Dishwashing detergent hack: Two ingredients (2015) | Hacker News Reader

Dishwashing detergent hack: Two ingredients (2015)

whatlisacooks.com

144 pointssuperasn289 comments

Everything I know about dishwasher detergent is that it is formulated to clean chemically, i.e. with enzymes etc. that actually break food down over the course of tens of minutes or hours.

Dish soap does NOT do that. (It's also why you shouldn't wash dishes by hand with dishwasher detergent, because the chemicals are too harsh.)

I don't doubt that this "hack" does some cleaning, but for things like crusted-on tomato sauce, hardened cheese, dried egg yolks, etc. -- it's just not going to work as well. Dish soap simply doesn't break these things down. It's not meant to.

(Washing by hand with dish soap works because you're applying intense pressure and abrasion, neither of which a dishwasher can do -- which is why it does it chemically instead.)

I just don't find it credible that "the results are identical". Either the author isn't paying enough attention, or else they're doing extensive "pre-washing" of their dishes before loading them, or they're washing so incredibly quickly after eating that food never has the time to dry/harden in the first place.

I once met a chap who told me he used his dishwasher without any powder or soap at all, and it still worked.

Now, maybe he was making it up. But i suspect that there is a common class of dish dirt where prolonged steaming and jetting with hot water is adequate in practice - i'd expect anything water-soluble to dissolve in hot water! So, residues from tea or coffee, water-based pasta sauce, fruit juice, jam, etc. It won't work for everything, of course, but it might work for a surprising range of things.

Exactly, even friction with hot water will definitely do some level of washing. You can't really estimate the effect of dishwasher detergent until you actually try with and without (which is akin to using placebo for drugs).

The same is true for washing machines in laundry, running them without detergent will still remove some stains.

Once a month or two I run my washing machine on a hit wash with just a couple of old towels in there to 'clean' the washer. You will be amazed how soapy the water is. Running a hot wash like this gets rid of the detergent that is trapped in the machine and removes smells.

Many machines have a cleaning program to do exactly that. Machines without it should be avoided IMO.

I have hard water so washing machine and dishwasher get limescale. I just run them on a hot cycle with a bottle of white vinegar every month or so. Leaves them sparkling clean. Same with the kettle. No need for nasty descaling products.

I just run every single load with a single "extra rinse" cycle, since I hate leftover detergent/smell on my clothes (and I already use "fragrance-free").

With the extra rinse, I've never had any kind of buildup of detergent in the machine. I know this because I wash my shower curtains with just water and bleach every ~month to remove mildew, and there are zero suds.

To be fair this is what I do, I always make sure everything is in the dishwasher less than 30 mins after I'm done and no issue.

Then again I have one of those small half size ones that look like a cabinet door.

I do this with the same set of plate(s) and utinsils and rice cooker it's great.

Granted, I cook daily for myself, and I steam everything and avoid oils/grease in general with chicken/fish.

But it's possible, the only issue I have is hard water stains but better than scrubbing it with a sponge.

I lived in a co-op in PA during college, we had a "dish sanitizer" instead of a dish washer. It was basically just blasting the shit out of the dishes with crazy hot water. We were supposed to wash them before we put them in there but nobody ever did.

The cafeteria at my dorm had this. High pressure very hot water spray. Took about a minute. All the dishes were ceramic and there was glass and flatware. I don't know if anything plastic or other material could be subjected.

Ppolypropylene baby bottles (with silicone parts) are sterilized in steam or boiling water.

The school cafeteria I worked in had this (was a middle school that also prepared food for some smaller elementaries). We put plastic foodservice containers in there all the time. As long as the plastic is made to stand the heat of the water, you are usually OK. Home dishwashers have similar restraints.

Very standard at most bars since soap residue will remain on pint glasses and ruin the taste of beer. Instead this just sterilizes them.

I’m in a constant debate with my spouse about the need for prewashing. She’s a prewasher and I am not.

My anecdata based on “feedback” I’ve received over the years:

(1) Greasy and sugary things will go through fine.

(2) Proteins, like supplements, eggs, less cooked meats or cat food, tend to denature more and get stuck/baked to dishes to the point of needing a rewash.

(3) An exception is proteins in a fat emulsion (like mayo) where fat has a stronger influence on the properties of the residue.

This is after trying multiple tablets, even ones that promise pre-wash free dishes, in a pre-Energy Star dishwasher.

I used to get testy when people rinsed the dishes before loading the dishwasher. Then one day I had to take it apart and dig out rice, plastic, beans, and other things that were stopping it up.

This is standard part of dishwasher operation. Every 5-10 loads you refill the jet dry liquid and bang the screen trap out in the trash.

It should be only slightly more difficult than removing lint from the dryer.

With my lack of rinsing this is an every day job in our house. Though we never use rinse aid.

xattt says>"(2) Proteins, like supplements, eggs, less cooked meats or cat food, tend to denature more and get stuck/baked to dishes to the point of needing a rewash."<

Proteins are softened and loosened by soaking in water. Many glues are protein-based and, for that reason, protein-glued items should not be exposed to high humidity or water. For example, most violins are glued with animal hide/hoof or fish protein glues.

Soaking protein in plain water will eventually loosen it completely. The process is reversible: drying re-hardens the protein.

This has been my strategy with some caked on foods but not always an option in the heat of the moment.

An ideal dishwasher would let you load it up over a day or too, and keep the dishes moist but intermittently misting them. Probably terrible for mold and mildew however.

We experimented with several solutions (as we found the tablets expensive and needlessly complex). We tried with our own home-made baking soda solution. It worked generally well, except for something like tomato pulp. You'd simply still see it afterwards (red). We gave up after a while, and found a relatively cheap and good brand of tablets. YMMV.

We had a dishwasher with auto-dispense where you pour the whole bottle of detergent into a reservoir and it would automatically dispense what was needed.

Well one day it was getting low I poured a new bottle in and all the dishes weren't getting washed. I called the detergent company to report a defective bottle, but turns out there was some sort of formula change due to a new regulation. Apparently mixing the two together in the auto-dispenser causes them to harden and clog the dispenser. So I tried just pouring it into the manual dispenser, slightly better but the dishes weren't really clean. I called my dishwasher repairman who just told me to buy Finish tabs and we would be fine.

My mother called me weeks later saying that six of her tenants complained that their dishwasher was broken and she had already replaced one (two of the dishwashers were less than two years old). I told her to just gift them all a tub of tabs from Costco which worked.

This happened to me in the car when adding a new kind of windshield wiper fluid over the old one. It did not clog the pipes, but made the resulting fluid very slimy, and it could not be wiped out by the wiper blades. The result was that the windshield became translucent and very hard to see through. When it stayed longer on the windshield, it frosted like ice, making it even harder to see through. I had to stop at a service station and drain all that fluid out, then fill the washer fluid tank with water to clean everything.

