Cost of Cloth

I love Excel. I’m not an Excel master like some people I know, but I do love to make use of its great features to solve problems. I was lucky enough to be able to work in Excel all day every day when I was working. Now I have a better job, but Excel use is limited to our budget and fun little side projects. Yes, I said fun projects when referring to Excel. :) Paying attention to our budget is important these days since we went from DINKs (Dual Income No Kids) to ahh…insert catchy acronym here to describe our current state of happy family of three with a single income. Oh, that sounds good, we are a FOTSI (Family Of Three Single Income)! A family of four (or five) would be a FOFSI. Anyway, our budget is in Excel, and its fantastic and lots of fun to use. Our income is entered, along with our eleven consistent bills/donations that range from basic utilities to life insurance and church offering. We then track expenses in 23 different categories but still seem to have to use the miscellaneous category now and then. If this sounds like overkill, it probably is. However, we can tell you just how much money we have spent eating out or on clothing in the last month, two months, or two years. It is very helpful to see where our money is going or where it isn’t going. At the close of each month, we take all the data and turn it into an array of graphs that compare what we spent in each category to what was budgeted in each category along with monthly averages and number of catagories over and under budget. And when I say we, I mean we created a macro that does it all at a push of a button while also adding a new month tab. Oh yea, I use macros, buttons, and the works at home. For fun. I love it. Even when there’s lots of red and I realize I have to change my spending habits; it’s so easy to look at that it takes a bit of stress out of money issues, which we thankfully don't have much (probably due to being this into saving, budgeting, and tracking). There’s no arguing over money because the facts are there. So, Excel gets used for our budget and projects. Yesterday, I had one of the best types of projects. It included Excel AND cloth diapers.

I’ve been doing cloth diaper (or fluff) laundry for 29 days and have had 15 DWDs. Allen comments that it seems like I’m always doing fluff laundry. No, he doesn’t call it fluff like I do, he says diapers. I have it down to a routine at this point. Every other night, I throw the diapers, wipes, and every other time the diaper pail liner into the washer with just a bit of detergent to run a short cold wash to get rid of the ick. Once this cycle is done, I add some OxiClean Baby and soak overnight. If the pail liner was in the cycle I take it out to dry before soaking. In the morning, I drain the washer, and then do a hot long wash with two rinses and detergent. Once the diapers are clean, they get tossed into the dryer for about an hour. I really want to dry outside; however, I don’t have enough diapers to do this. I don’t know if it is worth buying another dozen to dry outside or not. That question, along with Allen’s thought that I’m always doing wash and thus always using water and shortening the life of our W/D which will eventually costs us, prompted the project I started yesterday to find out how much this fluff laundry is really costing me and when I’ll break even.

I know some of you are curious about using cloth with your next baby (or current baby), so I thought I'd share my findings with you!

The first thing I did yesterday was to list out all the fluff cost I’ve had. I know I listed some on my earlier post Cloth 101 but I didn’t list everything. In fact, Allen is often reminding me of things I “forgot” to count against my total investment. I listed everything that I have purchased or received as a gift. To those of you who gave me a cloth diaper accessory – cover, snappie, or wetbag, I’m going to recoup your money too! Thank you for supporting me and my cloth habits! I really appreciate it. So, first I want to break even on our investment – that’s $300. With all the gifts it totals $370. Now, we probably could have gotten away with $225 but we purchased a few things that would help the process. A diaper pail with a foot pedal (probably didn't need the stainless steel variant, but...), a diaper pail liner, a second type of cloth wipes (because I didn’t really like the ones I had, though Allen prefers them to the new ones), a bigger wet bag for full day trips, etc. So, $300 and $370 are our numbers.

Allen’s big thing is how much work I’m putting our W/D through every day. Its seems on my off day from diapers I have a load or two of our clothes to do. Laundry every day for me. So how much does it cost per load to do diapers? I found a couple of different sites that broke down the cost, and I played with the numbers for how I do laundry and came up with $1.75 a load. Don’t worry babe, this includes depreciation of the washer and dryer. I typically do 24 diapers at a time, so it costs 7 cents to wash each diaper and wipe.

Another important number is how much disposable diapers and wipes cost. Based on Anna’s current diaper size, this is 21 cents for each diaper and wipe combo.

So far; I’ve washed about 360 diapers, that’s a total of $325.24 on cloth (initial costs and washing costs) and it would have been $78.00 on disposables.

So, then I let Excel do its thing, and I figured that it will take me 2000 diaper changes to recoup my costs and 2480 diaper changes to recoup yours as well. 2000 diapers is roughly 166 days and that takes us through to August 2, 2011. That’s about 5.5 months after I started using them. August 2nd will be a big day, its Anna’s 8 month birthday AND her Aunt’s Birthday! 2480 diapers is roughly 207 days or September 12, 2011. After those dates, I’ll just be paying to wash diapers not the diapers themselves.

Cool, huh?  Even cooler when you realize that by Anna's second birthday (you know, the real ones at a whole year mark) we will have saved $1225.  Now, technically, we will have to buy a set of larger diapers, but the cost per disposable diaper keeps going up, so we will call that even...

Now, here's the coolest thing... for a second kid, we save from day 1!


Here's my lovely model wearing a bikini twisted prefold.
These are the diapers I purchased.

 

Here she is wearing a origami folded flat diaper.

My Nana found a pack of these diapers and gave them to me!

Gotta love free fluff!