Cloth Diaper Update
Yesterday someone asked the Mr. and I about using cloth diapers and how much we saved from using them. I had to admit that I had not looked at the numbers for awhile. After opening the excel spreadsheet and pulling up our last update post I can see why! Our daughter has been in the same size for over 500 days!
Over those 500 days the savings has really started to add up. To date we have saved over $1,319 by using cloth diapers and have also kept 5092 diaper out of the landfill. BUT, that's just the beginning. Here are the details so far.
Over the last 500 days our daughter has been in a size large. While in this size it has cost us $0.90 per day/$27.12 per month to diaper her. That comes out to a total of $508.21. It would have cost us $1,313 to have used disposables over that same period of time.
Just for fun I plugged in the numbers to see approximately what the net cost will be once we are done with this size and done with diapering all together. After we sell the diapers we are currently using it would have cost us apx. $0.43 per day/ $12.99 per month to diaper our daughter from birth to potty trained. This would give us a savings of $1,622.07 over the course of those two years.
I love seeing numbers like that! Do you know how much your diapers cost you per day? What's holding you back from trying cloth diapers?
3 comments:
Just out of curiousity, did you factor in the cost of laundering the diapers? I am attracted to the idea of cloth diapering, but as we use coin-operated machines, the cost would be much higher in our case.
Great question! In our cloth diapering post, reader Heidi shared her laundry math. It's really quite negligible, for home laundry that is. More so for us as we are on well water, and use HE front loaders.
For coin laundry, you could simply add those costs in as a line item under the Cloth side. So let's estimate....
Our newborn went through ~14 diapers per day. Granted, the newborn size are pretty small, so estimate maybe 4 loads per week? Multiply by the number of weeks in that size (~7 for us) = 28 loads for the newborn (they go through a LOT of diapers at that age). Then multiply by the cost per load and you have it. I have no idea what it would cost to wash and dry at a coin laundry these days, so your mileage may vary here. If it's $2 per, then that's $56. Even with that added in, we still would have been $187 ahead, just in the newborn size. (see the spreadsheet post)
What may be a bigger issue is the diaper covers that aren't supposed to go through the dryer. May have to defer to the Mrs. or the readers here...
Anyways, thanks for the question - am I off on the cost of coin laundry? It's been several years....
Glad to see you did the math! I use cloth diapers with my daughter and am always trying to convince friends to switch. I write about cloth on my blog as well.
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