The new fluid by itself was fine, it was just the combination of the two that created a reaction.

Didn't happen to be a BMW did it? It was a big issue for a while.

Nope. A quite old VW Polo. Not sure how it could be car specific.

Because clearly BMW sells it's own special washer fluid for $40 a bottle.

Nah, BMW uses tablets for it's screenwash that are about £7 for six, each makes 5 litres. BMW Part number: 83122298202

Less shipping cost/environmental impact too.

30 litres for around £7 (plus a few pennies for water) doesn't seem bad to me.

Different brands use different formulations, apparently the brand that the dealership puts in at BMW/MINI doesn't play nicely with some of the brands from supermarkers.

More of an issue for newer cars though, I will give you that.

If your kids do the dishes this is essentially the amount of diligence they provide. And people don’t get sick.

I do put soap in but he few occasions I forget I don’t worry and put them away anyway.

> I just don't find it credible that "the results are identical". Either the author isn't paying enough attention, or else they're doing extensive "pre-washing" of their dishes before loading them, or they're washing so incredibly quickly after eating that food never has the time to dry/harden in the first place.

They run the washer many times per day... al the food is probably still fresh and not dried up and hard to remove. Same is true for professional/restaurant dishwasher, where dishes are put inside immediately and washed in a few minutes.

I worked as a dishwasher at a restaurant -a couple differences between the dishwasher there and the one at home- it had a couple tanks of liquids (once for the cleaning cycle, a different one for the rinse cycle) - and the water got seriously, seriously hot at high pressure. Also - still didn't work with baked on spaghetti - still had to clean those by hand.

Commercial dishwashers also don’t hold much (at least the single rack ones in most restaurants) and have much higher pressure spray.

Commercial dishwashers often don't wash dishes - that isn't their purpose. Most often, you need to rinse off any solids and scrub off anything baked on (which happens, especially with buffet-style inserts). After removing obvious dirt, they go into the dishwasher, which realistically is there to sanitize the dishes. If you don't have this, you generally need 3 sinks so you can have a sink full of disinfectant.

> Everything I know about dishwasher detergent is that it is formulated to clean chemically, i.e. with enzymes etc. that actually break food down over the course of tens of minutes or hours.

This may have changed recently, but dish soap used to have enzymes too.

Dawn still does:

https://www.pg.com/productsafety/ingredients/household_care/...

Was curious about this, so I looked it up. Sounds like it's usually bacillus protease and amylase, to digest protein and starch, respectively.

As another commenter mentioned, Dawn dishwashing liquid, used by the author of the article, also includes protease and amylase.

Maybe the baking soda emulates some of the mechanical action of manual washing.

You're underestimating the power of steam, hot water, and surfactants and overestimating the power of enzyme cleaners. You could run a dishwasher on fresh dishes without any detergent at all and there's a great chance they'd come out spic and span, though with water stains.

In the article they claim to run the dishwasher twice a day. No time for sticky foods to become extremely dry I guess..

>I run the dishwasher twice a day usually during the week

yep

We do this on occasion if we’ve run out of pods, it recipe calls for some salt as well. It works INCREDIBLY well.

A fun trick is to google for the safety data sheet (SDS) of household chemical products. They'll tell you rough proportions of some of the ingredients. (Not all, just the ones they're required to -- the more dangerous ones.)

For example, the SDS for Cascade Pacs[1] tells us that there's ~40% sodium carbonate (washing soda, a fairly strong base), a few percent of sodium percarbonate (washing soda + hydrogen peroxide), and a few percent of an ethoxylated alcohol, a surfactant.

There are also some notes further down about Subtilisin, which apparently is a protease, an enzyme that breaks down protein.

(I'm not a chemist, so my interpretations of what these chemicals are/do is based on search results for the chemical names / CAS numbers.)

I bet if you looked up the SDS for Dawn dish soap, it'd be mostly surfactants, so sodium bicarbonate + Dawn dish soap is a reasonable approximation of sodium carbonate + surfactants.

OxyClean is also sodium carbonate, sodium percarbonate, and ethoxylated alcohols, so it'd also probably do just fine -- whether it's safe to use in a dishwasher depends mostly on the toxicity of those ethoxylated alcohols.

1. https://www.pg.com/productsafety/sds/SDS_2018/SDS_Feb_2018/C... 2. https://www.ahprofessional.com/_downloads/sds/SDS%20OxiClean...

I am a (former) chemist, and you are spot on. They are pretty comparable.

One is Polyethylene glycol (PEG) isotridecyl ether, one is PEG decyl ether (and friends, various carbon chain lengths. These neutral detergents act as surfactants without much foam. Dawn has anionic detergents which foams up.

Are you suggesting the OxyClean dishwasher detergent recipes may be good?

It's far from the worst. The big unknowns are the PEG chain lengths (how many -CH2CH2O- links in the chain, more means more solubility, to a point) and how clean the product is. It's a dirt simple synthesis and there aren't a ton of real nasties (toxic at low concentration) that can be generated, so there's not a huge amount of risk in my opinion. Like, eating fried food is probably a higher risk in the long term.

I love doing this. Often, they'll give a range e.g. 5-15% to protect their 'trade secret', but it gives you a decent-enough idea of what's in there.

Always fun to lookup some kind of expensive cleaning product (e.g. tile grout cleaner) and find out it's made from a few percent NaOH (sodium hydroxide) and water. You're paying $30+ for a quart of water and $0.10 worth of lye.

I'm baffled by this. Many times it is listed under the ingredients, no need to look up anything. NaOCl, HCl, NaOH make up the majority of cleaners. My wife prefers to buy the expensive stuff even though she knows I consider them a blatant rip off. I lost count of the arguments that started with a grocery shopping.

Marketing and FOMO works

I always wondered, how safe are dish soaps? Can they replaced with something more natural, like vinegar or lemon juice? We have those around for simple household cleaning, only bringing out sodium hypochlorite and sodium hydroxide for heavy duty cleaning.

Depends on the "dish soap". I've seen everything from sodium fatty acetates (old fashioned lye-and-grease soap, Castille soap) to PEGylated alkanes and sodium lauryl sulfate.

Vinegar and lemon juice work well on Lewis bases (amines, some proteins) and some inorganic salts, but they aren't detergents.

NaOCl and NaOH are right proper cleaning agents and will saponify fats.

"natural" is over used - arsenic is natural. If dish soap wasn't safe we would have known about it well before now.

Here's another solution. Next time you run out, buy two bags of dishwasher soap. Then when one bag is done.... wait for it... USE THE SECOND BAG!

All that's left is to put one bag of soap on your shopping list and you have 5 to 20 days to manage to buy it before you're back in fish soap and baking powder hell.

