Review: gNappies

Posted by: Penny Leach 7 months, 1 week ago

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i was pretty adament since finding out that I was pregnant that I wanted to do cloth diapering.  I didn't really know much about the various options available but a few people I knew, including my sister, had done it at least for awhile, with varying degrees of success.

I started doing research and quickly came across gNappies (who as well as the UK store, have USA and Canadian ones too).  The unique thing about gNappies was that you could use either a cloth liner, or a paper one, which has no plastic in it, and thus can be composted, flushed down the toilet, or just thrown away.

Also in many of the cloth nappies I saw, the whole nappy and all associated parts had to be after each use. Not so with gnappies. It took me a little while to get my head around how it worked, but the nappy is made up of three parts.  A little "pant" outer, with a snap in pouch, and a liner that goes inside the pouch.  Depending on how messy the whole thing gets, you can either just wash the liner, or wash the liner and the pouch or wash all three parts.  This is all explained in the following video:

Anyway I was pretty keen on this idea but didn't really get around to doing anything about it until I met another mum in Munich who also uses gNappies! And she highly recommended them too.  So I bit the bullet and ordered their starter set for newborns.  Veronika is now 6 months and we moved from the newborn set into the small size, and I've just ordered the medium size for her as well.  So we're pretty pleased.

A few things to note.

Night nappying

We use the cloth inners during the day and change her about every 2 hours.  At night we use the paper liners as they're far more absorbant.  We started off changing her once in the night and now we don't change her at night at all, but we put in two paper liners, one on top of eachother.  A paper liner on top of a cloth liner seems to work too.

Leaks

We have had a few problems with leaks but they're largely solved now.  The paper liners almost never leak but the cloth ones tend to leak if the nappy is done up too tight or the little pouch isn't sitting right in the crease where the legs attach.  Also I've found that we tend to get detergent build up in the cloth liners which affects the absorbancy, and washing them without detergent and then drying them in the dryer strips it out.

Travelling

We've been away for the weekend and used cloth, and we've been away for the weekend and used paper. Paper is definitely simpler for a weekend!  We have the gNappy wash bag for being out and about and it lasted a few months and then started leaking.  I wrote into gNappies and they sent me a new one really fast.  Which brings me to...

Service

Wow, they are fantastic! They answer emails quickly and very thoughtfully and they were super helpful debugging our leaking problem! I also talked to them on the phone when I was pregnant about what to buy and they were really honest - to the point where they actually advised against some things that would have involved me buying more stuff.

What to buy

We didn't have much luck using cloth liners with the newborn size.  In fact I can't really remember why (sleep deprivation!) - I think they didn't fit into the pouch properly.  Their rationale for this is that you're too wasted being a new parent to do washing all the time.  They grow out of the newborn size pretty fast though so it doesn't matter too much (Veronika took about 6 weeks to move to the small sized nappies, and she was really tiny back then).  For the small size, we have:

• 12 outer pants
• 6 extra pouches
• 24 liners

24 liners is definitely more than enough.  I ordered 18 for when she moves to medium (they come in packs of 6).  The 6 extra pouches are really worth it!  the 12 outers seem to be enough for doing washing every 2 days but I have to say I'm kind of disappointed about that.  We tend to change the outers more that I'd like because they do get a wee bit wet around the edges.

I was super excited about the poo catching paper inserts that you put on top of the cloth inners. In theory they sound awesome, because you just lift off the piece of paper with the poo on it and throw it away, or flush it, and underneath you just have a wet cloth inner.  In practice though we don't use them at all. You don't know when there's going to be a poo, so you'd have to use one every time which seems like a waste, and also they don't fit on the small size inners at all, and they only come in one size. I guess we'll try them again when we move to the medium size, since they seem to fit better there.  It probably also doesn't make any sense to use these until you start with solids anyway.

Pre wash the red outer pant!

Because if you don't, it will turn everything pink.

Cost

This is definitely an expensive way to go. The paper liners are particularly expensive - £10 for 40 small or 32 medium.  If you use 2 a night, that's only 20 (16) days and that's only the liners for use at night.  Not to mention the upfront expense of the cloth liners, the pouches and the outer pants, which by themselves are really quite expensive.    I think my mother would call the people who go with this approach "chardonnay drinking green voters".   But we're definitely happy with them and would recommend them.

• Tags:
• parenting
• nappies