>I had found this calculator to help determine the cost of cloth diapering vs. disposables.  Because our new house has a well, there’s no cost for the water itself.  We have an HE washer so when using hot water, it’s not more than absolutely necessary.  I don’t know how much the electricity to run a loan (ha typo but it’s funny so it stays) through the washer costs, but I doubted it was excessive.

That left the detergent.  I had gotten a crazy deal on method baby detergent, and that combined with the HE washer and our soft water meant that I barely had to cover the eensy teensy cap of the 3x concentrated detergent in order to wash a load.

Unfortunately, I discovered that there are a lot of ingredients that are no-nos for cloth and that only certain detergents are cloth-diaper safe, none of which seemed to be locally available to me.

Since I am used to paying a maximum of $3/bottle for our detergent, or up to $6 for baby detergent, $15/bottle BEFORE shipping put me off.

I wanted to cloth diaper so I wasn’t putting chemicals on my baby’s butt or diapers in the landfill.  The potential savings sounded great too.  Even if cloth cost the same as my rock bottom price for disposables, I’d still be interested.  But more?  Not so much. 

I’d have to order 4 bottles to bring the price down to $12.50/bottle (more than double what I’d usually consider paying for baby detergent) and I simply didn’t want to invest that much in my little cloth diaper experiment, since I didn’t even know if this would work out.

My hubby and I joke that we are too poor to have convictions.  If it were my choice, I would shop locally, organic, do everything green and so forth.  Unfortunately, we just don’t have the financial resources to do so.  We pick & choose and do what we can afford and what’s most important to us.

With that, I pretty much figured I was done & wouldn’t get to try them.

>I had spent enough time on the diaperswappers forums to know that well cared for, high quality cloth diapers had decent resale value.

I also discovered that diapers.com sold bumgenius 3.0s, and that 3 of them would add up to enough to get free shipping.  So, I figured I’d order 3 and try them.  If I hated them, I’d resell them and at least I could say I’d tried.

Before I ordered, I started researching washing methods, which led me down the sudsy, convoluted road to detergent land.