That trick only works if you have lots of money. And lots of space.

Do you apply it to other things too, like garbage bags? Or olive oil? What about hand soap?

All of a sudden you're spending 2x normal for a while. Not a lot of people can do that.

> All of a sudden you're spending 2x normal for a while. Not a lot of people can do that.

Then stagger it—an extra box of dishwasher tablets this paycheck, an extra box of garbage bags next paycheck. Overall consumption doesn't double.

The space concerns are very real though and probably harder to solve…that's my bottleneck

Yes, that's the reason why shopping at Costco isn't the solution to everything. I don't want to store 300 toilet paper rolls.

Also, Costco isn't always automatically the best price per unit anyway. Especially for staple items, I find that Fred Meyer (Kroger) is frequently less expensive on a per-unit basis for really common household items. It's deeply ingrained that buying in bulk must be cheaper, but pricing in grocery stores isn't always that intuitive.

Don’t know how it is in America but here in Norway, stores are required to list per-unit price on the shelf for all articles. Makes it quite simple to compare stuff. So for example milk has the price for a carton on the shelf along with the price per liter, toilet paper has the price for a pack along with the price per meter, detergent has the price for a box along with the price for the portion required for running one machine, etc etc.

This makes it trivial to spot cases where the bigger bag is actually more expensive per-unit when you’re at the store.

I guess to compare between different stores you’d still need to make note of the per-unit prices that are listed but still it is helpful even if you went as far as that. I usually buy everything I need at the store closest to my home because they are very competitive on average even if one or two items might be cheaper downtown.

I am not certain what the law is, but stores here in the U.S. routinely list the per-unit price on the shelf tag. Costco certainly does, Kroger does, but I don't know if all stores must. I wouldn't be surprised. I don't often look at per-unit when going between stores, I more often use it to gauge the value of upsizing at the same store, or comparing to other brands of the same product that are on the shelf nearby.

Costco shoppers know that they don't always get the 'best' price, but it's a good enough price and it's likely to be good quality, so it takes the hassle out of the shopping and decision making process.

That's a fair point but if you can afford two, buying twice the amount is actually cheaper since you can buy it at Costco, etc. I do have two rolls of garbage bags, etc. but I also recognize it's not doable by everyone. GP's tone is a bit off putting even if it is a valid suggestion for some people.

Ah, the garbage bag. This elusive luxury item which throughout history has been reserved only for people who have lots of money.

I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not. But yes, waste disposal has been done much better for the rich historically than the poor.

I listed garbage bags specifically because I've noticed recently that the "good" ones (like, large, or strong) are actually quite pricey and often only are available in large quantities (40 count or something). So the price to buy trash bags might be like $20 or something. Buy 2 at once? $40 on garbage bags while grocery shopping? I mean that's a lot, no? To get the good version of something, twice? Not exactly an item for the poor to double-up on.

And suggest the poor buy the less good trash bags that are cheaper? Well then we have shown that garbage bags can indeed be a luxury item even today.

If $40 to buy two is a lot of money, then $20 to buy one is also a lot of money (since, after all, it's the same price per unit), are you sure you can afford to spend 50 cents/bag for garbage bags?

We buy the big store brand box ($15 - $20 for 200). The box is a bit too big to put under the sink, so we put half in another smaller container under the sink. When we refill that container and the box is empty, then it's time to buy more.

You do realise that your consumption of garbage bags does not double because you buy two rolls at a time. If you are wealthy enough to save up for a one-time investment of 1 roll of garbage bags, you are able to implement the scheme suggested by the original poster.

Yes I realize that consumption does not double simply because you buy double. I am not commenting on garbage bags (the topic is detergent); I am commenting on the strategy being used for more than 1 thing. If you use this strategy for 1 item, okay, I get it, the expense is fine. But if the trick is used for other things (as seems logical) then the initial expense of starting to do this could be large.

You are arguing against yourself. You made up this idea that if you buy extra detergent (because you keep running out of it) you also need to buy more of everything else.

You're not making any sense here.

Nothing is forcing you to go buy double everything each time you shop.

If cash is tight but you want to implement this scheme, buy an extra unit of one household item (e.g. laundry detergent) your first trip. Hext time, choose another item (e.g. trash bags).

Eventually you've got a backup unit of every item, and you're now just buying your one item on the same consumption schedule, except now instead of replacing the item you're replacing the backup.

I did grow up in poverty and indeed garbage bags were one of the luxuries I "treated" myself to when I started living on my own as a teen.

Its not twice always, its just twice once. Its like getting ahead of the usage schedule.

When you start, buy one. You assume its good for 20 days. Buy next one on Day 10. Voila, you have the backup now. Now buy next ones, one at a time on 30th, 50th, 70th day. You are 10 days ahead of usage, you always have at least 10 days of runway ahead of you.

Yes, I do it for Grocery, Ice cream, Watet, Olive, Garbage Bags, Dryer Sheets & anything I use regularly.

The ones in use are required in their place. The spare ones can be stuffed at upper shelves, under the sink, under bed or such.

I have seen second toilet roll in many offices & homes, almost every car has a spare tyre, & many other things.

With a little planning like described it gets even better since you can buy stuff when it's on offer, which is never when you suddenly need it.

I figure I'm buying my time back with very little upfront cost. That also leaves more energy to do things like... earn more money/manage my space better.

Many poor people don't even have dishwashers! Perhaps this whole topic we should refrain from discussing.

Or take it to the other extreme - buy two dishwashers A and B and use A for dirty items whilst using B as storage for clean items. When the dirty one A is full, run it and put dirty items in the formerly clean washer B. This way you save on cupboard space which can be used to store faberge eggs instead.

Yes!

At which point the frumer-than-thou will need four dishwashers...

After the eggs, don't forget space for wind-up travelling salt servers.

(We actually have one of the latter. Not as fancy as the ones in the Hermitage by a long shot, but then again, we're intending to come to a better end than the Romanovs, so we're certainly not going to just cargo cult their flexes.)

As far as I can tell, this HRE example is so posh a salt cellar that it's even useless for actually holding salt: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mechanical_Galleon

My father in law had a running gag about wanting to do this for a couple years. Replace all the cabinets with dishwashers and just cycle between them.

> That trick only works if you have lots of money. And lots of space.

No, detergent is cheap nowadays, and detergents are way more compact now (thanks chemistry) than they were 50 years ago. So space should hardly be an issue.

It's also not a surprise when cleaning supplies run out, they're used at a fairly steady rate; like you have weeks of notice if you see the bottle/box is running low.

Yeah resource management is really not that difficult for this kinda stuff.

