Michael Hession/NYT WirecutterA good diaper pail should:Reduce stink: This is the most important quality to consider when buying a diaper pail. If you don’t care about stink, use a regular garbage can!Diaper pails deal with stinky smells in several ways: All pails contain a physical barrier — at minimum, a close-fitting lid. The more elaborate designs have an antechamber, where you place the diaper, and then some kind of mechanism that dumps the diaper into the pail when you close the lid (minimizing exposure to the contents). Some pails also block odor using the bag itself, while others freshen the air inside with a carbon filter or a scented baking soda puck.Be simple to use: Setup should be straightforward, and emptying the pail and inserting a new bag should be intuitive. The diaper pail should be easy to open with one hand, since you’ll probably need to deposit diapers one-handed while holding onto a squirming kid. Ideally, you won’t be required to push a soiled diaper against a physical barrier or restricted opening, either.Be reasonably priced: A diaper pail’s lifetime expense is heavily influenced by the price of the refill bags. Pails that don’t require proprietary refills are less expensive to use and also possibly more convenient — if you run out, it’s easier to find regular trash bags.Your total cost will vary depending on how often you empty your pail, what kind of child-care arrangements you have, and, of course, how much output your child produces. Some diaper pail makers offer estimates of bag costs over time as well as bag capacity, though we found the latter estimates to be on the optimistic side.Be sized for efficiency: At most, a pail should need to be emptied twice a week, based on capacity. We expected the pails we tested to hold at least 20 size-4 (or about 45 newborn-size) diapers. At the same time, the pail should have a compact footprint.Be somewhat attractive: Because diaper pails are usually placed in a prominent location, often in a nursery, aesthetics are important. We also looked for evidence that a candidate’s materials and design could endure years of use without looking worn out. One of our testers, posing with eight pails we tried. Michael Hession/NYT WirecutterWe tested nine diaper pails in 2017, in a first round of testing, and an additional six (with some repeats) in early 2023. In between, we collected feedback on our picks. When writer Jenni Gritters took over as the author of this guide, in 2023, her family had owned the Ubbi diaper pail for nearly four years.In both rounds of testing, we first unboxed each diaper pail, noting how easy or difficult it was to put together. Then we put the mechanical parts through their paces, opening and shutting the lids more than 200 times each over the course of testing. We tested each pail for at least two days, making sure to dispose of fully loaded diapers without first attempting to fold them up tightly (to simulate how a not-so-fastidious caregiver might use a pail). We changed out the liner when it was full, and we inserted a refill in the pails that took proprietary bags. For pails that took tall kitchen trash bags, we used the Glad Tall Kitchen Drawstring Bag.Finally, we collected feedback from two other testers, who tried three of our favorite pails for a week as well. Any amount of smell was worth noting — even if it was minor. If an odor was detectable when the pail was just sitting in the room, we eliminated that pail from the running.
Source link