These things…
annoy me.
This is a dishwasher detergent pack,
actually one of two that came with my new dishwasher.
Detergent packs have become wildly popular lately, and ya know what?
That’s cool.
I get it.
No mess, pre-dosed, convenient.
Those qualities are worth a premium!
Just don’t eat them.
I can’t believe that ever needed to be said…
Trouble is, these fly in the face of the way most dishwashers are designed to operate.
Including the one this came with!
I have a feeling these guys are responsible for a lot of dishwasher dissatisfaction these days.
See, if you use them exclusively,
you may be significantly limiting your dishwasher’s ability to clean.
Now, have no fear, your Tide pods are fine.
This problem affects dishwashers specifically.
To understand why, let’s take a look at a dishwasher so we can learn how it works.
Luckily, I have one!
Riiiighhht here.
[various shuffling and struggling]
[struggling intensifies]
Hi.
This is a fairly typical and basic household dishwasher built for the US market.
Cue the comments about how European models are different.
Actually, yes, before we go too far -
my experience is with the North American market and there seem to be vast differences between the continents.
I suspect the main point of my video here will apply to many of you over there,
but I could be wrong and in any case
I’m sure there are lots of particulars that will seem odd or different.
Please do comment about them, it boosts engagement!
On that note - before we get into the main point,
there’s a bit of advice I want to give to North American viewers specifically.
Our dishwashers... [audio fades]
[voiceover] OK I spent way too much time on this.
Basically, because it’s always been this way,
North American dishwashers are hooked up to hot water.
Now, because of this, they don’t expect to heat the water for the first rinse.
But, since you probably don’t get hot water right away at your kitchen sink,
it might start washing with cold water and that alone will really affect performance.
If you aren’t already in the habit of doing so,
you should run your kitchen faucet until you get hot water
before you start the dishwasher.
Since the dishwasher’s almost always hooked into the kitchen sink,
this ensures it starts washing with hot water.
Yes, this wastes a bit of water,
and the entire practice of hooking it into hot water is questionable in the first place,
but that’s just the way it is
and if you think your dishwasher sucks
you should really try this if nothing else.
Anyway...
Being a more basic model, this dishwasher is constructed mostly out of plastic.
Normally it’s installed under the countertop
which is why they only bother to give it good looks on the one side,
though so-called portable models
(which really just means they’re on wheels and don’t require permanent installation)
as well as countertop models are available if uncommon.
Also, comes with this nice blanket to keep it warm!
Or maybe it’s for sound-deadening.
Probably that.
Dishwashers are actually very simple appliances and they haven’t fundamentally changed since,
well, since they were invented, actually.
That’s right, Josephine Cochrane’s dishwasher design [she later changed the spelling of her name, pedants]
patented all the way back in 1886
and considered to be the first modern automatic dishwasher,
worked more or less exactly how this one does.
And really, that shouldn’t be too surprising
because it’s not like the physics of washing dishes have changed from then to now.
Speaking of, how does one wash dishes?
Great question! First, you get some dishes.
Then, you use them to help you prepare and consume a meal.
After that’s done, now ya got dirty dishes!
To clean them, all you’ll need is some hot water, some soap,
and something to scrub with.
Fill your sink up with some hot water, add some soap,
and go all scrubby scrubby.
The mechanical action of your scrubbing
combines with the cleaning actions of the soap and the heat of the water
to break food residue apart and release it from the dinnerware.
Now just give it a good rinse and you have a clean plate or whatever.
And if you work in a commercial kitchen, don’t forget to fill the third compartment
of your three compartment sink with an approved chemical sanitizer solution
or extremely hot water.
Remember: Wash. Rinse. Sanitize!
But here’s the thing -
you don’t actually need something to scrub with to wash dishes.
Scrubbing with a towel, sponge, what have you imparts mechanical force
on food grime releasing it from plates, silverware, et cetera.
Water by itself can accomplish the same thing, though.
Ask any canyon and it’ll tell you just how abrasive water can be.