1. Do dishes

2. Oh there’s fewer than 7 tabs left

3. Buy new pack on your next weekly trip to get groceries

You can eyeball the number 7 and you even get a daily reminder.

The problem is the gap between 2 and 3 -- unless you keep a list (and follow it when you're at the store), you may still run out.

Online shopping has helped me with this -- I usually add it to my online cart as soon as I'm running low.

I think this is the problem the Amazon Dash buttons were supposed to solve -- keep a Dash button in the cabinet with the dish detergent, and when you see that you're running low, hit the button to order a new one.

Kitchen chalkboard + mobile phone camera. Bonus points if your wife sends you the picture of the shopping list with a cute emoji.

Adulting: it's not that hard, but it's not kid stuff either.

Yeah, there are lots of ways to do grocery reminders, I'm just pointing out that when the OP said "resource management for this is easy", he omitted the hard part. "Buy more when you're low" is the easy part, the hard part is how do you go from "I need more" actually buying more.

Yeah this is the solution my family has restored to, after trying all kinds of grocery list apps etc.

Pro-tip for folks with multiple adults in the household - Google Keep makes for a super easy way to manage shopping lists.

I created (over time) a list of things we buy, in order of how you'd shop for them and shared it on Keep. Basically me or my wife can pull open the app, check a box.

Get to the store and just go down the list as you walk through the store.

I'm sure others have better ideas - this one works for us!

We do the same thing. Keep is superior to a written list - you can organize it, so apples don't end up near the top of the list, and oranges at the bottom, and you end up walking back and forth through the store.

You can have sub-items in Keep, by dragging items beneath a "heading" item, and so we have a bunch of major items (meat, fruit/veg, breads, paper, cleaning, etc.) that stay on there, and we add subitems to the list. It makes it much easier to shop, and as we shop, we check items off.

It's too bad Google separated Keep from their assistant function. You used to be able to say "ok google, add cheese to the shopping list" and it would go in the Keep shopping list. Now it goes in a shopping list that is somewhere else, that I can't share. Not very useful. Keep is also easily replaced by a variety of open source solutions, whenever Google decides to deprecate it. It is simple, and it works for now.

We have a similar system!

I know you can also do it through Apple Notes. It's a bit clunky to share the note with someone else, but once you've done it, it works very similar to Keep.

FWIW, Google Assistant can now use custom list apps (and Keep is an option), so "ok google, add cheese to the shopping list" is a thing again. Under assistant settings, it's in the Services / Notes & Lists heading.

In my house I'm the one who cares the most about running out of things so I keep a list on my phone. When my fiance or I notice something is low, it goes on that list. Since it's on my phone, I'll almost always have it at the store.

> You can eyeball the number 7

Supposedly, Henry Ford ran F by eyeballing the height of various stacks of papers on his desk. GM made fun of him for doing so (because they had "scientific management"), but I wouldn't be surprised to find out the numbers on the pieces of paper in each stack were generally for the same order of magnitude, so he really could get actionable "Business Intelligence" by comparing stack heights.

(Are there any other practices on which astrophysicists and Henry Ford could agree?)

Another option is to do things on a schedule. E.g. you work out how much of something you need per month, and make sure that you order that much every month (if you order/buy every month). Sometimes you use less, sometimes more, but then you just take one order to "skip" if you have too much, etc.

Also, it helps with consumption on some level. You start adjusting your consumption based on how low/high you see your stocks. Other than that, make sure you always have a bit of a buffer and you'll be fine. Especially now with the pandemic, lockdowns and supply-chain irregularity.

Well done for never running out of any household item

A related strategy - always keep a spare of crucial household items like this (dishwasher soap, toothpaste, etc). Don't buy a new one when you run out entirely, buy a new one when you use up your primary and switch to the backup.

eg, I'm about to "run out" of toothpaste, in that the tube on my bathroom counter is almost empty. I have a full tube sitting in one of my bathroom drawers. When I pull that one out, I add toothpaste to my shopping list, and the new tube goes into the drawer as the new backup.

Also, buy in bulk and when it's on sale. Those things usually last a long time, and there is a very very low chance you'll end up not needing those items anymore in your household, and even then you'll have bigger problems than 5 tubes of toothpaste left over in your drawer.

Another related strategy: Pay an extra month on any recurring bills at the start (for services that allow you to maintain a credit balance). Then, just pay your bills as normal, except that you have an automatic one month of grace period for everything because you have a credit balance. This has saved me numerous times because of absentmindedness.

>This has saved me numerous times because of absentmindedness.

Aren't you costing yourself tens of dollars per year in lost interest by doing this? You're essentially giving them an interest free loan. A calendar/reminder app doesn't have this problem and is more reliable (on the off chance you forgot twice in a row, for instance).

Only worry about lost interest after you have maxed out all your investment and are holding no cash. Once you run out of cash to invest, then you can tap into these reserves. Most people though keep cash on hand anyway, accruing no interest.

Also, you might want to use the shelf space for something else. And the apartment may have a high cost per square meter so it would cost thousands in storage space.

I used to do this until I became competent with that sort of thing.

If you're the sort of person for whom this is a bandaid, a calendar won't fix it, and you're also not the sort of person who cares about $15/year. Hell, I haven't missed a bill in well over a decade, and I don't care about $15/year.

I think you might be overestimating what the opportunity cost is. A $100 loan to a utility at today's interest rate (say a high-interest savings account) is probably $1-2 per year.

Or better, have all your bills paid automatically.

That only works well if you're diligent about reviewing them. If the power company suddenly thinks you owe them for a new $2000 power meter, it's good to know that before the money comes out of your account (or onto your credit card).

I'm not that diligent so burden of manually making sure bills are paid is a great way to force me to check that the bill makes sense!

Just came here to say this actually happened to me. About 10 years ago I lived in a high-rise apartment in Chicago. One day we got a bill in the mail for ~$50,000 -- turns out, I got billed for the entire building. It took weeks to sort that out.

3 weeks prior to the automatic payment, the power company sends me a notice of the exact amount that's going to be taken out. I review it every month.

You are far more diligent than me! If I know the bill is getting paid, I have a tendency to put it off.

I do the same and wait until all the bills arrive at the beginning of each month to do them in one batch and do not like the cognitive overhead. Now wondering whether it would be possible to set up semi-automated payments. You get a notification about your bill and if you click/tap through it gets paid. Still in control but less manual steps. Maybe there are services for this use case already?

It's like Toyota's kanban cards. When there's only N left the card says get M more of these items.

Literally addressed in the article...

This technique worked fine for me for decades, until semi recently.

Another solution is to stock up on such commodities - most people have enough space to store toilet paper, detergents and the like since you are anyway going to use them sooner or later. You might as well stock them up, just in case, as you never stop needing them.

