Bladder Games By The Numbers

[Will Ford]

I have a few days with no housemates around and I'm doing some experimenting. I will admit up front that I'm obsessed with spreadsheets and numeric progressions. Here's the protocol I'm trying today.

[Will Ford]

Man, not bad. ABU Cushies at 8.4 times initial weight (1,446 mg. over initial weight of 154 mg). Granted the Attends still wins at 11.7 times, but the Cushies was a lot cuter. Speaking of cute, I'll try a Super Dry Kids now.

[Bonsai]

Missing variable: salt ingestion rate.

The greater the salt content in your urine, the harder it will become for SAP to absorb it.

[Will Ford]

Missing variable: salt ingestion rate.

The greater the salt content in your urine, the harder it will become for SAP to absorb it.

[rusty pins]

Who would have thought we would find the 6th Mythbuster here on Daily Diapers!

[Will Ford]

Who would have thought we would find the 6th Mythbuster here on Daily Diapers!

[Will Ford]

Second day protocol: From 8:00 am to 1:00 pm I drank 946 ml (32 oz) per hour: water, Gatorade, and some milk. Then I cut to half that pace for a few more hours, then just normal drinking. I wore each diaper until it was at max capacity. For cloth this meant any pooling in the plastic pants at the crotch, and for disposables this meant slight leaking at the legs, usually when I sat down, or any moisture in the PUL pants if I used them. I had underpads on all seats.

I should add that I'm on vacation this week.

I'd already read a lot about water intoxication and I figured I was within reasonable bounds: I had the Gatorade and some food, and I was watching for signs that my body was telling me to stop.

OK, why? I had several goals:

Goal 1. See if it was possible to drink this much and see what would happen. Would I reach a point where I was a steady-state pee machine, with output matching input? Would I instead hit a wall?

Results: After a while it wasn't pleasant, but I didn't seem to suffer from it. I got to the point where I would wet every 5-10 minutes, sometimes more frequently. Even so there were some slow periods and some floods.

The correct way to measure output would have been a foley catheter and a bed bag. I could have measured every five minutes. But that would have interfered with some of the other goals below, so I just weighed all used diapers. Taking just the last 1.5 hours of the heavy-drinking period when I'd really gotten going, the rate was 818 ml/hour. That was followed by a three-hour period of 619 ml/hour while I cut the drink volume in half. Input during the first period was 946 ml/hour. So I got most of the way toward output = input, and during the second period I was getting rid of 146 ml/hour more than I was taking in.

Goal 2. Wear and wet a lot of diapers because it's fun. I've been out of the game for a while and I wanted a lot of wetting and changing action.

Results: Including the previous day I got to try a Bianco, Attends Extended Wear, Goodnight, ABU Cushies, ABU Super Dry Kids, Depends Real Fit, a few thin cloth training pants, and 44" by 44" flat cloth diapers in a few different folds.

I tried a few oddball things like wearing a Goodnites Bed Mat as a diaper. If you remember the very first disposable diapers that were just a big rectangle folded in, you'll know what I'm talking about. And I tried wetting a thin training pant (no waterproof cover) while sitting on a stack of diapers. But even though I did a few strange things I still measured everything.

Goal 3. Drink a lot from a bottle because it's fun.

Results: This was great. I have an adult-sized Nuk nipple and I carefully made the hole with a toothpick and razor blade. I did gallons of bottle-feeding during this run. The only thing that might have been better would be some variety. Next time I should have some formula, Ensure, juice, etc. I'm mostly a DL, not an AB, but I really like bottle feeding.

Goal 4. Find the outer-limits capacity for several kinds of diapers, experiment with different cloth folds, see the patterns of wet and dry on a maxed-out diaper, and learn what each kind of diaper felt like when it was near capacity and how it failed.

Results: Tons of data. Mostly I go by the ratio of initial weight vs. maxed-out weight. Subtracting one from the other you get the amount of pee, then I take the ratio of that to initial weight. So the best I saw from a normal cloth diaper was a 2.37 ratio, in this case an initial weight of 235 grams and it held 557 grams (19 oz.) of pee. The best regular cloth liner got to 2.44, and a hemp liner from Snap EZ got to 2.92, though I only tried the hemp liner once and it's possible it could do better. The regular cloth diaper and liner each got multiple tries.

I should note that not all of my results on capacity are from the few hours of the "experiment". I've been pushing all of my diapers over the last two days to capacity. The things I do for science.

On to disposables. Naturally the capacity winner was the Bianco with a ratio of 11.81 and a staggering 1,877 grams (63 oz.) of pee. That's basically a half gallon. The thing weighed 4.5 pounds by the end. So the Bianco is a great feat of diaper engineering, but I have to wonder what it's for. I maxed it out in three hours, but that was under extreme conditions. Normally someone my size would produce a little more than that in a whole day, and I don't think anyone would leave a diaper on for that long. Even if you take 2 liters per day and divide that up only over 16 waking hours, assuming that production slows way down while you're asleep, the Bianco would still last for 15 hours. Of course in real life you wouldn't push any diaper to capacity, so say 10 hours?

Goal 5. As a psychological game, see if I could get to a submissive space where I didn't want to drink any more from the bottle, or wet my diaper, or leak onto the chair, or put on a new diaper, but I "had to".

Results: Sort of. I got to a point where it was pretty annoying to keep drinking, timing, changing, weighing, filling in the spreadsheet. There was a small part of my brain that could pretend I was being forced. But I was focusing more on the task than on getting into a sub space. This is something I'd like to get better at.

[Will Ford]

Some further thoughts. I'm taking it on faith that someone out there is transfixed by this data geekery.

[Baby Brian]

So what were the results? What diapers did you test, and how well did they perform?

[Will Ford]

So what were the results? What diapers did you test, and how well did they perform?