Well, OK we’re not talking about erosion here
but water is heavy stuff.
A jet of water can impart a fair bit of force
simply because it’s moving at high speed and has a substantial mass.
You’ve sprayed dirty boots with a garden hose before.
Or something like that anyway, so you’ve seen this first hand.
Dishwashers use this same principle.
Combine it with a bit of soap and time, and you’ve got automatic dishwashing.
Now, you could simply use the water in your home’s pipes,
send it through nozzles to create jet streams from the pressure,
and spray the dishes but that would be very wasteful.
So instead, dishwashers fill themselves with some quantity of water
and use an electric motor to drive a pump which creates its own pressure.
The same water will be recirculated through the dishwasher for long periods of time,
which also means that any detergent that’s added stays in the water
and doesn’t get flushed away immediately.
How and when detergent gets added to the water is important.
Foreshadowing.
When necessary, a second, smaller pump is used to drain the water,
although the mechanical particulars there vary from model to model.
Inside the dishwasher are a series of sprayer arms which, you guessed it,
are armed with sprayers.
The main pump sends the water it moves into these arms which,
by restricting the flow from the pump and causing a build-up in pressure,
create a series of waterjets to be directed at the items to be cleaned.
The jets are pointed in all sorts of different directions,
a definitely deliberate design decision,
distributing a deluge of detritus decongestant
directly at dirty dishes.
Importantly, the spray nozzles are arranged
so that the reactive force produced by the water exiting the nozzles
causes the arms to rotate for more complete cleaning coverage.
Let’s now take a look at the various components of this dishwasher.
The large plastic box which forms the bulk of its structure is called the tub.
It’s not always plastic, and for a name like tub it seems to be on its side,
but it is the tub nonetheless.
A small cavity at its bottom known as the sump houses
the pump assembly and provides much of the space for the water that it will fill itself with.
When cleaning, the pump takes in water through these filter screens
and forces it through a pair of pipes which lead to the sprayer arms.
One pipe leads directly to the bottom sprayer,
and in this case there’s a suspended sprayer arm below the top rack
as well as an adowable wittle one at the very top;
those two are fed by a pipe traveling up the rear of the tub’s exterior.
All of the mechanical bits of the dishwasher hang from the bottom of the tub,
and you might be surprised at how few there are.
Only four things need to be controlled here.
First there’s a solenoid valve which allows clean water into the tub.
Second there are the two electric motors that drive the pumps -
the large one provides the pressure for cleaning and discharges through the sprayer arms,
and the smaller one discharges to this hose for draining.
And finally there is the resistive heating element,
with its terminals protruding through the tub here.
And that’s it.
Since this is a modern dishwasher
there is a microprocessor at the helm,
and it monitors a few sensors.
This one here is a mechanical float switch which signals that the tub is full.
However, this is a backup input.
It doesn’t actually fill the tub anywhere near this full -
instead, there is a second, hidden sensor here.
I suspect the float switch is there mainly to guard against overfilling
in case the main sensor fails or the solenoid valve gets stuck open.
Or some other thing.
Lastly, there is a temperature sensor which helps it know when it needs to heat the water.
Oh, and of course there is also a door switch
so it can tell if the door is open or not.
Speaking of the door,
now let’s talk about the door!
This is where the brains of the operation are,
including the logic board and user input panel,
as well two more things the dishwasher has control over.
Built into the door at the top is a vent that opens when drying,
and about midway up the door on the inside is the star of the show:
the detergent dispenser.
See, because of how dishwashers work,
it would be best for it to be able to release detergent into the tub
at a specific point in the cleaning cycle.
That is after all the entire point of having a detergent dispenser.
It wouldn’t bother with one if it didn’t want control over when it’s introduced to the wash water.
And this is where, in my opinion,
dishwasher detergent packs are making things worse for all of us.
Well, those of us with dishwashers, anyway.
To explain what I mean, we need to observe the dishwasher in action
and uncover its sequence of operations.
