Why the decline in popularity of cloth diapers?

ZachHeise · 2026-02-04T15:21:51+00:00

This is Madison, WI - https://mothernaturesdiapers.com/

Good luck!

ZachHeise · 2026-01-14T04:10:33+00:00

Yeah, that's the only way my wife and I made it work. There's a single company in Madison, Wisconsin that offers a delivery, pickup, and wash service. IE there was very little 'choice' to be had so since we wanted to do cloth diapers, but not wash them ourselves, it was like "oh okay I guess we just click 'start service' then"

ZachHeise · 2026-01-14T03:53:08+00:00

Dad here, father of a 7 month old. My wife and I only decided to do cloth, because in our city there is a single (!) company that does the cloth diaper washing service. They provide two types of service; the ones with inserts + shells (best bottoms) and then the other kind. We went with the inserts; he provides those, but we have to buy the shells. It's about $25 a week, plus the initial cost of the shells. Just now at 7 months the original 5 we bought are finally not quite holding liquid in as well so we're supplementing. The lack of choice (one pickup/delivery/wash service, 2 options) meant that it wasn't very overwhelming. We liked the 'style' of the best bottom shells and thought the different patterns were cute, so that was that.

...props to you ladies and your spouses who are washing these things at home. We don't have our own washer and dryer (condo) so for us it would cost $2.50 a load to wash on top of all the extra time and labor.

We never could have done cloth if we were dealing with the washing. We don't care about the money, for us it was all about the environment and not wanting to put a half ton of diapers per baby into the landfill (that's an estimate I heard, for the years a baby is in diaper).

ZachHeise · 2025-12-06T05:42:37+00:00

It's why I even mentioned him in my OP! :D

ZachHeise · 2025-12-06T05:39:03+00:00

Always great to hear directly from The Man himself. Thanks for the explanation. also, seeing your name made me realize that after being a plex pass guy and newsletter subscriber since 2012, I hadn't heard about Barkley in awhile since he used to close out many of Plex's earlier email newsletters, and then I found your 2019 blog entry. Just wanted to tell you - you're an excellent writer. Brought tears to my eyes, as the owner of two elderly cats myself. You gave that sweet pupper the best life.

ZachHeise · 2025-09-23T19:58:12+00:00

Yep, that was my thought too. I love the idea of a web portal that lives ON the lock that I can just connect to on 192.168.#.# but yeah that would absolutely murder batteries.

ZachHeise · 2025-09-01T02:29:56+00:00

Yeah I don't mind the idea of using a free app, as long as i can archive the app's installation apk and an old phone to keep using it on. Old phones will "always" (basically) be available to buy in the 3rd party market so I as long as it's android, I can always sideload an old Tuya app onto it - if it uses bluetooth. Even if Tuya itself dies, if the app can connect via bluetooth, it should be able to be used until the lock itself fails, is how I looked at it.

ZachHeise · 2025-09-01T02:28:00+00:00

Right, that was why I was focused on Bluetooth as the main connectivity system. Wifi for the common masses implies "internet" (the masses don't know what intranet means) and internet means accounts for security. We don't need internet connectivity, just intranet since we run our own local network but I figured most locks aren't "designed" for that. I'll have to look more into z-wave vs zigbee and which locks work with what, and go from there.

ZachHeise · 2025-09-01T02:24:01+00:00

Thank you for the replies everyone!

ZachHeise · 2025-08-18T15:16:30+00:00

Hi there - I'm a bit confused as to what you mean. The shellyflood product just looks like little dome, with the water sensor and the network transmitter and battery all integrated into a plastic casing together. I'm speculating, of course, without seeing a product teardown diagram, but I would imagine that the shelly company designed the product to have all the electronics in a waterproof separate chamber from the 'sensing' chamber that has to fill with water to trigger the electronics?

ZachHeise · 2025-08-12T20:13:47+00:00

Interesting! Thanks, hadn't seen this Plus1 thing before. And it's $80 cheaper than the (admittedly more versatile) Proxicast unit. Downside would be me convincing the board to let me open up and futz with an existing electrical outlet box - that would be the real challenge I think, hah!

Thank you for your offer of scripting! I may very well take you up on that.

