Laundry Cost

[tuffy]

I've wanted to figure out the actual laundry costs for quite a while, so I've been collecting some numbers here and there and finally have enough to build a vague picture.

So, first the diapers. I'm using the Babykins hook and loop diaper, 3 during the day and 2 at night along with a couple of boosters.

I'm using a Whirlpool Duet washer/dryer combo circa 2004. The water consumption is where I'm making an educated guess because reading our water meter before and after isn't practical at the moment. The gas consumption, I got off our meter, but those things aren't designed to give you the granularity necessary, so there is some guess work there as well. The electricity I measured with a Kill-A-Watt device.

When I'm wearing, I do laundry every other day, but each morning, I run the previous days diapers through the rinse & spin cycle and hang them up to dry. From what I can tell from the instructions that came with the washer, it uses about 8 gallons each time it fills up the tub. I also use the extra rinse during the wash, so that's about 40 gallons of water.

According to the Kill-A-Watt, running 2 rinse & spin cycles, 1 wash and 1 dry, we use about 0.51 KWH of electricity and my best guess on the gas meter is we're using about 1/8 an MCF of natural gas. The only way to know exactly, is to put a camera on the meter and count the number of times the 2 cubic feet dial spins around and I haven't done that yet.

Our electricity costs around 9.599 cents per KWH, the water costs $6.69 per thousand gallons and the natural gas costs about $5.918 per MCF. Oh, and the detergent costs about 15 cents per load.

Here's the totals:

• Electricity: 0.51 * .09599 = $0.05
• Water: 40 * 6.69 / 1000 = $0.27
• Gas: 125 * 5.918 / 1000 = $0.74
• Soap: $0.15
• Total: $1.20

The amount I spent on the cloth diapers, inserts and water proof pants back in 2018 was comparable to what I would have spent for 2 months of 24x7 use of disposables back then. Given that my ongoing cost is around 12 cents per diaper, I think I'll stick with cloth.

Now for the elephant in the room... labor. The whole wash/dry/put away process is about 2 1/2 hours long though my involvement is about a half hour of loading, transferring, unloading and putting away every other day. While the washer and dryer are running, I'm doing other things, but I have to be at home for that and that's a trade off I'm willing to make. If I had a 9 to 5 job away from home, I'd probably opt to keep using disposables.

 

[rusty pins]

Wish I lived where your electricity, water, gas and soap are that low cost!  .85 to wash and dry a load of laundry seems extremely cheap to me.

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

What has gotten rediculous is the original price. If you ebay up "prefold baby diapers", you will fidn that a 10 pack of Gerber 6-ply diapers can run around 29.50 USD with shipping. I see single cloth prefolds going for as much as 35+ USD. These are not 10 times bigger than the baby prefolds. I suspect this has to do with being a niche item. Now, just how many uses you get out of it I do not know. Another disproportionately large cost is the panties. A good pair of snap-on panties with a high waist can set you back 45 USD, that being 7 mil. Now, baby panties come standard with sufficient coverage, etc. Again, these have become niche items. So you need to get a lot of mileage out of them. Since I started using the BabyDoll diapers in 2009 and keeping them in repair I have gotten 15 years and I am beginning my 3rd set of panties, the firt being Comco and lasting about 5 with the BabyDolls and a couple with the preivious ones, the decond being Gary 7-mil snap-on lasting me 10 and I expect the same from the third, which I am just starting on, at a suage of 6 times weekly, changing each panty with the diaper. So I am an extraordinary example. As I said. the basic kit would be a dozen diapers and 4 pull-on panti4es, preferably high waist

How, one estimate of laundry costs ar 1 to 3 USD/load and another is 85 cents. I will average the first cost as 2, which, to average out with the other estimate , 2.85/2=1.48. The first esimate, the load size being 10 is 8.5 cents, the second, unstated, I will presume is 10 which comes to 20 cents each. That averages down to about 15 cents per use for care. Now there is still that big initial outlay. Depending on how many uses you get per diaper and panty. and I think that 2 USD average is quite high, I would be suprised if the total average would be more than 75 cents per use over the lifespan of a diaper and panty (the elastics being the weak link of the latter) in the Comco and the hardening of the material being the weak link in the Gary, but the latter lasting a decade the way I use them).. Now, the cost to make a BabyDoll diaper was far less than the cost of an adult prefold

At any rate, even with the high front end costs, which, the longer the item lasts, the more that intial cost is amortized down, the per use cost of re-usable items is less than that of equivalent disposables (basic vs premium: Depends vs ABU). Also, when you take into account that the throw-awy is not actually disposed of, but sits in "post consumer storage". While attempts at recycling are being made, so fiar they are just impractical "look what we can do" stunts and who wants to wear something or use something in a different form that someone else took a dump in? One Murphy event with whidepread effects will kill that industry off. And after 2020, do you REALLY trust the Chinese to be competent and transparent in health matters? And that is who will be running that industry. Given their totalitarian government's hostility to the West, they might consider arranging such a event. With reusables, once you do the initial wash, you know they have not been in some third world place whose health codes you have no knowledge of. Who do you trust more, yourslef or someone in some remote artea who has no personal stake in the care of intimate apparel?