When a cycle is started, after running the drain pump for a while
to get any stray water that might be in the tub for whatever reason out of it,
the water inlet valve is opened and water is let in.
Once it’s full, it runs the main pump and starts cleaning in earnest.
Remember that this water isn’t being heated by the dishwasher,
so unless you ran your kitchen tap this may be stone cold.
Because the dishwasher has filled itself with so little water,
hardly even a gallon (or 4-ish liters)
it can’t run the bottom and top sprayers at the same time.
So, it periodically switches which ones are cleaning.
I believe it accomplishes this simply by reversing the direction of the pump motor,
as I don’t see any sort of valve anywhere.
When it’s not cleaning the bottom rack, water is redirected out the rear supply pipe
and sent into the top sprayers.
This does have the unfortunate side-effect of making the wash cycle much longer,
but comes with the benefit of reduced water usage.
In many dishwashers, including this one,
the impeller of the main pump acts something like a garbage disposal.
It shreds food particles apart so that they can easily be drained and won’t harm your plumbing.
This isn’t universal, though - some dishwashers, notably models made by Bosch,
instead use filter screens to trap particles, and these require periodic cleaning.
Sounds gross, but whatever.
This dishwasher is of the pulverizing variety,
and it’s actually got a really clever design feature.
The bottom sprayer arm shoots jets of water along the bottom of the sump
to push solids into the main pump intake where they will be shredded into gloop.
Neat!
This first fill of water is responsible for…
well, a lot.
The dishes are as dirty as they’ll ever be when you first start the dishwasher,
and there’s a lot of grime to take care of.
That means this fill of water gets filthy…
fast.
So it doesn’t spend much time with this water.
Only about fifteen minutes.
It then drains it away.
And it fully expects this water to be friggin’ nasty.
The next step in its program is to fill with just a bit of water,
and run the pump in a few short bursts.
This dilutes whatever’s left of the nastiness
(after all there will always be at least some water left in the sump from the last fill)
and probably helps ensure the pump doesn’t clog.
It then drains this small quantity of water.
Now, notice that this entire time
the detergent dispenser has remained closed.
Because the first fill is the nastiest and also the shortest,
it doesn’t make sense to release the detergent right away.
Again, that is the entire reason the dishwasher has a mechanism to hold and release detergent.
It has to get the nasty stuff out first,
and if it had released the detergent,
well the detergent would have left with all the nasty stuff in the first 15 minutes of the cycle.
That’s no good.
But wait, you say.
Isn’t detergent, like, there to help it clean?
Wouldn’t it be good to have some in the first fill
to help it get more gunk off faster?
Why yes!
It would!
And this is why many dishwashers, and in fact every single model I’ve encountered personally,
have not one...
but TWO places for you to put detergent.
One of which, the pre-wash compartment,
is open to the tub to release detergent immediately for the first fill
(in this case through these little vents)
and the other, the main wash,
is sealed until the dishwasher’s program calls for it.
Are you starting to see why I don’t like detergent packs?
Quick note, for those of you with dishwashers that don’t have a pre-wash basin,
hold your commenting fingers because we’ll get to you.
So, this dishwasher like many, many others out there is designed with the expectation
that some detergent will be in that first fill,
and that *more* detergent will be available to it when it wants it.
And sure enough, after it drains the real nasty water out of itself and does that little purge routine,
it fills up with fresh water, this time completely,
so it can start cleaning again.
Shortly after it begins, it opens the detergent dispenser.
It spends a long time with this water: nearly an hour.
With most of the real nastiness long gone,
it can really work to clean the stubborn bits with very soapy and mostly clean water.
This is also where it turns on the heating element to heat the wash water further,
if needed.
Which, since 15 minutes has passed since the last fill, is almost a given.
Again, we might want to rethink this whole
“dishwashers are hooked up to hot water” business
because I think it might be more harmful than helpful.
Your water heater ends up heating a bit of water that gets cold again
by the time the dishwasher actually needs it.
It’s not great.
Now, after it’s done cleaning, it needs to rinse your dishes to make sure there’s no detergent left on them.
