What's your cloth diaper wash routine with an HE machine?

This is our regime for cotton prefolds and covers:

First, do a speed wash with very little or no detergent, high soil level, with just the dirty diapers and covers.

Then, throw in your other laundry and do an extra hot "sanitary" wash, high soil level, w/ lots of detergent, and an extra rinse if needed.

Good for you for doing cloth diapers!  

I had pretty good results with doing a vinegar cold-water rinse cycle before the wash cycle.  Our machine didn't have a pre-rinse option, so I just ran a short wash (30 min?) cycle on cold and dumped a lot of vinegar in.  Then just regular wash with detergent.  I also aired them in the sun occasionally.

We use the bumgenius flip system (covers and inserts). We're on our second round of cloth diapering and now follow the routine recommended specifically for our HE machine and detergent type (country save powder and biokleen liquid) by fluff love University. We had some stink issues the first time around, even though we dried the diapers in the sun all the time. I think we weren't getting enough water in the machine. So now we do a quick cold wash with little bit of detergent, peel the diapers of the sides of the drum and add other laundry til 1/2-2/3 full, then heavy duty hot wash with lots of detergent. So far so good but it's only been a month... I'm a little worried about detergent build up because fluff love recommends using so much more than country save does, but we shall see... I'm also going to try treating with grovia mighty bubbles every so often.

We use cotton diapers (prefolds and some workhorses. For detergent we use Country Save. Mostly we don't have any problems. If we notice that there's still a smell after the wash we just run them again and occasionally will put a scoop of oxygen bleach in. We live in Berkeley and run on the heavy duty cycle. Cotton diapers are just so easy to wash!

Yes, I can answer this! We used cloth diapers which we washed at home (in San Francisco). At first I had an old washing machine but we eventually upgraded to a HE front-loader, which made our lives SO much easier because of its programmable cycles. We had enough diapers to do a big load about once per week. All the dirty, separated diapers would go in; we'd load the detergent, and simply push the "My Cycle" button to start. We programmed My Cycle to consist of 1) cold pre-wash, 2) hot normal cycle, 3) medium spin, and 4) extra cold rinse. The whole thing would take about 2.5 hours. As for detergent, we tried a bunch of different things, including the one recommended by the diaper manufacturer (BumGenius), but the type we liked the best in the end was Rockin' Green in combination with its cousin Funk Rock (for the pre-wash). We hang-dried the covers, since they're hydrophobic and don't need the heat. We used to air-dry the inserts too, but figured out that the low-heat setting in the dryer made them fluffier and possibly more absorbent. It was obviously much faster, too, but it does degrade the fabric. Anyway the inserts pretty much need to be composted after two years (when one child is finished with it). Air-drying the covers will make them last a long, long time.

BTW, good for you for using cloth diapers! SO many benefits to the environment, to your children, and your wallet. The biggest advantage to us was the ease with which our daughter potty-trained at 22 months. I tell anyone who will listen that cloth diapers are the way to go. It's not that hard and kind of fun! Plus you get to stick it to Big Diaper... haha