As a bonus, when the next pandemic hits and everyone is panicking for a roll of toilet paper, you can rest easy knowing you have enough for a year or more.

Thank you Costco.

> As a bonus, when the next pandemic hits and everyone is panicking for a roll of toilet paper, you can rest easy knowing you have enough for a year or more.

And make money on Ebay :)

> I buy like 4 or 5 packages at a time, just to make sure we don't run out.

It sounds like that's how they normally solve this too.

But this pandemic has messed with a lot of our supply chains. Things we counted on being there on the next visit or order just aren't there. Automatic Amazon orders that we've been auto piloting for years and years aren't so automatic anymore.

So any hack around not having something is still something I think most of us should keep in a back pocket ;) Even for the most prepared of us.

Don't let amazon drive your supply chain. Figure out what you need to operate for 120 days. Buy whenever you're below 90 days.

Then make zero mistakes in your planning, and have no accidents or unseen needs. Sounds easy for a family.

The 90 days is a buffer to handle mistakes, accidents, and unseen needs.

As nitrogen pointed out, that's what the buffer is for.

You're right, you can't individually run a just-in-time supply system for your family. (Well, you could, but it meant a lot of grocery runs every week ;)

What I'm saying is that you do not want just-in-time. Neither by yourself, nor by people who are really good at it. Systems are resilient by having built-in slack. Remove the slack, you've optimized the well-lit path. And become much more susceptible to failures.

Ask people in the Northeast who just had a week of power loss how redundancy helped them. The ones who have a backup power source will nod vigorously. Ask midwesterners how they prepare for winter (especially in rural areas). Having that buffer is helpful.

It doesn't need to be 90 days, that's my personal threshold.

And yes, it's easy. "Hey, I need X" -> "Go get it from storage, and put it on the list". It'll take a while to flush out unseen needs, but the same is true for a standing Amazon order. I'm not saying drop ordering/shopping on demand right now - just order a decent supply next time you order, instead of one pack.

And sure, you can keep Amazon as your supplier, but we've just proven out that they're a single point of failure. (Remember ordering in April/May and getting delivery dates for August?). Having local alternatives is valuable. Support them even if they aren't immediately necessary.

Huh, for the first couple of weeks here in the UK some things were harder to find, but since then I've noticed no items not in stock at all - Where are you based?

Do you Kanban? Because that's exactly how kanban works. The signal to purchase is the empty bag/box of detergent.

On the topic of dishwashers, can anyone tell me why no dishwasher let's me fill it with, say, 20 loads worth of detergent and then it just dispenses it as needed? My dishwasher can do that with "rinse aid"(which I don't use), but I've never seen one that can do it with regular detergent.

Another "hack" is that the tray you're supposed to fill with detergent is almost always way too big. People think "more soap -> more clean", but that is only true to an extent. You will be just fine filling it only halfway up, even if you have a full load in there. The same goes with laundry detergent.

My dishwasher can't do that, but my clothes washer can. The limitation is space inside of the device for the reservoir. In a clothes washer there's plenty of space between the cylindrical wash basin and the square housing, but in a dishwasher there is much less available space between the square dish cavity and the housing, and that space is generally filled with sound deadening and thermal insulation.

Great observation on space utilization!

GE makes dishwashers that do exactly this. You look up your water hardness in a table, push some magic buttons as described in the manual to tell the dishwasher how hard your water is, and you pour detergent into the reservoir. Interestingly, you are strongly advised not to mix chlorine-based detergent with enzyme-based detergent at risk of turning the mixture into hard-to-remove goo.

Seems like determining water hardness would be something the dishwasher could do.

Have you ever taken a dishwasher apart? I have and it's an unbelievably simple machine that they charge you big bucks for. There's a lot it could do but manufacturers are in the business of making money, not selling complex, hard to maintain machines.

They are very simply constructed - and I think that's for two reasons: 1, it's cheaper, and 2 - My experience with dishwashers is that they are sort of intended to be disposable. They're relatively cheap, and replacement parts for the things that can fail regularly are very nearly as expensive as the actual machine.

The control board is the thing most likely to go (electronics and water); everything else is floats and switches. It's also 7/8ths the price of an entirely new machine.

This is one conspiracy theory I whole-heartedly subscribe to.

This is like Apple charging half the phone to fix a cracked screen.

Half a phone? The screen repairs are like $100-200 depending on your model, while the new phone is over $1000. It's also not just the glass, when you get your iPhone screen replaced, they replace the entire front half of your phone, basically everything involved with the display, and put a new front on. So I think you are pretty wrong here, I think they charge less than half the phone, and you actually get half of a new phone.

They can be well over $200 for some phones:

https://support.apple.com/iphone/repair/service/screen-repla...

I get that it's a lot of parts, but this is the most fragile piece of the phone and Apple would be wise to take a note here from their competitors and explore other options. There is no reason why it needs to be a lot of parts replace to fix your cracked screen, or even have a screen that cracks at all, other than a lack of imagination in the engineering department.

My experience (and this may be brand or price-point dependent) is the opposite. My Bosch had a couple of failures (that ideally would never happen, of course), but because the parts are fairly standardized and the design is very elegant, I feel like it's one of the last few "owner-repairable" items in the house.

The replacement parts were very reasonable (a fraction of the original cost of the dishwasher), easy and quick to obtain (from a particular retailer which also does very informative non-pushy YouTube videos for reparing/diagnosing problems), the diagnosing was straightforward (like debugging code), and the replacement was manageable (if a little cramped).

There may be a price cut-off where this starts being true, and where it stops being true. My particular dishwasher was ~$1k 10 years ago, has had ~$120 of parts replaced over that period, one of which was cosmetic, and has otherwise worked flawlessly. All in all, I'm very happy with that trade-off.

I just checked, and there are two control boards that could be replaced - each $150.

I'm pretty enamored with the engineering elegance of the dishwasher. Until I opened one up and had to fix something I always thought it would be a lot more complicated than it really is.

I've had the same experience with our Bosch dishwasher.

It may depend on the manufacturer, but my impression was they were usually about the simplest white goods to repair. You can buy the pumps, valves etc cheaply, and they’re quite accessible.

Probably not worth it, since your hardness doesn't change, and is a number that you can get from the water utility.

The inexpensive ways to measure hardness are colorimetric: you add some reagents to the water and look at the color. Electronic colorimeters exist but are not particularly cheap. Electronic colorimeters with automatic reagent dispensing also exist and are quite expensive. And you need reagents.

I’d rather save $500 or more on my dishwasher and type in the hardness. Even without my utility report, hardness tests are cheap if a human operates them.

The main annoyance is the fact that there are a couple different units for hardness.

Are you sure you're not thinking of dishwasher salt? https://fredsappliance.com/service/dishwasher-salt-use/

Yes.

https://products.geappliances.com/appliance/gea-support-sear...