[tuffy]

6 hours ago, rusty pins said:

Wish I lived where your electricity, water, gas and soap are that low cost!  .85 to wash and dry a load of laundry seems extremely cheap to me.

Well, I looked up the rates on the utility web sites last night at 1am last night, so of course I got it wrong. This morning I pulled my most recent invoices and found I was off by about 1/3. So the cost goes up to $1.20 per load and 12 cents a diaper which doesn't really change my calculus. I'll update the original post to reflect the correct numbers.

Edit: You can buy the detergent from Amazon at 15 cents a load here. We get ours at the local grocery store for about $8.50 though I'm always looking for a better deal.

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

38 minutes ago, tuffy said:

Well, I looked up the rates on the utility web sites last night at 1am last night, so of course I got it wrong. This morning I pulled my most recent invoices and found I was off by about 1/3. So the cost goes up to $1.20 per load and 12 cents a diaper which doesn't really change my calculus. I'll update the original post to reflect the correct numbers.

Edit: You can buy the detergent from Amazon at 15 cents a load here. We get ours at the local grocery store for about $8.50 though I'm always looking for a better deal.

Do not forget the panties, they have to be cleaned to. The most significant cost is the purchase costs, which is why you want to use good quality items since the more uses you get from the diapers and panties, the further down the total cost is amortized. Let's say you pay $30 for the diaper, you get 50 uses out of it, that makes the cost .12 x 50 + 30 / 50. Now, let's say you get 100 uses, That becomes .12 x 100 +30/100.Another way you could affect the cost is if you added to the number of diapers per load, instead of 10, you could wash 20 per load, the cost per diaper would go down to maybe 9 cents

[tuffy]

4 hours ago, Little BabyDoll Christine said:

Do not forget the panties, they have to be cleaned to. The most significant cost is the purchase costs, which is why you want to use good quality items since the more uses you get from the diapers and panties, the further down the total cost is amortized. Let's say you pay $30 for the diaper, you get 50 uses out of it, that makes the cost .12 x 50 + 30 / 50. Now, let's say you get 100 uses, That becomes .12 x 100 +30/100.Another way you could affect the cost is if you added to the number of diapers per load, instead of 10, you could wash 20 per load, the cost per diaper would go down to maybe 9 cents

Ok, I'll dig through my purchase history at Kins and NorthShore to see what I was actually spending. I started buying the Kins diapers in the fall of 2018. They were $34 each and I ended up buying 12 over the course of the next couple of years. I also bought 4 of their waterproof pants for $25 each and some boosters at $16 each. I wash the pants, boosters and the washcloths I use for wipes with the diapers at no extra cost. The pants I hang up to dry, the boosters and wash cloths get dried with everything else.

Looks like the total cost over time was around $600. That replaces (really phased out) a combination of NorthShore Supreme and Supreme Lite I was using and given that I'm not 24x7 I was spending about $150/month. Switching to cloth, my break even point was about 4 months, not 2. As I ramped up my cloth usage, I cut back on disposables. After 6 years, I'm still using the same diapers and waterproof pants.

Ok, let's estimate the number of washes the Kins diapers have been through. I'm not 24x7, but more like 35%  to 50% depending on my workload, so let's assume 40%. I normally wear 5 a day and I've been using them for about 5 years. So 365 * 5 * 5 * 40% is 3650 diapers I haven't sent to a landfill. Divide that by my stock of 12 and you get a little over 300 times each diaper has been washed. They are still in fine shape. While I'd like to replace the hook and loops with something better, they still work fine (and I'm still looking for that better solution).

PS: Let's not forget about the waterproof pants. I normally use 2 at a time alternating them while the other 2 are in the wash. So someone correct me if I'm wrong, that's the same as having a 4 day rotation where each pair is in use 25% of the time. That gives us 365 * 5 & 40% / 4 which is 180 or so washes.

Edited March 17 by tuffy
added the analysis for the waterproof pants

[foreverdl]

16 hours ago, tuffy said:

I've wanted to figure out the actual laundry costs for quite a while, so I've been collecting some numbers here and there and finally have enough to build a vague picture.

So, first the diapers. I'm using the Babykins hook and loop diaper, 3 during the day and 2 at night along with a couple of boosters.

