Flexitots smell soooooo bad - what can I do?

[spongebrainbigpants]

My DS is in BG during the day (which are fab!) but we use flexitots at night with a Motherease wrap and bamboo booster just to make sure we don't get any leaks.

Anyway, the flexitots now smell horrendous. I was originally told this was because I was drying them in the airing cupboard so we've stopped doing this, and now line dry them. I've put them all back through the wash on 60 degrees but this morning the nappy smelt so bad (of ammonia) it made me want to heave .

I have been advised to try them outside but that's not too practical in February!

Would tumble drying them help? Can I wash them at 90? What am I doing wrong? Really don't want to go back to disposables at night cos I spent alot of money on these things!

Any help gratefully received. Thank you.

My recommendations are:

Do a cold pre-wash if you have the option. This seems to REALLY help.

Always use minimal washing powder

Choose the "extra rinse" option (if you have one) on your washing machine, or give the nappies an extra wash with no detergent (not every time, just every now and then)

Put a tablespoon or two of bicarb in with the detergent. I also put some in the pre-wash bit of the detergent drawer. Again, this seems very effective.

Some people suggest using vinegar in the softener drawer, but that never worked for me.

I would try using some biological detergent, it helped massively with the smell on ours. We also had issues with nappy rash and surprisingly, it helped with this too.

How are you washing them sponge?

I wouldn't tumble dry or wash at 90C. HAve you done a search on the nappy topic? I'm sure there have been quite a few threads on smelly nappies with lots of good advice about dealing with smelly nappies. There's also a procedure known as 'stripping' nappies but you've not had your flexitots long so not sure you'd need that.

I'll be watching this closely as we use flexitots!

I'd try doing a pre soak in nappy sanitizer - BioD is my favorite. Give them a good long soak, and then wash as normal. I do this with smelly dishcloths as well - works a treat! You don;t need to pre-soak every time - just do it when they get smelly

don't use ecover is my tip. my cloth nappies got stinky and i switched to fairy and they were fine. still use ecover for clothes but don't think it was up to dealing with nappies.

btw before i switched washing stuff i tried vinegar, extra rinses, pre-washes etc to little effect

sponge I found this for you. It was posted by bigbadmouse who I've always found quite wise on nappy things:

This is in essence what I said...

Clean the filters and wipe out the rim and door seal of your washing machine. Do a service wash if you think you need to (empty cycle / hot wash or whatever your manual suggests). You really only need to do one if you think your machine has suffered at the hands of dirty nappies for too long!

Then...

Buy 500ml WHITE MALT vinegar (it's cheap stuff)
Put CLEAN nappies in nappy bucket
Pour all of vinegar over nappies and top up bucket (almost to top) with warm or cold water
Leave to soak overnight
Plonk nappies in wasing machine next morning and wash at 30 or 40C with a full dose of BIOLOGICAL powder
(I also add some warm water with several - up to 10 - drops of lavender or tea tree to the softener compartment but this is optional and if you use nice smelling powder you won't need it - I used a tub of value stuff so I needed it )
Once the wash cycle is over then rinse once or twice to get rid of any excess powder.

This gets rid of the smell from even very stinky nappies - it's not something you should need to do often.

The reason behind the biological powder and the low temp was is the enzymes in the biological powder are very good at dealing with nappy type smells in particular but you need to do a low temp wash or the enzymes are denatured and won't work. I thought that this wasn't the case anymore but have since discovered otherwise - there are plenty of enzymes that will work at higher temps but they don't use them in bio powder from what I can tell - I guess they are more expensive and defeat the object of trying to get people to wash at lower temps anyway. Biological powder is fine for a baby's skin -esp with the final rinses.

Sorry, in my excitement I completely forgot about my smelly nappies!

Thank you all so much for your useful tips - babyphat, interesting that you should mention Ecover cos that's what we use, so once we've done the soak and bio wash we will switch to Fairy for our nappies. Can't cope with the smell much longer!

Thanks again - really helpful .

Oh yes agree about ecover. I've given it up completely for everything.