Sadly this seems to have been discontinued.

One design issue would be keeping the reservoir and chute dry enough that the detergent supply doesn't cake up. Another is that dishwashers are designed to fit into a very specific space in a typical kitchen, and any extra gadget takes away from the capacity of the tub.

You're not buying expensive enough dishwashers - Miele have recently launched machines which do just that:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQPmumBcAF4

They use a proprietary disposable reservoir, so there's an opportunity to get hacker points by working out how to refill it yourself!

Some users might get annoyed if it isn't compatible with whatever type of dishwasher detergent they want to use. And there are at least 4 types: liquid, powder, gelpacs/pods, and tablets.

It's easy to solve that with a compartment and a door that flips open. I don't know of an easy way to solve it for 20 loads.

Or even easier, just create a hockey puck of detergent that dissolves a certain amount each time you run it. Kind of like those toilet pucks.

Once it disappears, drop a new one in.

Came across this hack for using ordinary liquid soap in dishwasher. Posting it here since a hack is a hack :)

tldr: use a few tablespoons of baking soda with the regular dishwash soap. The reason for not being able to use regular dishwash soap is because it makes lots of suds which floods your dishwasher. But baking soda prevents that from happening.

Would love to know the pros and cons from an expert here.

that is literally what the article says to do

To be fair, it takes about 4 paragraphs for the author to get to that point.

Commenter is the submitter. Often someone will submit a post, and then add the first comment.

I was a chemist in my past life, but not a soap chemist, so no doubt someone will be along to correct me.

At a high level, soap is soap. They are basically molecules with a greasy end (long carbon chain) and a polar end (ionic group). The molecules form stable micelles that looks like little cell membranes almost, with the greasy ends pointing inward and the polar ends pointing outward (in contact with water, which is polar).

That allows the soap to combine with greasy molecules you are trying to clean away. You're basically suspending the grease in water using the soap molecules.

Now, there are a ton of different soap though. The polar functional groups can be carboxylic acids (typical homemade soap, hydrolyze fats with lye), or phosphate groups (now banned as the phosphates end up in waterways and cause algae blooms) or sulfates (the most typical last time I looked). There are no doubt others I'm not as familiar with.

Now soaps all do the same thing, but there are important differences. So this "hack" works in terms of providing a soap and killing the foaming with baking soda (we used this trick in the lab all the time to break up foams and emulsions). The baking soda can also act as a water softening agent.

That said, dishwashers are usually made for specific detergents because you don't want build up from leftover soaps and you also don't want to corrode any metal parts.

So this works, but probably not as good as actual dish detergent (but it might not matter if your dishes aren't that dirty), but you are taking a risk that continued use might gunk up your machine. Or maybe it won't.

I think most dishwasher detergents switched to enzymes to replace phosphates: https://www.cnet.com/news/appliance-science-how-dishwasher-d...

That article implies the enzymes do some work, so that surfactants/soap can carry away the tougher components (protein and starch)

I could believe the enzyme bit. Soaps require 3 things to work well: sheer force, concentration and temperature. The higher the better for all 3.

Dishwashers can’t do consistent sheer force unless the sprayer hits your dish just right.

So makes sense that their cleaning agent will use some other mechanism just requiring application/soaking and not sheer force.

Dishwasher powder is also extremely alkaline, i believe. I (cosmetically) ruined an aluminium Moka coffee pot by putting it through a dishwasher.

Nothing cleans quite as good as strong alkaline. In the lab, we'd use a 50% lye bath and it strips off everything.

If you want to add a bit of punch, you can add some 30% hydrogen peroxide as an oxidizer. Caution is needed as mixing a strong oxidizer and organic material is a recipe for fire or an explosion.

Yah, lye won’t just clean, but also help make new soap from anything fatty!

> Nothing cleans quite as good as strong alkaline.

Depends on what you are cleaning. Most oven cleaners are strong alkalines, often sodium hydroxide. They work well enough on grease, but neglect it a bit and the heat turns the grease into a char that nothing short of a steel scraper and lot of elbow grease will remove. (On reflection, that char may be a combination of what was grease and protein.) In any case, alkaline cleaners and soaps won't touch it.

But allow to ammonia at it for 12 or so hours (it doesn't have to be wet - just exposed), and it just wipes away. The usual technique is to put the stainless steel fittings in a garbage bag, pour in a cup of cloudy ammonia, and tie off overnight. (If you want to have working nostrils afterwards, open bag outside.)

It even works on the glass door. Open so it's flat, cover with paper towels, soak paper towels in cloudy ammonia, hide outside for an hour so the smell doesn't take you out and burnt on crap wipes off.

I don't the chemistry is, but it's magic. It would be interesting to find out what the chemistry is, actually.

Yes, there can be a lot of additional ingredients added to dishwasher soap and I had heard of enzymes before.

I have to admit I'm a bit skeptical of their effectiveness. Enzymes can usually be denatured pretty easily and if they are in a solution of hot detergent, I'd be amazed they'd stay intact enough to actually do what enzymes do.

That said, there are enzymes that are pretty robust, so I could be completely off base.

Edit: I am off-base, apparently there are super stable amylases that can survive 106C water.[1]

[1]https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S157096391...

I speculate that bio laundry powder would be better than dish soap, as that has similar enzymes in. No idea if it's similar enough, or if there are other things in laundry powder that would be a problem.

Oh no, hack trouble:

https://www.idealhome.co.uk/news/washing-machine-hack-242903

>At a high level, soap is soap.

Very well said.

Anecdotally, many years ago we were using in a tunnelling project what was called in jargon "shampoo" that was essentially some form of high concentration surfactants, they are used (injected in little quantities with water) in rock drilling mainly to prevent the bores to collapse (in order to later be able to insert the explosives in them).

The stuff was pretty much inexpensive (bought by the barrel), I diluted it 1:5 and made an exceptionally good liquid soap to wash car, trucks and equipment.

Then, diluted 1:10 and with added sawdust (we had on site a small carpentry shop) and little sand (the fine one we used for concrete) and some lemon juice the result was an as well very good hand wash paste for the workers.

The reason for not being able to use regular dishwash soap is because it makes lots of suds which floods your dishwasher.

And by "floods your dishwasher" he means "makes enough suds that they escape from the bottom of the dishwasher door and spread themselves across the entire kitchen in a giant soapy mess.

Found this out when my grandmother, who had never seen a dishwasher before and had no concept of "dishwasher detergent," came to stay for a while.

An additional function of the powdered detergent is that it's an abrasive, so it helps scour the dishes.

I ran out of dish soap a few weeks ago, and I came across this same recipe. I found that my dishes were clean, but glassware and ceramic had a film on it. It wiped off easily with a towel.

