Could This Be My Answer?

Hard water.  I loathe it.  It crusts up my pipes, clogs my faucets, spots up and films on my dishes, and makes my diapers retain stink.  I'm also not too thrilled with my front loader, but I think my wash routine gets enough water to the diapers.  As a quick re-cap, my wash routine goes something like this:  pre-wash cold with no soap, hot heavy wash with soap and bleach, cold short wash with no soap.  Yeah, sounds like a lot of water, but my machine does not put out much, so in the end I think it is okay.  

Anyway, due to our hard water I have been battling ammonia stink in my diapers.  Suggestions for wash routines in the cloth diapering world are a dime a dozen.  What works for one does not (unfortunately) work for another.  I've done a lot of reading about keeping diapers clean and stink free.  I'm going on almost three years of straight cloth diapers and within the last year or so is when I've been dealing with ammonia almost constantly.  I pull much of my knowledge from an awesome site diaperswappers.com and the ever so popular thread on washing diapers.  

From what I have gathered, heat is your best friend.  Wash in hot water and dry (inserts and prefolds) on hot to kill the bacteria.  Bleach I'd say is number two.  Some do it once a month to sanitize and keep diapers fresh.  However, I have been using it with every load.  Yeah, that's a lot of bleach.  Every other day I was pouring about 2 caps full of bleach into my machine in hopes of killing the stink and ammonia.  Needless to say though, I don't think it really effects the absorbency or the PUL on my diapers, but it is totally killing the elastic in my covers.  When I pull the diapers out of the washer, they smell heavily like bleach (even with the extra cold wash) and from the dryer some of them will have a bit of a funk smell.  Not to mention come morning time the unforgettable waft of ammonia from a heavily peed in nighttime diaper.  I figured this was the best I could do.  I didn't think anything else would work.  

I've done extensive reading (and unfortunately though, I totally love the very informative blogs, I didn't bother to bookmark them so I can't share where I found them, sorry) and there seem to be other alternatives to bleach.  I've had a bit of a feeling of hypocrisy when I say that cloth diapers are better for baby's health and then I'm practically drowning them in bleach.  So, the word on the street is there are three "natural" alternatives to bleach.  The first would be baking soda, then vinegar, and borax.  I can't speak for borax as I've not used it.  I've tried baking soda with little success.  The ammonia went away for a couple of washes, but then it came back.  The last time I used vinegar was when we had a stacked washer/dryer unit and I was using only prefolds.  I hadn't perfected my wash routine, so I don't know that vinegar was really all that useful.  At any rate, I began using vinegar again.  Now I have only used it for two loads, tomorrow will be my third, and so far so good.  The only thing I have noticed is that heavily urinated diapers have a concentrated urine odor; no ammonia, but definitely a strong urine smell.  

So, this may be my answer.  I think the true answer won't come for another couple of weeks when I have done this several times.