesting counterpoint to my previous update (relating an experience of somehow becoming aware of a bedwetting event occurring whilst dreaming about something else) happened this week. I’d gone to bed at around 11pm wearing a slightly wet Rearz overnight pre-fold diaper with a folded 24” x 24” baby’s terry nappy as a soaker pad. Fairly well protected, I fell asleep. Some indeterminate point later I was dreaming. Again, it was a kind of lucid dream. In it, I was lying in bed in the dark next to my beloved and I wanted to pee. It seemed that in my dream-state I was unaware that I was in a nappy since I was concerned that if I just peed, our bed would get wet, she would wake and I’d (once again) be in trouble. I lay there for a while thinking “Should I or shouldn’t I?” It was a cold night and I wasn’t keen on getting up to use a toilet (not that I would have done these even if I was awake as I was quite suitably dressed for peeing myself). Suddenly, my beloved stirred and got out of bed, presumably to deal with a similar issue. I briefly considered the moral dilemma of simply peeing in our bed whilst she was gone. It’s evidence of the sleeping brain’s poor capacity to make choices that I even countenanced doing this. It would hardly have been a long term solution. Her outrage would be guaranteed to eclipse the transitory comfort of relief and could be reasonably estimated to eventuate within at most a minute or two as that’s how long she’d likely be gone. If I’d just wet the bed with her still in it I might have gotten away with it for a little bit longer (fun fact: assuming that they are not making gratuitous attempts to bring attention to soggy affairs, sharing a bed that your partner has just peed in isn’t as obvious as it seems – at least at first). I then got it into my sleeping head that I’d peed (at least a bit) anyway and I needed to explore the extent of the damage at my pyjama pants (which I wasn’t wearing in real life – just a t-shirt and a nappy) and bedding. At this point I awoke. My beloved was still snoring beside me. Her departure for the bathroom was a figment of my dream. It wasn’t clear if I’d peed any more or not as I’d been a bit wet to begin with but I suspect not. I could feel that there WAS pee in my bladder. It was 2am – a time I know from experience to be a peak bedwetting zone. I relaxed, savoured the burst of wet warmth in my nappy and promptly fell back asleep. The interesting thing though is that on THIS particular night, something in my subconscious was hung up on me NOT having permission to just pee where I laid. The theme of this dream was that it would NOT be ok to just wet the bed. In my dream I fretted on this dilemma and eventually woke up either having not peed at all or at best, leaked a little bit. This narrative was the complete antithesis of last week’s dream scenario whereby I became aware I was wetting myself whilst in a dream but was completely convinced that this was “ok” and so I slept on dreaming my way through it. These examples illustrate to me that the kind of bedwetting we experience after prolonged permanent diapering is mental and not physical. We wet ourselves in our sleep not because we are incontinent but rather that we’ve re-patterned our brains to think that it is permissible and somehow, “ok” to pee in bed. If we DON’T think it is permitted for whatever reason, we wake up. The problem of course is that our sleeping brain isn’t very good at evaluating waking reality when making these choices. Confusion ensues which is what I suspect what drives the wet beds I’d rather not have had. The internal middle-manager down in the sleep-basement to whom we have delegated the authority to authorise peeing sometimes gets it wrong, or right, depending on your point of view but this is not predictable. This is probably the reason why sleep driving is universally considered to be a bad idea.

As the owner of an EV I’d draw a distinction here. The generally accepted Worldwide Harmonized Light Vehicles Test Procedure (WLTP) test is wildly optimistic but is at least based on a driven vehicle use-case. For me I find it overstates real-world range by between 20 – 25% The nappy ISO test method (ISO 11948-1 if anybody is interested) is NOT based on the use case of wearing one and peeing in it. It’s therefore probably unsurprising that its outcomes bear no relationship at all to real world performance. I realise that it’s perfectly possible to build ISO-compliant concrete life jackets as its focused on standardised methods rather than performance outcomes but holy puddles Batman, this one truly misses the mark. If we tested vehicle using off-beam methods such as ISO 11948-1 we should just push the cars out of aircraft at cruise altitude. We can measure their 0 – 60mph acceleration time by how quickly they fall (fairly close numbers between models thanks to Galileo’s principle of free fall) and their top speed by their terminal velocity. I would suggest that this product/ISO will be over-stating its REAL capacity by between 300 and 500% Basically this is what I find although I'd range them down even further. Even the best super-nappy in my experience becomes increasingly fragile for every drip over 2000ml (assuming you are not laying flat in bed which MIGHT see you get to 3000ml). I've worn them for 24 hours. It's not something I'd habitually do. It's happened once or twice when I've kind of accidentally gone long-haul in one and decided that rather than change into a nappy that I'd be dumping again in 3 hours, I'd just push on and go straight to the next day's night nappy at my evening shower. Generally speaking sometime after hour 14, that nappy becomes less and less comfortable. Sagging, with noticeably cold-and-wet bits, smelly, itchy and often slightly leaky anyway. By hour 18 I'm dreaming about hot showers and clean nappies wistfully. If you do more than just wet your nappy, you're going to have a rash. Your skepticism is in my opinion, very well founded... There are so many better ways these products could be improved but consumers understand integers.