Note that I tried this exactly 1 time.

Adding a teaspoon of Lemi-shine (which is just citric acid, which you can buy in bulk online) to the late rinse cup will solve that problem.

(The late rinse cup is the one with the door that seals; the early soap cup is the one the door doesn't seal; it is labeled "pre-wash" in the article photo. The pre-wash cup is where you should put the baking soda/Dawn mixture.)

Adding some TSP should help.

TSP is magic. I put it in the laundry from time to time. Used to be built into laundry detergent back in the day, right? Banned now. Well, I only use it for nasty stains and really dirty stuff.

TSP - Tri Sodium Phosphate

It was an effective cleaner and an even more effective fertilizer that fed toxic algae blooms in aquatic environments. Not the best choice unless you don’t have anything else.

Oxi-Clean is what I use 99.99% of the time. TSP is a rarity, and since the vast, vast majority of people here are never putting it in the drains, I don't think it's going to be the end of the world.

In areas with very hard water, it may be the only way to prevent calcium deposits that make dishes feel rough and fog glasses. An appropriate amount is < 1/8 of a tsp (~ 0.6 ml) per load.

I would probably _not_ do this long term without expertise from someone that understands the 'why' on the ingredient list on commercial detergents... but my limited intuition says it's probably ok in the short term. The hotter the water the better, and always dry as hot as possible. Dishwashers save a ton of water, definitely use them when available

Why dry as hot as possible? I was always told that the dry cycle was a waste of energy unless you need the dishes dry faster.

Sanitization. Your dishwasher spreads dirt and bacteria around and tries to remove as much as possible with a clean water rinse. Bacteria get into every micro-pore and nano-sized crack, where detergent is unlikely to penetrate effectively. Heat doesn't discriminate (unless we're talking prions, but I digress) and will kill everything that remains.

Does it really get to 150°F inside a dishwasher?

Sanitize mode on Bosh gets to 155°F, They claim it kills 99.9% of bacteria.

Korean dishwasher have heat and UV lights.

I can't see how that's true. A quick search tells me that dishwashers can get up to a max of around 60c, that's nowhere enough to kill most bacteria, especially ones hiding deep inside cavities. Maybe you could pasteurize milk in an extra-long run of your hot cycle, but it won't come close to sterilizing stuff.

Fair enough, but let's say the goal isn't to kill everything, but common bacteria that causes problems, such as salmonella and e coli. 60c is enough to handle that.

It's non-issue in any case. Quite a few people on the planet really need to sterilize their plates, spoons, and forks just to have a lunch. And with rare exceptions 60°C + soap is more then enough for all that stuff to be safe.

60°C is enough. I've made chicken at 60°C in a sous vide without any issues

Here's the pasteurization table:

https://www.seriouseats.com/2015/07/the-food-lab-complete-gu...

So you need to hold at 60 degrees for an hour. Even assuming the dishwasher isn’t lying about it’s temperature, it’s unlikely to do that.

Edit: looks like some dishwashers have modes that do this, though they take a very long time.

I haven’t seen any quality evidence that dishwasher dry cycles effectively “sanitize” anything. Really not trying to be a “but actually” dick, but without this information it’s just marketing mumbo jumbo.

Here [1] is a reference of a citizen experiment to test the sanitize cycles. There are also experiments regarding clothes and apples that are quite interesting on this website.

[1]: http://www.dranniesexperiments.com/dishwasher-testing

They get contaminated as soon as you unload the machine.

Instead of using the dry cycle, use hot water to wash and rince and open the door when its done... It dries most stuff for free (except plastic)

I have a degree in chemistry. This is probably fine unless used constantly or in excess, or if you water is too hard. Powder dish detergent contains sodium carbonate, which is more basic than sodium bicarbonate (baking soda). Bicarb is less soluble and thus acts as a very mild abrasive, but powder detergents usually are similarly abrasive, though I can't find any hard sources saying bicarb is completely safe.

Biggest issue would be hard water creating gunk buildup in the plumbing. Run the "good stuff" every now and then with drying agent and that should clear it out.

If you swap bicarb with sodium carbonate (washing soda) you literally have dishwasher detergent that might be a bit foamier.

Another environmentally friendly hack you can do is to use pine oil soap for machine washing clothes. Naturally you may not want to run this on your finest shirts and pants. But for other old clothes that you do not care that much about it is just fine. If you do this try it with very little soap first so it does not cause to much bubbling in the machine. Also check if your water is hard or soft, if its soft its more likely to work well. Hard water can cause too much bubbles with pine based soap.

You can use pine oil soap for lots of other cleaning tasks, cleaning the oven put a drop out on stuck dirt, heat oven up to 80-100C, wipe off. You can also use green soap for washing the toilet and sink.

For washing the coffee maker use vinegar mixed with water, run it a short wile so waster circlulates through the pump, stop. Wait for 30 minutes.

For dirt stuck on stove, use vinegar let it stay for a while wipe off.

Good natural cleaning items: Baking soda, Vinegar and Pine oil Soap.

White Vinegar / Water also replaces Windex! I didn't want to believe it because I thought we needed the blue stuff in the spray bottle. The product. But we were out and push came to shove we tried it. I was wrong. It works.

50/50 white vinegar and dawn detergent will keep your shower and toilets looking new.

Could someone please confirm what “dish soap” is please for those of us that aren’t American. It’s soap for cleaning dishes in the sink, right? (as opposed to soap for washing hands). In the UK we refer to dish soap as washing-up liquid. Don’t want to use the wrong stuff!

Thanks in advance.

Dish soap is for dishes. Hand soap is for hands. Bar soap is also for hands.

Barkeeper's Friend is definitely not for hands though!

Canadian here. Detergent is what you put in an automated dishwashing appliance. Dish soap could be either detergent or dish soap for washing things by hand. Dish pods are pre-bundled detergent with liquid that helps stains from forming.

Sometimes you see "dishwasher soap" or "dishwasher detergent" for the stuff you put in the machine, as opposed to "dish soap" which is used in the sink.

Yeah, dish soap is soap for washing dishes. Us Americans can get pretty craaazy with our naming conventions!

> Us Americans can get pretty craaazy with our naming conventions!

This really goes both ways. :) Wait until you find out about "public schools" in the UK, or at least England.

(They're independent private schools which are not government-funded, and are in fact far less public than government-funded state schools. As I understand it, they came to be known as "public" because they were successors to traditional homeschooling in a private environment.)

Washing up liquid. (Would you care for a cup of tea, love?)

You people say, "I'm in the toilet..."

Eww. The bathroom (or restroom) is the room the toilet lives in. Water Closet is fine I guess, just sounds so antiquated.

The toilet is the thing you poop in. When a Brit or Aussie says, "I"m in the toilet..." I just see someone standing in the pot trying to flush themselves down.

