Cloth Diaper Problem Solving: Hard Water & Funk

We recently moved from an area with no water problems to an area with extremely hard water. Yaaay (yes that is sarcasm). It has been such a pain with everything from dishes to our cloth diapers. We started getting stains, then a strong ammonia smell that burned your eyes when we were washing the diapers, then progressed to getting that lovely ammonia smell right after he urinated in the diapers. Woowee! His diaper pail smelled RIPE!

After taking it as long as I could, I finally wised up and decided we needed to switch to a new detergent. We were previously using bumGenius detergent and had recently tried Country Save. FYI, both worked great, but I preferred BG. Anyways, with the hard water issues we switched to Rockin' Green's Hard Rock detergent. It's specially formulated for hard water. I did the overnight soak like they recommended and immediately noticed an improvement. The stains were gone and the diapers didn't smell like ammonia as soon as he urinated. However, they would build up a really strong ammonia smell after being in the diaper pail for a day. Not cool. I did a diaper strip (I'll detail that below) and then a regular wash routine and I've been good to go ever since. Thank goodness! Cloth diaper issues can be so frustrating, but it's such an awesome feeling once you solve the problem. I'm pretty pleased! I think that doing just the overnight soak routine with the Rockin' Green would have been enough had I attempted to solve the problem earlier on. I had forgotten about the symptoms of hard water and it took me a minute to get with the program. I'm so happy to be back with good smelling diapers!

Diaper stripping- This can be done whenever you have detergent or "funk" buildup in your diapers. Here's how I do it.... Run a hot wash cycle with detergent. I then move my diaper shells to the dryer and leave just the inserts in the wash. I add 1 tbs dawn original dishwashing soap (the blue stuff) and 1/4 bleach (some people omit the bleach, but this is what works best for me) and do a regular wash cycle. I then do 4-6 rinse cycles with warm water or until suds can no longer be seen. Then I dry everything together.