To do this using as little water as possible, this dishwasher takes special care
in the draining of the main wash.
It adds a bit of water while the drain pump is still running
to dilute what’s left in the sump.
Then it does the same small fill and purge routine it did after draining the first fill.
This further dilutes what’s left.
And to be extra extra sure the detergent’s gone,
it again lets water in at the same time it drains the purge water.
Finally, it fills completely and pumps the rinse water around
for about a half hour while also heating it.
If you have a sanitize option, this is when that happens.
In the US, the rinse water will be heated to at least 150°F
per the NSF specification on residential dishwashers.
After the final rinse, it drains this water away and runs the heating element
to dry the dishes, if desired.
Let’s step back a moment.
What do we need detergent for in the first place?
What does it actually do?
Well, a number of things.
Dishwasher detergents are concoctions of various chemical surfactants and enzymes
with three particularly useful properties for washing dishes automatically:
it helps break down proteins in food,
and it acts as an emulsifier and a dispersant.
They also don’t produce suds,
an absolute necessity when pumping water around in a machine.
This is why you can’t use plain dish soap in a dishwasher - otherwise,
this happens.
Fun.
Except, not at all.
Oh, and dishwasher detergent is the main reason some things aren’t dishwasher safe.
It’s more aggressive than just plain soap, and so can harm certain items or finishes.
Anyway, you know that oil and water don’t mix, right?
This presents problems when cleaning dishes
because we often have various oily substances in our food which in turn end up on the dishes.
Emulsifiers can ease the tensions between oil and water.
Dishwasher detergent, and in fact soap more broadly,
is an emulsifier.
It allows oil and water to mix by encapsulating tiny oil droplets in structures called micelles
which then become suspended in the water.
The emulsifying action of the detergent thus allows you to clean oily things using water.
Fun fact!
Egg yolks are an emulsifier,
which is why eggs are often called for in recipes for baked goods
where oil or butter is to be mixed with flour and water.
You need them to keep the oil or butter from separating out of the batter, dough, etc.
Which leads us to the dispersant properties of detergent.
Dispersants, also known as dispersing agents,
are used to keep you in suspen -
I mean keep things in suspension.
I will now read this amazing sentence from Wikipedia:
“Dispersants are widely used to stabilize various industrial and artisanal products,
such as paints, ferrofluids,
and salad dressings.”
The main benefit of having a dispersing agent in the dishwasher detergent
is that it helps keep oil droplets, food particles, what have you
in suspension so they don’t settle out of the water
and form a nice buildup of residue.
‘Cause that’d be gross.
Plus, it keeps them from redepositing on the dishes,
as that would be counterproductive.
So basically, detergent helps break down food things
and helps them mix with the water which makes the water more effective
at getting food things off plates and stuff.
That’s a really simple way to put it but it’s more or less correct.
And so I ask you,
would it not be beneficial to have some detergent from the beginning?
After all, if the point of the first fill is to remove and pulverize the biggest,
nastiest, grossest food bits and get them out of the wash water quickly,
would we not want it to be able to emulsify oils
and break down proteins,
remove more food particles as a result,
and keep those particles in suspension until it can drain them away
by adding a little bit of detergent to the water from the start?
Personally?
Yes. I want that.
And these little buggers have taken this away from me and you and everyone you love.
Well, OK, that’s not strictly true,
but their popularity has caused most consumers to bypass the very helpful
and in my opinion necessary addition of detergent
in the first pre-wash fill.
Dishwashers can clean much more effectively if they have detergent in both the initial fill and the main wash.
You really shouldn’t need to pre-rinse the stuff you put in a dishwasher because
that’s what the first fill does!
Without detergent in it, though, it can’t do nearly as good a job.
And now that detergent packs are the de facto form of detergent,
your dishwasher simply doesn’t work as well as it should.
I mean, look, this box of Cascade powder even says
“For best results, fill both the pre-wash and the main wash cups completely.”
How am I supposed to do that with one of these, Cascade‽
Let’s do some experiments, shall we?
