The Great Diaper Debate: Year 1 Update

Every parent in the world has a universal complaint: diapers are f*cking expensive. Just prior to the birth of our first child I wrote about the Great Diaper Debate seeking an answer to the question: Which is cheaper, cloth or disposable diapers? I’m back with an examination of the data after a year of diapers.

Read part 1 of the Diaper Debate series here.

In the first part of my series on the Great Diaper Debate I analyzed the projected costs of going with disposables, the projected costs of going with cloth diapers, and compared the numbers. The clear winner? Cloth diapers, with savings potentially in the thousands of dollars. After a year of living the cloth diaper life, I’m back with the hard numbers on what we actually paid. Before I get started today I want to clarify one thing: I’m not counting in my costs expenses you pay whether you use disposable or cloth diapers. For example, wipes are necessary whether you’re throwing away your diapers or washing them so I didn’t log how much we paid for wipes. Likewise diaper caddies, diaper bags, and other accessories that are cloth/disposable agnostic aren’t being considered in my math. We also use a daycare that supports cloth diapers; if your daycare only allows disposables then your savings aren’t likely to materialize as you have to pay both the costs of cloth diapers and the costs of disposable diapers. We’re definitely lucky to have a daycare that does both.

Okay, with that out of the way let’s go!

The Costs

When it comes to diapers for your kiddo there are two types of costs to consider: one-time costs and ongoing costs. One-time costs are, of course, expenses you pay once and then never pay again. Ongoing costs are the costs that keep going throughout the cycle of needing diapers. To calculate ongoing diapers we’re going to need to know just how many diapers a baby goes through in a year. Google says the answer is 7-10 diapers during the first year so I’m going to provide data for that range. The costs for disposable diapers? Pretty easy to calculate: we simply need the cost of a case of diapers divided by the amount of diapers a kiddo is going to need in a year. A quick search of Costco reveals a case of 192 diapers (size 1) is $30, giving you a price per diaper of $0.16. That means we have our answer for the ongoing costs of disposable diapers:

Disposable Diapers - Ongoing Costs
Number of Diapers Used	7	8	9	10
Cost Per Day	$1.12	$1.28	$1.44	$1.60
Cost Per Year	$409.08	$467.52	$525.96	$584.40

That’s it for our disposable diaper costs. The biggest upside to disposable diapers are the convenience and the low upfront cost: if you’ve got $30, you can buy a case of diapers! There aren’t any one-time expenses to pay that we don’t also have to pay to use cloth diapers meaning what you pay at Costco is what it costs you to put your kid in disposable diapers.

So how does that compare to the cloth diapers? For the route Mrs. Stark and I took we have to consider some steep upfront costs, the biggest blocker for most parents in considering what type of diapers to buy. We ultimately settled on these styles of diapers and associated goods for our upfront costs:

Cloth Diapers - Upfront Costs
Item	Cost
Tri-fold nighttime liners (two sets)	$30
Two cases of disposable diapers	$60
20 Flip Diaper Covers	$300
21 Flip Diaper Inserts	$105
Total	$495

When all was said and done going the cloth route cost us just shy of $500. The diapers themselves cost about $450 after we bought the shells that make up the outside of the diaper, the liners that make up the inside, nighttime liners that are extra thick so the baby can sleep through the night without experiencing the discomfort of being awoken for a diaper change nor excessive irritation, and the last bit were for two cases of disposable diapers we bought for the occasional case of diaper rash, traveling, and sometime use at daycare.

Cloth diapers also have ongoing costs too, just like disposable diapers. We opted to use disposable liners inside the diapers to help with the removal of solid waste, but this isn’t necessary and is an expense you could do without if you wanted. The cost of a liner is $.035, though I rounded up to $.04. Because they’re sturdy you can re-use them a second time if they had no solid waste after a run through the laundry, so a $13 order of 200 is more like buying 330ish (about a third of them won’t be re-usable). You also have the cost of laundry which increases when you’re washing more loads because of diapers. Any parent can tell you your life is about 30% laundry after kids anyway, but cloth diapers punctuate that point even more. I break the laundry cost down into two expenses: the utilities cost of increased water and electricity consumption and the detergent cost.

You have to use specialty detergent for cloth diapers to protect your baby’s skin as well as the diaper liners; use too stringent a detergent and they can lose their absorptive abilities rendering them useless and requiring a replacement. That’s much costlier than buying a big jug of Charlie’s Laundry Detergent, which is about $20 for 160 loads. We bought enough cloth diapers to allow us to run for two days before doing a load of laundry so I calculated my detergent cost by determining how much it was per load ($20/160 loads, or $.125, rounded up to $.13) and then multiplied that by the amount of laundry we did in a year. Doing a load every other day means about 182 loads in a year, although the actual number was a bit lower because we did a few weeks of traveling that saw us using disposable diapers instead.

