I too think the Ronald McDonald house is awesome.

Regarding costs, it’s true that re-using nappies for a second child (or borrowing nappies from somebody else) will reduce costs (by half almost according to my calculations). I saw on your website that cot to potty kits are sold for £250 so my estimates seem conservative.

As you can see, I’m the Nappy Lady, and cloth nappies is what we do. I do my best to give people the complete picture and a fair comparison, rather than trying to frighten people off using disposables. It’s not our job to persuade people to use cloth, but to ensure they don’t waste money when they do. It’s all too easy to get sucked into cloth nappy addiction!

There have been two Environment Agency lifecycle reports about nappies. Both came to the same conclusion, though no newspapers reported on it: that responsibility for the environmental impact of the nappies you use rests largely with the manufacturer for disposables and largely with the consumer for cloth nappies.

The more children you have, the greater the cost benefit of using cloth. I made a net PROFIT of about £100 on nappying my second son – all I had to buy was a few top up items and I sold the nappies at the end of the process.

Anyway, I’m currently writing the Nappy Lady Guide to Cloth Nappies, so if any readers want to contribute their ideas for what they would like to see in that, please pop over to my blog at http://www.nappyladyuk.co.uk or to our main information site at http://www.thenappylady.co.uk.

We went with nappies for both of our kids, except when we were away from home (e.g., overnight camping, for example), where we’d use disposable because there is no safe and convenient storage mechanism for soiled nappies. The original nappies were far less expensive, around US$100 if I recall.

Once you do several dozen washings, it becomes rote and you can multitask really well. As we are in a very wet, cool climate, air drying isn’t feasible. We did find that a more efficient spin cycle on the washer helped reduce the tumble dry times substantially (90 minutes down to 45 minutes). Tumble-dried nappies produce a lot of lint, requiring more frequent cleaning of the dryer exhaust.

Also, when your child is toilet-trained, the nappies are still usable as household rags.

Another thing that a friend pointed out is that I should have accounted for the depreciation of the washing machine as it is used more and therefore its life will be reduced. This would affect the environmental impact too.

Overall the cost argument does not convince me, I agree with you. However, I am pretty sure now that it’s better for the environment which matters a lot to me.