I’ve prepared a few pairs of dirty plates soiled with various grossness.
Here we have baked-on pasta sauce.
This bowl is filled with remnants of pancake mix.
We have a plate on which scrambled eggs were eaten.
And finally, there’s 2 tablespoons of butter
and about a quarter cup of shredded cheese microwaved to make this mess.
And, these have been sitting undisturbed for about 3 days.
Yummy!
I’ll be running them through a normal cycle on this dishwasher,
but I’ll be stopping it after it drains the first fill so we can see how much gets done in that first 15 minutes.
The water entering the dishwasher will be as hot as the tap allows.
For one run no detergent will be added to the pre-wash basin,
and for the next run there will be.
And it’s nothing special, just this Great Value lemon scented gel.
Let’s see how it goes.
Here’s the first attempt.
Remember, there’s no detergent in here at all;
it’s cleaning with water only.
It’s doing surprisingly well at getting the pasta sauce off.
That water’s looking pretty gross… and here it comes.
Look at that deliciousness.
Mm-mm good!
Now, let’s do this again but this time with some detergent.
It’s been placed in the pre-wash area and you can see it oozing out.
Actually, it doesn’t need to be here at all,
in fact I think it would be better just to squirt some into the tub,
but I’ve done it because it’s prim and proper
(plus it’s the amount the dishwasher manufacturer recommends because, well, it is a measuring cup after all).
Alright, and washing… washing… done!
Or, well, no… 15 minutes of a two hour cycle but now let’s compare!
I’ll admit that I was surprised just how much water alone was able to accomplish,
particularly with the pasta sauce.
And, believe it or not, the run with pre-wash detergent actually did worse with the pancake mix.
But the devil is in the details, and there are some important and significant differences.
While the difference looks slight at first glance,
more pasta sauce was removed and more completely when there was detergent,
particularly in the areas it had been burned onto the plate.
There are many more flecks that stuck behind when there wasn’t detergent in the water.
Next, notice that a fair bit of butter remained on the buttery cheese plate.
With detergent in the water, all the butter had been dissolved into the wash water.
Thanks to the emulsifying action of the detergent, of course.
There doesn’t seem to be much of a difference when it comes to the cheese,
but remember that what doesn’t leave in the first fill will stick around for the main wash.
This glob of butter will take up a lot of the detergent’s ability to emulsify oils in the main wash,
which will make it less effective,
whereas when there was pre-wash detergent it was all gone.
Last but certainly not least, the eggs.
Eggs are notoriously difficult for dishwashers to tackle,
and sure enough it doesn’t look like much has been accomplished here.
But look closer.
The run with detergent removed much more of the surface residue than water alone.
This is probably thanks to the enzymes in the detergent beginning to break down the proteins in the eggs.
It doesn't look like it at a glance, but to me this is the most compelling evidence
of the benefits of pre-wash detergent.
Remember that these results are after only 15 minutes into the cycle,
and more detergent (and clean water) would be on the way
were the cycle to continue.
The simple addition of detergent to the first fill,
and honestly not all that much,
increased the amount of food it removed in just the first few minutes of washing.
If it can get more out in the first rinse,
it will obviously do better in the main wash.
Not only that, but without detergent,
a disgusting amount of sludge built up at the base of the sprayer arm and pump intake.
Most of that was the butter, I’m sure, because it doesn’t mix well with water alone.
A little detergent, though, greatly reduced that sludge buildup.
And, of course, that means the main wash would have less to deal with.
Again, I know I’m repeating myself here,
but there are two places to put detergent for a reason!
I hope through this you can see why.
No matter how fancy your detergent pack may claim to be,
it will be working harder than it needs to without a little help in the pre-wash.
Except, of course, for the dishwashers that don’t have a pre-wash basin.
It seems Bosch in particular has just given up and conceded that everyone buys detergent packs these days.
They no longer include a spot for pre-wash detergent,
which is particularly odd because they still have a dispenser
and still hold it shut until the second fill.