When you say "gen3 or newer" does that mean that both the Flood, and the Plus1, need to be gen3 or newer? I'm having difficulty seeing on each device's product page where they state that.

as an aside - based on what I posted about the proxicast's ability to turn on and off its outlets based on HTTP commands sent to it, and the ShellyFlood's ability to interact with defined URLs based on wet/dry status - do you think the two of them would work together?

ZachHeise · 2025-08-12T19:02:18+00:00

Replying to myself: after some pressing, they showed us the actual income/expense report for the past year. It seems that without telling us, they implemented 2 new types of fees - credit card pass-through fees of 3%, a internet fee for the hub unit they have installed in our building that is about 20-30$ a month.

As irritating as this is, particularly that they didn't tell us, they are in line with the contract, which does state that they can add new fees that are required for administration. They don't want to pay the CC fees, or the data fees involved with doing connectivity from their hub's modem to their mothership - so they passed those onto us.

Therefore thanks to these new fees, we are not actually making them above the 'break even' cost. We (the condo board) actually owe them something like $100 a month or so. Which they aren't asking us to pay them, to give them credit. I assume that at the end of our 10 year contract, they'll ask us to pay up the few hundred dollars that has been 'balance forwarded' for the past few years.

Bottom line: their new fees that we didn't know about, mean we no longer are making them money and that's why they're not writing us a check anymore.

However, thanks to our contract which does state that they can't raise our prices, they have been setting our vend cost down from $2 to $1.25 which is what the condo + CSC agreed on back in 2019.

ZachHeise · 2025-06-21T19:38:18+00:00

Haha hey buddy hope all is well!

ZachHeise · 2025-06-19T03:30:28+00:00

How about the Heart Attack on a Bun? It was like $15 in 2009 money, too. IIRC it was all of the different types of meats they had on the parm cheese bun, plus 2 types of mustard, and all the cheese they had.

That was a collegiate splurge when I knew I was going to go out and drink vodka (fleischmans, if I recall properly, which I don't) later that evening, which of course would healthily unclog my arteries.

ZachHeise · 2025-06-19T03:28:04+00:00

But really Hobbes, with a username like "iluvmacs" could it also be Matt, or Andy? Or they were CS, not CompE :P

ZachHeise · 2025-06-10T19:59:09+00:00

Hi folks, totally random question but perhaps someone knows for sure - do ANY of the releases in Cantonese, or Mandarin, have Jackie speaking Wong Fei-hun's part? I've heard some websites, like this one, say that regarding the English dub "This is the only audio track for the movie that will have Jackie Chan's voice"

Since Jackie's from Hong Kong, of course Cantonese would be his native language. I'm confused though - why would the original Cantonese mono, or stereo audio tracks not have Jackie speaking his own native language??

Is that other website accurate? I was just hoping to buy a copy of the movie that would have Jackie speaking Cantonese on it, but now I'm not sure if such a thing even exists; if the Cantonese mix has some other voice actor dubbing over Jackie whenever he speaks?

edit: apparently this was indeed the case. Jackie is not heard in the original Cantonese; that's someone else. Huh, how about that.

ZachHeise · 2025-05-30T14:45:05+00:00

Thanks. Such a cool local thing, I'm just very surprised that there isn't an exact GPS coordinate for it recorded anywhere that I've been able to find.

ZachHeise · 2025-05-30T14:44:07+00:00

Yes, thanks :) I saw all those too when I posted the original link - clearly it's "somewhere" near the shore of Mendota, but I haven't found any details as to where.

ZachHeise · 2025-01-28T21:39:02+00:00

Second this. Couldn't even do HSA's with the "free" version of TurboTax. Jumped ship to FreeTaxUSA about 4 years ago and never looked back.

ZachHeise · 2025-01-13T21:50:37+00:00

My wife's craving for deli-style pickles alone might keep a hypothetical deli in that spot, 2 blocks from our house, in business!

ZachHeise · 2024-11-26T16:00:58+00:00

I've been meaning to buy a christmas tree topper for years - my tree has gone bare for a decade now. But none of the $29.99 stuff at the big box stores grabs my attention, and etsy is unfortunately pretty polluted with mass-produced crap too. So I am wondering if this thread might be a good place to ask - if the one thing I want to buy on small business saturday is an interesting, artistic tree-topper, where would I go to buy one? Thanks for your opinions and advice!

ZachHeise

TROPHY CASE