Ammonia that just won't quit

Linnya

DS is 2 and his night time diapers will knock you over in the morning with the ammonia smell.  They don't stink like this during the day, after normal diaper changes.  I've stripped them in the past, and they were recently stripped and treated for yeast.  Hasn't changed the morning ammonia.  Is there anything to be done about this? 

 

ked77

Do you add any vinegar in your wash?  That's the only thing I've found that really helps control the ammonia.  I put vinegar into my cold rinse, then wash hot w/ detergent.

GreekyPie

Tide?

flyer23

DD's overnight diapers are usually pretty stinky. I thought it was the build-up of all that pee... but one night, I was out of her usual overnight inserts, so I stuffed with two brand new inserts intended for use in DD's pockets. And in the morning, they still smelled like ammonia! That's when I realized that her pee is just really potent, so it's gonna smell like ammonia in the morning, no matter what.

If it gets really bad, she gets ammonia burn. So I keep it at bay by doing a deep clean of the inserts roughly every two weeks. A ~1 hour bleach soak followed by a wash using the sanitary cycle (super hot water -- too hot for PUL, but fine for fitteds and inserts). The inserts still smell slightly of ammonia in the morning, but at least I can't smell it the minute I walk into her room, and she doesn't get ammonia burn.

So frustrating because she only wears diapers overnight (she's potty trained during the day), but her one diaper/day takes more thought/effort than ALL of DS's diapers. But better than throwing away money on disposables every day...

*LrCg*

This happened to us when DS was wearing diapers.  It started right around when he was on fulltime table food (@ 11 months old).  Like your situtation- we would have no ammonia issues with the same fitted diaper for nap time only for nightime (he sleeps 12 hours).  What worked for us was first, I soaked all the diapers in vinegar to strip.  After that, in the morning I would just run the diaper under very hot water and rinse it out very good and then put it in the diaper pail.  I had no issues with ammonia after that.  From what I was told is that the ammonia will continue to crystalize while it sits in the pail so by the hot water rinse in the morning, I was breaking down the crystals.  HTH

maramarrie

There were a few changes we had to go through to ultimately deal with the ammonia. We also had issues with a "burnt ammonia" smell out of the dryer.

One problem was inefficient detergent; we switched to Tide. 

One problem was too much detergent and we had buildup; I had to start really focusing on how much I was putting in rather than falling for the "
it's a big dirty load, I need lots of detergent" mentality.

For a while I tried water softener in case it was our moderately hard water, but I decided that was complicating things and didn't help our problems; I rarely need to use it now.

MrsGalligan

We couldn't figure it out so I gave up on cding my toddler at night.  We just use disposables, we buy them for school anyway.  The smell would knock you over in the AM.  We may try again if we get some different inserts.  I don't know if it smells like that just on MF. 

What type of inserts do you use at night?

 

Linnya

Thanks for all the good input, ladies.  I have started adding vinegar to my cold wash and we'll see if that makes a difference.  We use AFFF doublers and sometimes MF inserts, as well.  Our washer gets very hot, so at least that part is easy!