Well it's Tuesday here already on the far side of the planet. Monday (yesterday) was when I first noticed that the days are getting longer rather than shorter. For mid-winter, it was curiously warm day (around 24C/75F) and oddly humid (winter is our "dry" season). This "retirement" thing kind of sucks. After my beloved left for her work, I spent most of Monday trying to feed ethernet cable through a too-small-to-fit-into roof cavity. Why? Because I had the cable, the time, and a left-over security camera from my old house. I did it in wearing a wet Omutsu cloth diaper and plastic pants which would have been amusing for the paramedics if I'd gotten stuck up there. Today I'll terminate the cable run into the patch panel, install the camera and configure it. I'll do that in a Kins pull-on cloth nappy which I'll change into when I can be bothered changing out of my terry overnight nappy (which is amazingly comfortable). Winter is back. It's 10C/50F here on Tuesday morning but will make it up to around 22C/72F eventually...

Rage

Like many, I wore out my washing machine whilst blowing through the usual retail brand nappies: Tena, Depends, all useless. I wondered how ANYBODY could get by with that rubbish (years later, working in the disability sector after the inevitable career-ending COVID layoff, I found that they DON’T work there either and people just leak on everything and/or get changed every 10 minutes). I settled on Molicare Premium Slip which then they promptly stopped making, substituting it for the not-nearly-as-effective Molicare “Elastic”. Abena L4 were the ok exception for "medical class" until the price literally doubled for them. I realised by then that ABDL products were just light years better and worked out cheaper because I used less of them. ABU Simples were great until the local shipping charges from their solitary supplier (lack of competition is a perennial problem in Australia) went bananas making them unviable for daily use. The nappies themselves were reasonably priced. It was absurd shipping charges that killed them. I then switched to BetterDry and they were good for a while before a series of breathtaking price increases and a sudden drop in quality saw me drop them for Rearz where I remain today for disposables.

100% Although I've not been inclined to build myself a changing table (because I like being married), I've repurposed a lot of Ikea furniture as our kids grew up and left home. A lot of it can be chopped and changed (no pun intended) fairly easily. A docking saw, a drill and an ethos of "measure twice, cut once" and you're away! I gave our kids Ikea beds for sure (sure they were cheap but the kids would destroy them anyway) but I baulked at those Ikea mattresses. I've seen thicker cheese slices. Cheese slices would probably be more comfortable to sleep on 🤣