You would imagine that they would want their dishwashers to perform at their peak,
and I can all but guarantee they could do with a bit of detergent in the first fill,
nevertheless they don’t bother to encourage it anymore.
I suspect this is a reaction to the proliferation of detergent packs,
and not because the pre-wash detergent doesn’t help.
We’ve just seen that it does significantly.
My guess is that Bosch has optimized their wash programs for only one introduction of detergent,
and I’d bet thanks to detergent packs.
However, my new KitchenAid dishwasher,
with such fancy features as a third rack for flatware, mugs, and glasses
and a turbidity sensor which can determine how dirty the wash water is,
still encourages you to add a little extra detergent.
In this case there’s a divot on the sliding dispenser door,
and detergent placed here will just fall into the tub.
But you can’t do that if you buy detergent packs.
I mean, sure, I guess you could just use two with each load but that would be a little silly.
And still, some dishwasher manufacturers like LG
say that if you are to use a detergent pack,
you should bypass the dispenser altogether and instead place it directly into the tub.
But that’s horrible advice, particularly since many packs
are nothing more than plain powder detergent in a dissolvable membrane,
with maybe a little extra flair.
It will all be gone after the first drain if you just throw it in the tub.
Really, dishwasher detergent packs just... don’t make sense to me.
One of the great benefits of using an automatic dishwasher
is that it greatly reduces the amount of water needed to wash dishes
compared to washing by hand.
This is all the water this model uses in a normal wash cycle,
which can tackle more than 8 place settings!
It only takes 4.2 gallons, or about 16 liters,
precisely because the detergent keeps food particles suspended in the wash water,
allowing the same water to provide cleaning action for almost an hour.
Oh, and it only used 1.2 kilowatt hours of energy!
But you hinder your dishwasher greatly when you only introduce detergent once.
I suspect that a lot of complaints surrounding modern dishwashers not cleaning as well as old ones
have detergent packs to blame, at least in part.
Oh, phosphates you say?
Yeah, quick note, there are a lot of folks out there who are convinced that phosphate-free detergents,
which were introduced to combat the environmental damage caused by phosphates being introduced into the waterways,
just doesn’t work as well as old fashioned phosphate-full detergent.
Personally? I don’t buy that.
I... I just don’t have issues with my dishwasher not cleaning well with really any detergent I've used.
Plus, phosphates were added to reduce limescale deposits from hard water,
not exactly a function of cleaning.
Using a rinse aid product will help, so if you aren’t doing that,
well start doing that.
Here’s an anecdote for you.
This pan was used to make a cheese and bean dip I make every once in a while.
I’ve let it dry out, there’s caked on cheese and oil and in general it’s, uh, well it's kinda nasty,
but I know it will be cleaned just fine by my dishwasher.
It's done it many times before.
Even if I’ve let it sit for days before I clean it.
And for the most part I buy cheap, store-brand detergent!
All I do is put it in both places my dishwasher asks me to
and it cleans excellently.
Even this old one did a great job -
I only replaced it because its control board is starting to get a little loopy,
and sometimes it crashes and doesn’t finish a cycle.
It only happened twice during the making of this video!
It might have been an easy fix, but it’s also kinda loud, and so was the perfect candidate
for cutting a hole into.
I never pre-rinse my plates, cookware, even stuff like this skillet.
The first fill, with a bit of detergent, does that for you.
That’s the point!
Granted, I’m no chef, but I just put whatever is dirty in the dishwasher without thinking,
and rarely do I ever find something that wasn’t cleaned perfectly.
Usually it’s just something like a random fork with a stuck on piece of celery or junk like that.
Even this giant skillet, after making something like beef with broccoli with its gross and sticky sauce,
it comes out perfectly clean without any pretreatment.
And with cheap detergent.
If you’re constantly underwhelmed by your dishwasher,
well first you should probably buy a dishwasher cleaning product
and run that through it according to its instructions,
also check to see if there are any filters to clean,
but seriously, go buy some basic powder or gel detergent,
and put it in the dispenser AND the pre-wash area (wherever that is)
and see how it goes.
