Cloth Diaper Cost Breakdown

It’s been a while since I’ve posted about cloth diapering, but Nora is two years and two months old, and we are still going strong. We’ve touched on potty training (more on that in another post, I suppose!) but our girl just isn’t ready yet. So she continues to sport a fluffy butt, and with every passing day, we are saving more and more money.

If you’re interested in learning more about our cloth diaper journey, check out these past posts:

• Our decision to cloth diaper/building a starter stash
• The beginning of cloth diapering a REAL BABY :)
• The transition to pocket diapers/one-size pockets 101
• Trouble with overnight leaks at 14 months old

With that last one—the overnight leaks—I don’t think I ever updated about our solution. Honestly, we’ve been using disposables at nighttime ever since. We used Huggies Overnights at first, but soon discovered that generic disposables (Wegmans or Target) work just fine for Nora. It’s not ideal—of course we would’ve liked to continue cloth diapering around the clock—but using one disposable per day is not a big deal. And I’m actually happy we made it to 14 months being able to use cloth overnight, because it seems like a lot of the other cloth diaper mamas I know don’t even make it that long. The overnight wetting/leaking, in my experience, is an inevitable problem—it’s not about IF you will experience it, but when.

Anyway, a few weeks ago, a reader e-mailed me asking about the cost of cloth diapering. I had never added it up—or at least I hadn’t added it up in a very long time—so curiosity got the best of me (plus, I wanted to help). I sat down one night and went back through my cloth diaper and accessories ordering history and added up everything to share with her. And now, I want to share with you. This type of information was supremely helpful to me when I was researching, so I hope it’s useful for some of you.

The very first order—the prefolds and the snappis—was placed with Green Mountain Diapers. Every single order after that was placed with my favorite online cloth diaper store, Abby’s Lane. With Abby’s Lane, you get rewards dollars for every dollar you spend there, and over time you can accumulate enough to buy yourself free products. You’ll see a few times noted within the chart where I used those to bring down the total of a purchase.

Also, it should be noted that you can absolutely spend less money than this on cloth diapers. It depends on your needs, and how often you want to do laundry. We’ve discovered over time that having 24-25 diapers allows us to do diaper laundry only every three days, which we like. If you do laundry every other day, you can get by with ~6 fewer diapers. We also like having three wet bags for the three days at daycare. If you aren’t dealing with daycare, you may not need that many.

Now, how does this price breakdown compare to disposables, you might wonder? I wondered, too. So I did some math based on the cost of the disposables we’re currently using for nighttime—again, they are generic brand—and they cost $30.24 for a box of 140 diapers (or $0.21/diaper). A quick search on Amazon tells me that Pampers can be had for $0.23 to $0.36/diaper, depending on which type you get. As far as disposables are concerned, it appears that $0.21/diaper is pretty cheap.

I estimate that we use about six diapers per day for Nora. Obviously there are days when that is higher, and it WAS higher during the newborn days. But for the sake of this comparison, let’s use 6 diapers/day for the entirety of Nora’s life so far.

Nora is roughly 2 years and 70 days old.

365 x 2 + 70 = 800 days.
800 x 6 diapers =  4,800 diaper changes in her life (staggering, huh??)
4,800 / 140 diapers in a box = roughly 34 boxes of diapers
34 boxes x $30.24 = $1,028.16

Now, this isn’t an exact science. It’s rough math, since we haven’t ALWAYS bought disposables in bulk like this (so they’re more expensive per diaper in that case), and plus there are a few more diapers per package in the smaller sizes than in the size 4s she is in now. AND, we have bought a few boxes of diapers on sale as well, so those boxes would bring the cost down a little bit. I figure these two factors cancel each other out. In any case, you get the gist.

We have a high-efficiency front-loader washing machine, so I don’t see any real impact on our water bill. And for detergent, we use Charlie’s Soap, which we actually use for ALL of our laundry now. We do diaper laundry on every third day (so just twice a week), so although those extra scoops add up over time, I still don’t think it’s enough to negate the savings we’ve seen from cloth diapering.

In summary, we’ve spent $613.40 on cloth diapers. We would’ve spent approximately $1,028.16 on disposables through this point… it’s a savings of over $400 and she’s not even potty trained yet, so it’ll end up being even more savings by the time she is.

Oh, and we could potentially use these same diapers for a second kid! Even if we decide to get a fresh new stash for baby # 2 someday (which we actually might do), I’ll be able to sell our current diapers to recoup a portion of the money we spent… which you obviously can’t do with disposables. As far as I’m concerned, that’s all icing on the cake.

At the end of the day, it’s my philosophy that you have to want to cloth diaper for more than just the money savings. It’s not a TON of work, but it is more time consuming than pitching a disposable into the garbage, so you have to WANT to do it. I would absolutely do it again, and plan to with another child some day.

For us, cloth diapering a toddler is really no different than cloth diapering an infant. The exclusively breastfeeding days are definitely the easiest cloth diapering days, but once you get into a routine with the solids, it’s really no big deal.

Have I mentioned that cloth diapers are CUTE?! And colorful. Nora requests diapers by color. :)

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Now that I finished that beast of a post, and since we’re on the subject, I want to try help out my sister-in-law by seeing if anyone might possibly have an interest in buying some VERY gently used prefold diapers and Thirsties (Size 1) covers. My sister-in-law was so encouraged by our cloth diaper experience that she decided to do it for her own son (our 4-month-old nephew, Bryce). Bryce wasn’t much a fan of the prefolds, though, and Marie was able to get him into the one-size pocket diapers when he was only a month old. She only ended up using the prefolds and covers one time, but thankfully her cloth diapering experience has been smooth sailing ever since.

Prefolds and covers work well for a lot of other people, though—we used them starting when Nora was about two weeks old, all the way up to 8-10 weeks—so Marie is trying to unload her barely used diapers to a good home.

Up for sale are:

• 23 unbleached Green Mountain Diapers prefolds (newborn size, orange edge)
• 6 Thirsties covers, Size 1 (colors: celery, sky blue (2), white, butter, and ocean)
• 1 Snappi fastener

Marie is selling the whole lot for $75 plus shipping. Please leave a comment or e-mail me at heatherdriveblog@yahoo.com if you are interested and I’ll set you up with her.