I'm using a Whirlpool Duet washer/dryer combo circa 2004. The water consumption is where I'm making an educated guess because reading our water meter before and after isn't practical at the moment. The gas consumption, I got off our meter, but those things aren't designed to give you the granularity necessary, so there is some guess work there as well. The electricity I measured with a Kill-A-Watt device.

When I'm wearing, I do laundry every other day, but each morning, I run the previous days diapers through the rinse & spin cycle and hang them up to dry. From what I can tell from the instructions that came with the washer, it uses about 8 gallons each time it fills up the tub. I also use the extra rinse during the wash, so that's about 40 gallons of water.

According to the Kill-A-Watt, running 2 rinse & spin cycles, 1 wash and 1 dry, we use about 0.51 KWH of electricity and my best guess on the gas meter is we're using about 1/8 an MCF of natural gas. The only way to know exactly, is to put a camera on the meter and count the number of times the 2 cubic feet dial spins around and I haven't done that yet.

Our electricity costs around 9.599 cents per KWH, the water costs $6.69 per thousand gallons and the natural gas costs about $5.918 per MCF. Oh, and the detergent costs about 15 cents per load.

Here's the totals:

• Electricity: 0.51 * .09599 = $0.05
• Water: 40 * 6.69 / 1000 = $0.27
• Gas: 125 * 5.918 / 1000 = $0.74
• Soap: $0.15
• Total: $1.20

The amount I spent on the cloth diapers, inserts and water proof pants back in 2018 was comparable to what I would have spent for 2 months of 24x7 use of disposables back then. Given that my ongoing cost is around 12 cents per diaper, I think I'll stick with cloth.

Now for the elephant in the room... labor. The whole wash/dry/put away process is about 2 1/2 hours long though my involvement is about a half hour of loading, transferring, unloading and putting away every other day. While the washer and dryer are running, I'm doing other things, but I have to be at home for that and that's a trade off I'm willing to make. If I had a 9 to 5 job away from home, I'd probably opt to keep using disposables.

 

I can't imagine having electric that cheap. We have a 3 tier level, and our low level is >33 cents a KWH. It has doubled here in the past 5 yrs, from about .16. cents. I have not done much math but I figured it's cheaper to do the disposable and put a cloth layer inside against my skin, that way I only have to wash that stuff 2 times a week. In the summer time I will hang out to dry, but the price of natural gas keeps going up also. The cost of mountain living..............

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

It seems to me about the only way you could gain more savings is if you made the diapers yourself. There is a section in RUBBER PANTIES'R'US that leads t a site about making your own. I think mine cost about $8 to make in 2009. DIY'ing, for those who can, yields tremndous saving of initial costs

It might be a good idea to put a final summary table of costs and how they compare to using throw-aways since I intend to put this in the knowledge Base that I created in the Tech Support subforum

[tuffy]

3 hours ago, foreverdl said:

I can't imagine having electric that cheap. We have a 3 tier level, and our low level is >33 cents a KWH. It has doubled here in the past 5 yrs, from about .16. cents. I have not done much math but I figured it's cheaper to do the disposable and put a cloth layer inside against my skin, that way I only have to wash that stuff 2 times a week. In the summer time I will hang out to dry, but the price of natural gas keeps going up also. The cost of mountain living..............

I do live in the oil patch, so that helps on the energy prices. There's a lot of oil and gas production here and most of the electricity is made from natural gas. Sadly, not much in the way of mountains though. For a long time my brother kept trying to convince me to move to the Denver area, but I kept telling him I didn't want to lower my standard of living.

1 hour ago, Little BabyDoll Christine said:

It seems to me about the only way you could gain more savings is if you made the diapers yourself. There is a section in RUBBER PANTIES'R'US that leads t a site about making your own. I think mine cost about $8 to make in 2009. DIY'ing, for those who can, yields tremndous saving of initial costs

I do plan to make my own for the next batch whenever the Kins start to wear out. I'm not overly fond of flannel when the nap begins to wear off. I do like the hourglass design with the elastics in the legs and back. That seems to fit my fat ass better than using a large flat or a prefold. I'm also not fond of the thickness of whats available today. I'd rather stack up extra layers so they dry faster. When I get to that point, I'll start another thread about the construction. In the mean time, as I collect more data on washing, I'll update this thread.

[Little BabyDoll Christine]

Another difference between cloth and throw-aways is the question of "wasting" a diaper. A cloth diaper does not have to be wet to the point of dripping to be used properly since it will be re-use. In fact sometimes you do not even have to wet it at all if you do not wish to; and a BabyDoll diaper can be pulled down and put back up. A disposable is not so user-friendly. To get the most use of it, you have to wet it to the max. You are not getting full value unless you are swimming in it

There had been schemes for disposible diapers and panties made of textiles ever since 1939

http://other.sandralyn.net/1942.html