Ammonia Burn?

marriedinaugust

Last week my son started developing a rash under his testicles and it spread up to his penis.  The next day there seemed to be a little cut on his penis and blisters forming on his skin.  It didn't bother him at all but looked awful. My husband thought it was just heat rash so he used a little diaper cream and threw LO in a sposie.  I don't like using cream so we just let him air out a lot and used sposies the rest of the weekend and it cleared up almost completely.  I took that time to rock a soak with my CDs and rinsed them a ton in case the rash was yeast or something (I don't think it is, it looks nothing like that).  Because the rash was pretty much gone and he was leaking through the 7th gen dipes at night I put him in our normal bedtime diaper (BG 3.0 with a GMD prefold insert) last night and he woke up smelling of ammonia and his whole bottom was red, I put him in a GMD prefold and Thirsties cover for his next diaper and when we took that off his blisters were starting to form again.  Is this ammonia burn or something else?  What do I do to fix it, I hate using sposies but I cannot put another CD on him.

I was reading other forums that said to use vinegar, bleach, RLR, funk rock, dawn, etc.  I have none of that in the house.  Can I knock it out with boiling water added to the machine or do I need something tougher?  My normal wash routine is cold rinse, hot wash with 2-3T RNG depending on how full and an extra rinse, all set to large load in a top loader.  I have prefolds, fitteds, covers, pockets and AIOs, should I not add boiling water to anything with PUL?  Please give any advice you can.

Thanks!

yodasmistress

My son got like that from a few used dipes I bought but stripping them (with RLR) seemed to solve the problem.

LurkieLoo

When DS had it the only thing that helped was switching to Tide.

searcy7

Try tide and maybe adding boiling water will help I am not sure.

 

LI444

marriedinaugust:

Last week my son started developing a rash under his testicles and it spread up to his penis.  The next day there seemed to be a little cut on his penis and blisters forming on his skin.  It didn't bother him at all but looked awful. My husband thought it was just heat rash so he used a little diaper cream and threw LO in a sposie.  I don't like using cream so we just let him air out a lot and used sposies the rest of the weekend and it cleared up almost completely.  I took that time to rock a soak with my CDs and rinsed them a ton in case the rash was yeast or something (I don't think it is, it looks nothing like that).  Because the rash was pretty much gone and he was leaking through the 7th gen dipes at night I put him in our normal bedtime diaper (BG 3.0 with a GMD prefold insert) last night and he woke up smelling of ammonia and his whole bottom was red, I put him in a GMD prefold and Thirsties cover for his next diaper and when we took that off his blisters were starting to form again.  Is this ammonia burn or something else?  What do I do to fix it, I hate using sposies but I cannot put another CD on him.

I was reading other forums that said to use vinegar, bleach, RLR, funk rock, dawn, etc.  I have none of that in the house.  Can I knock it out with boiling water added to the machine or do I need something tougher?  My normal wash routine is cold rinse, hot wash with 2-3T RNG depending on how full and an extra rinse, all set to large load in a top loader.  I have prefolds, fitteds, covers, pockets and AIOs, should I not add boiling water to anything with PUL?  Please give any advice you can.

Thanks!

I'm so sorry you're dealing with that (it does sound like ammonia burn).  We had lots of issues with it because our son has very sensitive skin.  I tried boiling water with the inserts (DO NOT use boiling water with anything that has PUL, it's supposed to be very very bad for it) and that removed the smell for a time, but I had to do it with every wash and that took too much time.

I tried vinegar, which made our issues worse because apparently it doesn't work well if you have hard water.  I eventually started filling the washer with hot water and then adding 2 TB bleach, then the clean diapers, and running a full wash followed by several more washes to get all the bleach out.  That helped a little, but I had to do it once a month or so and I'm not really comfortable using that much bleach, knowing it isn't great for the diapers.  

We tried funk rock, which helped a lot, except for overnight.  Overall funk rock made the diapers much less likely to give him ammonia burn during the day, but if we used cloth at night, he always woke up with a sunburn-looking rash no matter what.  Also, funk rock is really expensive.  We had to resort to using disposables and thick diaper cream at night, and cloth during the day.  I hope you can find a solution!