Washing modern cloth nappies during a power cut

Rural Clean Cloth Nappies admin Jes reflects on managing cloth nappies during a five-day power outage.

Living rural has its struggles at times but even at its worst, I wouldn’t trade it for town life.

Our five-day power cut

It’s not uncommon for us to have power cuts when the weather turns. Most of the time they last no more than 6 hours. But it’s not uncommon for us to have cuts that last a day or longer.

Last year we had a power cut that lasted five (5) days! This certainly made life challenging. 

One of our homestead essentials is a diesel generator or some form of off-grid electricity for emergencies. During power cuts, we mostly use our generator to keep our water pump running. We are on tank water and the system needs a pump to get up to pressure. Our generator’s secondary use is keeping each of our five fridges & freezers running for a few hours each day. Our freezers hold several thousand dollars worth of food, and losing that would have been a huge setback.

Washing nappies without power

A day into the power cut we knew it was going to be a long out. When it comes to cloth nappies, that’s just not gonna work. I decided to try and at least do a first wash to slow down ammonia production in the nappies. 

We were using disposable nappies with a wool cover overnight, so we didn’t have to deal with night nappies. We still had cloth during the day and plenty of poo nappies to manage with no washing machine.

Altogether the washing machine was out of action for a full five days!

I ended up doing a modified handwash for the poo nappies, plugging the water pump in and boiling the jug to get hot water for the inserts, then adding the PUL shells after the inserts were done and the water was cooler.

First, I scraped as much poo off as I could and then added them to the dry pail. Once I had 4-5 poo nappies (roughly 2 days) I did a hot hand wash in my laundry sink with 1/2 scoop of my regular detergent to get as much soiling off as possible.

Once I had removed as much soiling as possible, I sanitised a small-scale bleach sanitise and 30 minutes later, it came time to wash them. 

I tried using a salad spinner to get agitation on the shells but quickly found this quite laborious as I had over 10 shells and inserts so it was a lot to agitate each one for 10 minutes due to the small capacity of the salad spinner. 

After this I got a little creative and used a drill and my milk powder mixing bit to get good agitation and save my hand and arms from the manual labour. Make sure you use the drill on the lowest setting to minimise the risk of damage to the PUL shells.

Not everyone has access to a drill and a milk powder mixer so you could always use a hand held cake mixer or egg beater if you have one. Once you use these, you probably do not want to use them for future food preparation. They can be used for laundry in the future so not a total waste.

I did end up ruining one shell that got stuck in the milk mixer however over 30 nappies successfully washed and only one damaged in an emergency situation isn’t too bad, all things considered! If I did this again, I would use a sock to put over the base of the milk mixer and a tomato tie to hold it on. This would prevent the snap from getting stuck and tearing the nappy like it did.

I’ve heard of people using plungers and buckets to manually wash (North American cloth nappy site Fluff Love University has an in-depth guide on how to handwash using a plunger). We didn’t have a plunger on hand, so I didn’t try this method.

Regrouping and resetting

The main thing to remember is that if you find yourself in this situation is to keep everything as dry and airy as possible until you can wash them. For washing you’ll need hot water and lots of friction to clean properly. And don’t be afraid of bleach! 

Most of all, do the best you can. You don’t have to be perfect. You can always sanitise with chlorine bleach once you have access to your washing machine again. Heat, chlorine bleach and a good detergent will do a lot of heavy lifting.