The other ongoing cost is energy and water. The Stark family lives in a somewhat unique situation in that we rent a mother-in-law basement home shared with the landlords who live above us. That means that while our electricity bill is our own, our water bill is shared evenly among the five people who all technically live in the same “house.” Our average utilities bill in the year leading up to the birth of our son was about $88/month. Our average utility bill in the year after his birth was about $152, a difference of $65. Not all of that increase was strictly a result of doing more laundry for cloth diapers; adding another human to your household significantly raises your expenses on utilities regardless of if you’re using cloth or disposable diapers. However I’m going to liberally estimate half of the total increase in our utilities was solely because of the cloth diapers giving us a monthly diaper utility expense of about $33.

Here’s the total breakdown of ongoing costs for cloth diapers:

Cloth Diapers - Ongoing Costs
Number of Diapers Used	7	8	9	10
Liner Cost Per Year	$102.20	$116.80	$131.40	$146.00
Laundry Detergent Costs Per Year	$23.66	$23.66	$23.66	$23.66
Utility Costs Per Year	$33.00	$33.00	$33.00	$33.00
Total	$158.86	$173.46	$188.06	$202.66

Adding it All Up

So how do the two diaper types compare? We know the yearly ongoing costs for both, so let’s look at those comparisons first:

Ongoing Costs Comparison
Number of Diapers Used	7	8	9	10
Disposable Yearly Ongoing Costs	$409.08	$467.52	$525.96	$584.40
Cloth Yearly Ongoing Costs	$158.86	$173.46	$188.06	$202.66
Savings Using Cloth Diapers	$250.22	$294.06	$337.90	$381.74

Because of the much lower ongoing costs cloth diapers are the clear winner on this expense front netting a savings of $250-$382 in a single year. Of course this math doesn’t take into account the high upfront costs of the cloth diapers, an expense disposable diaper users don’t have to pay. When we account for what Mrs. Stark and I spent there we have to reduce $495 in costs from the equation. That leaves us with this through the first year:

Ongoing and Upfront Costs Comparison
Number of Diapers Used	7	8	9	10
Disposable Yearly Ongoing Costs	$409.08	$467.52	$525.96	$584.40
Cloth Yearly Ongoing Costs	$158.86	$173.46	$188.06	$202.66
Cloth Upfront Costs	$495.00	$495.00	$495.00	$495.00
Savings Using Cloth	-$244.78	-$200.94	-$157.10	-$113.26

When taking the full set of costs into account we discover in the first year we actually paid anywhere from $113-$245 more using cloth diapers than we would have using disposable diapers. Fortunately that wasn’t a surprise: we knew in the first year we’d pay more using cloth diapers but that we’d get the investment back in the second year. That’s still true! The math checks out on continued costs, and I can prove it. Moving into the second year of the baby’s life we have the ongoing costs for both types of diapers, but since we’ve already counted the loss we can see how much we start to come out ahead. Here’s a look at that math:

Ongoing Costs Comparison - Year 2
Number of Diapers Used	7	8	9	10
Disposable Yearly Ongoing Costs	$409.08	$467.52	$525.96	$584.40
Cloth Yearly Ongoing Costs	$158.86	$173.46	$188.06	$202.66
Loss from Year 1 of Cloth	$244.78	$200.94	$157.10	$113.26
Savings Using Cloth	$5.44	$93.12	$180.80	$268.48

As we enter the second year savings range from pretty negligible on the low end of daily use to over $250 on the higher end. Of course, there’s even more savings as you potty train from 22-30 months, with each additional month netting extra savings (or, if your kiddo is an early adopter of the toilet the costs go the other way).

The final cost savings come from additional children. Once you’ve sunk the costs in, you have your ongoing costs to consider but not the upfront expenses. That means a yearly savings of $250-$382 for each additional year you use cloth. Here’s the breakdown by year:

Ongoing Costs Comparison - Child Two
Number of Diapers Used	7	8	9	10
Disposable Yearly Ongoing Costs	$409.08	$467.52	$525.96	$584.40
Cloth Yearly Ongoing Costs	$158.86	$173.46	$188.06	$202.66
Savings Using Cloth	$250.22	$294.06	$337.90	$381.74

If you had two children who each wore cloth diapers and potty trained at two years of age your total savings over disposable diapers could be more than $1,000.

The Verdict

In the first part of this series my estimates for disposable diaper costs were a bit high while my estimates for cloth diapers were more barebones than either me or the missus were comfortable with in the field. You can certainly eke out greater savings using some of the following tips:

·         Line dry your cloth diapers, which also has the added benefit of naturally bleaching them

·         Forgo disposable liners for your cloth diapers

·         Use reusable cloth wipes (works for both disposable and cloth diaper families)

·         Do laundry more frequently to save on buying fewer diapers upfront

·         Register for cloth diapers at a baby shower, lowering your upfront costs to as little as $0

·         Use your local “Buy Nothing” group to find cloth diapers for free

As for us? We’re satisfied with the experiment and expect to reap even greater savings should we decide to grow our family. I’m also calculating the expenses we would have paid if we had paid cash for everything we’ve wound up using for the purposes of this article. In reality some generous family members gifted us diapers at a baby shower and we’ve been fortunate to pick up extra sets along the way for low cost. Not everyone is in that boat so I’m calculating the costs based on what we use, not what we paid directly so the picture is more accurate.

I’m glad we opted to use cloth diapers but the real world expenses have been higher than I originally estimated, though over the long-term we’ll more than make back our investment in savings. What do you think?