Energy Costs of Cloth Diapering

When we first started cloth diapering before Ada was born, I have to admit I was a little wary of the whole process. I thought it would be a nuisance and an inconvenience and that I would regret ever making the switch. I thought the smell would be awful and the mess disgusting. Kindra's posts on cloth diapering helped me to decide to finally make the switch from disposables to cloth.

We've been using cloth diapers for about 3 months now and the results are in - I love cloth diapering! It is a bit more work than using disposables (and I only mean a bit), but the amount of money we are saving makes it all worth while.

Ada's clearly not impressed with the view

One of my friends remarked that she thought of using cloth diapers, but figured that the amount of water she would use to wash them would make the savings negligible.

Liam...future underwear model. He's wearing Happy Heinys, a brand I was introduced to by a generous relative. She bought Ada some of these diapers as a gift and I loved the diapers so much that I had to buy more!

There's lot of websites out there that talk about how much you can save by using cloth diapers, but I wanted to figure out how much savings we were seeing in our little house each month. That way I can give an accurate account to friends and family and it's always nice to know how much we're spending too.

Our washer and dryer came with the house and by no means are they energy efficient. These beasts use a lot of energy, but in spite of all this, still save us big bucks when it comes to diapering.

Here's how much it costs us to wash a load of diapers at our current energy rates:

WASHER
50 gallons/load of water @ $2.20/cubic metre of water = $0.36 of water/load
(one cubic metre of water is about 264 gallons of water)
959 kWh/year of energy@ $0.1125 per kWh = $0.30 of energy/load
$15.99 for a jug of Ecos laundry detergent (105 loads/jug) = $0.15 of laundry detergent/load

Total: $0.81/load


DRYER
898 kWh/year of electricity @0.1125 per kWh = $0.27/dryer load of diapers

Total: $0.27/hour of drying time

For two kids in cloth diapers, I wash about 27 diapers twice a week. In the summer I line dry our clothes. In the winter I also line dry the clothes, but I expect I'll be popping the diapers in the dryer because I'll have too much laundry to line dry all the time.



Let's look at monthly energy costs of cloth diapering:

SUMMER
(washing + line drying)
$6.48

WINTER
(washing + machine drying)
$8.64

If I had both Liam and Ada in disposables, I'd be spending $90/month. This cost is based on how we used to diaper Liam by using the cheap Superstore diapers during the day and the expensive Pamper diapers at night. If we had only one child in diapers, we'd probably be spending $45/month in diapers. This cost would be significantly more if we used only the expensive disposable diapers. No matter how you look at it, cloth diapers are cheaper!

We see more savings because we have two kids in diapers right now. Once Liam is finished potty training, our savings won't seem as impressive, but we'll keep with cloth diapering. Over the past 6 months our bills (fuel, property taxes, water, electricity) have gone up so much that we are now paying $150 more per month than we were in the spring. I guess what I'm saying is cloth diapering helps keep our costs down.

Look out soon for a post on the costs of starting cloth diapering ...(hint: it's not as much as you think)