This week I caught the bedwetting fairies red-handed. This is hardly new news but still, it was an interesting visitation of a type I’m not sure I’ve experienced before so I shall relate it. I was having a remarkably long, convoluted and vivid dream. In it, I was house-sitting overnight in somebody’s house. The house itself and the people I was minding it for kept changing abruptly as they do in dreams unbound from the concrete boots of reality. It was also a lucid dream. I knew it was a dream and that it wasn’t real whilst I was having it. I have these from time to time. At this particular juncture, these dream-people were supposed to be leaving me with the house to attend a party but the evening was drawing on interminably with them constantly finding some reason to further delay their departure. I looked at an old-school “flip-card” digital clock on their wall which read “23:44” and wondered what their party hosts would make of guests arriving well after midnight. Not my problem though. A long dissertation from them was underway from them about the requirements of their large and utterly-unruly dog that was cavorting about before me. It occurred to me that this dog would be of a lot less trouble when my friends had finally left so I could go about ignoring it from out in the backyard where it belonged. This was a dog that needed LESS attention, not more. I looked down to see that the reason that their unpronouncably-Scandinavianly-named wonder-pooch (the friends I was dreaming of HAD actually existed in real life, WERE Scandinavian and DID have a large, over-indulged-and-challenging dog), had stopped jumping on me was in order to have a pee on the carpet instead. It was an impressive quantity and I watched it pool and darken an implausibly-tartan floor. It occurred to me that this latest problem was technically out of my scope: my friends hadn’t left yet and it was THEIR carpet and THEIR dog. So I simply drew to their attention this latest problem pooling beneath their noses and amusedly waited for yet another departure delay. This is where it gets even weirder. I then became aware that I had started wetting my nappy but it wasn’t part of the dream. At some level, I knew this was happening back in bed tucked under the covers laying on my side. That I was wetting myself did NOT reflect in that dream at all. That was just a soggy sensory postcard from a distant reality. The dream-dog incident had resolved itself (because I had decided it so) and there was now new fussing to do with the car they were taking as I felt hot trickling and creeping warmth from pants back in a different mental dimension. I was aware that I was extremely comfortable back in bed and was utterly unbothered by my urinating in the midst of this complicated and somewhat-interesting dream. At some point this dream must have concluded and I lapsed back into deep sleep. Early the next morning I stirred. Grey, weak light was creeping in under the glass sliding door blind. I was STILL curled up on my left side. I was comfortable in bed but I could feel that my nappy felt quite wet. This was unusual. I was wearing a disposable. Disposables generally don’t feel wet, just warm. In particular, I could feel that the wetness was concentrated down one side and that my hip felt like it was resting in a bath. I could clearly recall both the complex dream and apparent pee incident that overlaid it somewhere. This recollection included the disturbing detail that I’d likely fully unloaded my bladder whilst laying on my left hand side. This is typically a death sentence for adult disposable nappies: something that clearly didn’t enter my head at all back when it happened. I wouldn’t do it if I were awake. I’d roll over. Nil desperandum: covering my nappy was my double-terry-lined plastic pants. I’d probably have some laundry to do but the bed should be ok. Some exploratory rummaging around inside those plastic pants revealed however that my Rearz InControl BeDry Night Premium (aka: “Colin”) had, amazingly, risen to this occasion. It was well-used but predominately on one side confirming my recollection. My hip WAS wet. There was a small amount of pee trapped between my skin and the un-padded plastic wing of my Colin but it had stayed there. Amazingly, my terry/plastic pants had remained dry. Colin had dealt with a fairly major nocturnal wee that happened 100% on my side and Colin held it. This was a remarkable effort. I’ve never seen an adult disposable nappy cope that well with this use case. Still, I wouldn’t make a habit of it. Colin is better but in the manner of adult disposable nappies, he is far from infallible. There were some other remarkable aspects to this incident. Firstly, I’d peed myself during some kind of bizarre sleep/dream-state. I didn’t decide to pee (that I was conscious of). I just became aware it was happening because I could FEEL it happening. Secondly, all of my conscious checks and balances were switched off. Despite being aware that I was laying on my side, I just remained in my somnolent state making no effort to stop or reposition myself and enjoyed the comforting physical sensations of a nappy getting wet around me. The thought of leaking simply never occurred to me. I don’t think I was even overtly aware that I was IN a nappy. I just knew that I was warm, comfortable and it was “ok” to pee. Thirdly, the nappy-wetting incident did not appear to directly manifest in my dream (the dog-on-carpet moment didn’t seem to have any obvious symbolism but perhaps it prodded the thought that I too could “go”). I’ve had pee-dreams before. Typically these have involved convoluted scenarios and sequences that attempt to rationalise that I’m about to pee my pants, or that I’ve just peed my pants or I’m in the ACT of peeing my pants whilst asleep in bed. In THIS situation, I simply became aware that I was wetting myself somewhere back in the real-world and at some level, I knew that was NOT part of a dream. I was informed but not consulted. It was actually quite pleasant – especially when I realised I had not leaked at all. A full shout out to Colin the wonder-nappy for surviving the adult disposable nappy torture test of a side-loading.

Nice analogy. I'm a serial-offender for over-analysing Bambi. I often wonder how much quicker "progress" could have been/would be if I could stop doing that. Still, it happens regularly enough now although still not every night. You should receive some kind of award for this! I can remember when I started out. I had to travel for business very frequently (pretty much every other week) and just 2 - 4 days of nappies largely deleted my luggage space. I've discovered that heat makes a big difference to how "wet" I will be. In my climate, the vast majority of the year ranges between warm and hot. "Winter" (such as it is) here is really only 6 - 8 weeks long and even then, daytime temps are usually between 20C and 25C but the nights are crisp. I actually tend to wear heavier day-nappies during winter. My at-home Active Airs may not run the distance. Interesting. There's a chance I might need to take a trip (my first since the pandemic) and if I do, it's likely to be a couple of weeks and managing my bedwetting will be a challenge. Did you re-use dry night nappies (so you could carry a smaller number) or how did you manage this? Did you end up reverting to bedwetting whilst still away or was the week #2 at your return home? This might give me some clues how to navigate here. In my case, this is due to a US-centric browser-side spell checker that hasn't responded to my (desultory) attempts to install a localised English dictionary.

🤣 - Seriously though, surely that would have to be pretty uncomfortable once that pee starts to chill down in there. You really *would* be wet down to your ankles for anything more than a few dribbles. It really does seem like a terrible idea. At least THESE ones aren't sold as day-wear: https://www.pjama.com.au/collections/adult AND they feature some kind of ankle-seal to stop the otherwise-inevitable fall-out...

Wow, THAT would have been an interesting conversation to start with a therapist! Did you have that story told in a thread somewhere? I'd be fascinated to read it. I suspect my beloved would like very much for me to visit a therapist but the objective would be to "cure" me...