So began the searching and researching to see how to fix my problem.  Apparently, I had missed the fact that using no detergent at all will leave a build up of ammonia salts in the diapers, which give off no odor at all when dry, but begin to, erm, wake up the faint after a quick pee.  So, time to find a good detergent that will really clean the diapers and rinse away clean without a bazillion rinses to get the “residue” out.

I keep seeing that Rockin Green is the best detergent for such a job.  It even comes in a formula for hard water that tends to leave deposits in diapers.  This sounds great to me!  Deposits in diapers = bad!  It has to!  On top of that it claims to be environmentally friendly and uses many “natural” and “biodegradable” ingredients!  Woo hoo! 

Then I decided to get the scoop on the ingredients listed.  (Thank you wikipedia!)

1. Sodium carbonate aka washing soda or soda ash.  According to this site, washing soda is a natural water softener and laundry booster.  I have this in my laundry room already.

2. Sodium percabonate aka oxyclean or an oxygen cleaner.  Again, this stuff lives in my laundry room.

3. Natural chelating ingredients.  This one was a bit harder to discern for me, but when it comes to laundry, a chelating agent is some sort of water softener.  Following that line of thinking, I look into various water softeners used in laundry formulations.  Three jump out at me as being able to assume the “natural” label: sodium chloride (salt!), sodium citrate (citric acid), and Borax.  I’m putting my money on the last one since the box has it screaming at you that it is “all natural” and it purports to be a water softener aka chelating ingredient.  It could be all three, since ingredients is plural.  Either way, I have salt in my cupboard and Borax in my laundry room.

4. Sodium sulfate.  According to wiki, this is a filler often used in powdered laundry detergents.  Really?  A filler?  This was getting more disappointing by the second.  I was under the impression that being green meant less waste.  Maybe this product meant green more in the penny pinching way than the tree hugging way, and I missed it somehow.  This filler business really irks me.  This is the one ingredient I don’t have in my house.  Somehow I’m not disappointed.

5. Biodegradable surfactants.  I’m going to go with the simplest possibility here since everything else has turned out to be super simple and say that this ingredient is most likely…wait for it…wait for it…SOAP! 

6. Natural fragrance oils.  So this doesn’t really have much to do with how this stuff works.  It just makes it smell yummy.  For the record, I have several essential oils in my washroom as well. 

So, big deal?  Someone has put together a bunch of fairly common, readily available ingredients (minus the sodium sulfate filler) and put them in a pretty package to charge about the same as Tide.  I suppose I wouldn’t have been quite so taken aback if I didn’t already have a jug of homemade laundry detergent already sitting in my laundry room with pretty much the exact same ingredients in liquid form. 

Dang it!  I should have come up with this idea.  Or perhaps I could have come up with some sort of special laundry treatment and just repackaged one of these common ingredients.  No.  Wait.  That’s what Cadie did with RLR Laundry Treatment.  It took a good bit of digging, but it seems that the consensus is that RLR is nothing more than sodium carbonate/washing soda/soda ash.  In my quest for defunking my diapers I saw RLR as being a good way of getting rid of ammonia stink, so I investigated it.  Now if I get the urge to try it, I know I can just dump a bunch of washing soda in my machine and eliminate that as a wonder fix.

Meanwhile, I am going to go back to actually using my homemade detergent on my diapers with a hot rinse and “rock a soak” once a month.  I did it for my last diaper load and the smell is much less, erm, rockin.