You might find it did a better job than it ever did with the fanciest of packs.
And also, now I get to be grumpy, it’s getting hard to buy plain detergent these days!
Everybody wants packs, and I would be OK with that
were it not for the fact that using a single detergent pack is antithetical to the proper function of most dishwashers.
The pre-wash basin would not exist if the manufacturer didn’t think it might be helpful.
And truthfully, I think that adding in a bit of detergent to the tub
even on models that don’t have a specific pre-wash area
would provide a dramatic improvement to cleaning performance.
You might want to give it a try yourself, it really won’t hurt anything.
Now, here’s a caveat.
Pretty much every dishwasher has different programs to choose from.
You may have an express wash option or similar which does indeed open the detergent door
right away.
For these wash programs, if you use them,
it simply makes the first fill the main wash, and so adding pre-wash detergent
wouldn’t make a difference there.
But most “normal” cycles will behave like we’ve seen here -
there’s at least one pre-wash fill before it opens the detergent dispenser to get all the nastiness out quick.
And in that case, you’ll get better cleaning with a little detergent in there from the get go.
I said "get go," not gecko.
Anyway, you’re right.
The main point of this video was for me to tell you about the existence
of the pre-wash detergent basin and show you that,
if you actually use it, your dishwasher will work a lot better.
I want you to experience the full potential of your dishwasher.
So many people seem to think that dishwashers need to be babied,
that you need to rinse anything remotely dirty off
before you load it up, and that’s just never been the case for me.
Either I’m the luckiest person alive, or pre-wash detergent makes a huge difference.
I think it’s the latter - when it has soap from the start, it can work so much better.
Thanks for watching, I’d really love for you to give old fashioned detergents a try.
They’ve never let me down, despite being the value option.
And truthfully that’s not my motivation, I just don’t get how a detergent pack
is gonna be a better option because…
that’s not how dishwashers work!
And the popularity of, like, those Finish tabs that are individually wrapped?
Don’t get that at all.
That’s way more annoying than just squirting some gel into a couple of cups.
If you like the convenience or accessibility of packs,
which I can absolutely appreciate,
my advice would be to try the cheapest ones and use two with each load.
Put one in the dispenser and throw another one in at the start.
That is, of course, if your dishwasher behaves like this one.
Which, on a normal cycle, it probably does.
Now, you can usually hear the detergent dispenser open,
and if it does a fill and drain before that happens,
I really think you’ll have better results with basic detergent but twice.
It’s worth a try, anyway, and please -
feel free to come back here and tell me if I was wrong.
My experience may simply be outliery.
And also, I would very much recommend against doing this to your dishwasher.
Despite using gobs of silicone and letting it cure for three days, the seal failed.
Yeah, that was fun.
Nothing quite like fighting a water leak near live electrical connections.
My second attempt worked, but only because I sealed both the inside and outside.
And I can tell that the inner seal has failed, as water’s trapped behind the glass.
It’s almost like dishwashers are designed to clean things using high-speed jets of water or something.
Whodathunk.
♫ phosphate-free smooth jazz ♫
Though, so-called portable models,
which really just means they’re on wheels and so don’t require… bo! Not "and so".
No!
With most of the real nastiness long gone, it can easily work to clean the stubborn bibts…
mmm!
It, well I think they all do, you may ha
[extremely weird noises]
Sounds gross! But whatever.
This dishwasher is of the pulverizing variety,
and it’s actually got a reaaally cleugh I don’t like how this line’s being delivered!
Exactly how this one does, and really that shouldn’t be all to surpri -
[just crashes like a computer or something]
...acts like a garbage disposo. It shreds… disposal.
I… Disposo the Clown’s coming back!
Remember him?
I imagine the comments are going to be filled with everyone's dishwasher takes.
And I mean, that's fair, that's basically what this entire video is.
One giant dishwasher hot take.
Yes I am grumpy and insufferable, why do you ask?