I was wrong. I have lots of suds

[etwahl]

Here I am on my fourth wash cycle. I think I was looking at the cycle during the wrong time when I thought there were no suds because I did a wash tonight then decided to do more in case I had build-up and four wash cycles later I'm STILL getting tons of suds.

Will they ever go away at this point?

Tammy,
mom to Lauren (March 2003)

[mommyoftwo]

Yup, but it can take forever. I had gotten a dozen prefolds off of diaperswappers or ebay or something and it took me 7 full cycles on hot to get almost all of the suds to go away. It was a pain and now I use washing soda/simple green to avoid the problem. So far that has worked better than anything else. If you don't alread, do a rinse cycle after your wash cycle each time to help prevent buildup.

[etwahl]

What is washing soda? So far I've always used Allen's Naturally (one ounce) but we have really soft water, so maybe that was too much? Plus I use Tide Free for our regular laundry, and I'm wondering if maybe there was a bit of residue left behind in our washer that was getting on the dipes from regular laundry loads?

It's so frustrating. We've just started having smell issues in the past week and now it makes me want to quit. I feel like I'm wasting sooooo much water (never mind that our electric and water bill went up dramatically once we started cding) and worrying that the suds will never go away. PLUS I'm only washing half our diapers and will have to do this all again with the other half.

I love cding, but why, oh why, does it have to be so darn complicated?

Tammy,
mom to Lauren (March 2003)

[mommyoftwo]

Washing soda is a laundry additive that you will find next to the borax and big laundry boxes of baking soda. It's made by arm and hammer and comes in a yellow box. It sometimes can be a little tricky to find so you might want to call around first. I've found it at a couple of our grocery stores. If you use a couple of ounces of washing soda and around 15 squirts of simple green then you don't have to use detergent. Of course you can experiment to see what works best for you. The other thing is that if you have really soft water then you may very well need less detergent. Experiment with how much you use. You only need enough to get some suds so you can try this. Start your load with only a tiny amount of detergent. If you don't get suds when it starts agitating, add a little more until you do get suds. Now you know how much you need, you won't have to do that again and hopefully you won't get so much buildup. I hope that helps. I really do like the washing soda/simple green combo though. It's worked great for us.

[new_mommy25]

When you stop the water to check for suds be sure to wait about 5 minutes. Quite often there are oxygen bubbles from all the agitation that can look like suds. I learned that the hard way.