Also, watch out when you ask simple questions like, "Which team do you root for?" because apparently those perverts across the pond think that's a filthy question to ask.

At work someone asked me for a rubber. I sort of knew what they meant, but I had a condom in my travel bag so I gave it to them. The look of like shock was worth it.

Localization man... it's a bitch. Idioms take time to learn.

You people say, "I'm in the toilet..."

A good number (most?) don't say that. They say, "I'm in the bathroom."

A bathroom is the room with the bathtub, and since the plumbing is also there, there's usually a sink and toilet next to it. Variations include a shower instead of a bathtub, and sometimes a "water closet" — a small room that is part of the larger bathroom where the toilet is. This smaller room is sometimes called the "toilet room."

My parents are both chemists. They use "soap" specifically for soaps that are made from fat and lye, and "detergent" for synthetic surfactants.

Oddly enough, powdered dishwasher detergent contains neither. At least the stuff I use is mostly sodium carbonate, which is alkaline and combines with fats in the food to make them soluble by turning them into soap. It is also an abrasive. And cheap.

A functional difference is that in areas with hard water (such as where I live), soap forms soap scum, which is calcium stearate. You used to be able to buy bar soap that was actually detergent, but it's no longer made -- there's a glut of tallow and lard that makes "natural" soap cheaper. So my family now uses liquid body wash instead of bar soap in the shower, and I don't have to spend every Saturday scrubbing soap scum away.

None of this gets to why some stuff is called "soap" in the vernacular. For instance, I call everything "soap."

A little meta, but can anybody explain why recipe articles like this (but usually food) spend so long waffling on about tangential "oh we can't afford to bit run the dishwasher 24/7" nonsense, and not just get stuck in?

Is there some technical advantage to padding it out, or do they just like to see their own words?

The explanation I've heard it's that it's an SEO thing -- if your page isn't "unique" it gets nuked in the rankings, so recipe sites need to add a long preamble to distinguish their otherwise-identical recipe.

Another explanation is that longer articles mean more time spent on the site, i.e. it pumps up those "user engagement" metrics. Plus more space for ads.

The saving grace is that most recipe sites have a "Jump to recipe" button. They know people don't want to read their life story, but they can't jeopardize their SEO.

EDIT: more well-informed speculation here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/3gkzog/comment/ctz...

I think for recipes specifically it started with the fact that a recipe cannot be copyrighted, but that flavor text around a recipe can. This is why recipe books do the same thing.

Actually, I thought that was why this article was posted -- to spur a discussion about these types of blogs padding stories with 95% fluff. As another commenter said, it is a SEO thing.

My dishwashing hack is to simply clean them in the sink by hand and to never use the dishwasher.

I find this encourages efficient reuse of dishes wherever feasible, and ensures that things are always cleaned to my expectations.

You might think this takes some extra time, but there are major advantages to having a sink full of hot soapy water available to you each morning. Wiping down arbitrary surfaces, mopping floors, etc, is a trivial next step after you finish with the dishes.

I'm not sure you sold me on any time savings.

Washing dishes by hand can be a surprisingly meditative experience. (Granted, I live alone--hand-washing dishes for an entire family would drive me insane.)

I agree. A few years ago I went a year without a dishwasher, and while I complained about having to do the dishes every day, while I was doing it, it was kind of an escape. I eventually looked forward to it.

Time to listen to a podcast, or some new music, or to simply be alone with my thoughts because nobody wanted to be around the guy doing dishes. Very therapeutic.

I also find it to be highly meditative. Its almost like a mental switch when I put on the gloves now. Sometimes I find myself avoiding washing dishes temporarily because I subconsciously know I will be forced to think slowly through whatever is bothering me instead of frittering away time clicking across the internet at hyperspeed.

In my experience, dishwashers use more water, not less. Growing up, we used a dishwasher regularly, and the process looked like this:

a) remove all bits of food with regular washing, stack next to sink

b) transfer from next to sink to dishwasher

c) (after running dishwasher) wipe off hard water residue from all glass dishes

d) put away dishes

When I moved out on my own, I discovered the joy of a simple wooden dish rack next to your sink:

a) remove all bits of food (and oil) with regular washing, stack next to sink

And the above is all one has to do! The dishes dry naturally, and putting them back into the cabinet is optional. Notice almost identical step a). How am I supposed to believe dishwashers save water? We used twice the water simply to get rid of oil! After my partner got tired of wiping hard-water residue, we abandoned our dishwasher and never looked back.

> a) remove all bits of food with regular washing, stack next to sink

Sorry, what? Sure, you can't put large chunks of food in a dishwasher, but isn't the main point of a dishwasher to... wash the dishes for you? If you're pre-washing, what's the point of the dishwasher?

That said, I also do not own a dishwasher, since hand washing is so quick and easy.

The "what" is exactly my point. One would assume dishwashers are supposed to do this for you, but what actually happens is the plate comes out with the (yes, small) bits of food hard and stuck to the plate (someone else mentioned "caked on cheese" in this thread).

I've tested this effect in multiple dishwashers at this point, always wanting the technology that was promised, but always in vain.

Maybe the water hardness is set incorrectly or the salt hasn't been added? A dishwasher doesn't need pre rinsing.

Strange, I only ever saw this happen on 20 year old dishwashers. Every modern dishwasher I have used, so long as your have correct plumbing and use a solid detergent requires no pre-washing.

I put my dishes in caked in pasta and sauce and large food bits. The only things that don't go in are anything that would disrupt a disposal unit. No bones, no stringy things like tomato vines etc.

This is advised against in modern dishwasher manuals. I personally never remove food for mine unless it's been caked on due to over-cooking in a pan or something (obviously I scrape large parts into the bin, but I don't pre-rinse). And in most cases I'll often run it through first anyway to soften it up then scrub the remainder off afterwards instead since that results in less work.

In rare cases, food will be stuck to some items but this is usually due to geometry (something was blocking something). It's sanitised from the heat anyway so I just wipe it off and put it away.

I think the hard water residue can be solved with an additive, but it's not a problem in my area.

I have a dishwasher that I use regularly. I never do step a. I usually just take a napkin and dump anything left on the plate into the trash before putting it in the dishwasher. My manual says no pre-wash is necessary and I have never had a problem with this.

Using a rinse agent takes care of c (at least for me).

I used to have this problem, and found it to be caused by a combination of two factors:

1) Growing up in a house with low water pressure. If the machine doesn't have much pressure to work with, it seems to do a bad job more or less regardless of what you try to do

2) Given you have sufficient water pressure, using cheap detergent. After switching to a "top of the line" dishwasher detergent packet, a dishwasher went from "borderline useless" to "more clean than I can get them by hand".

Number 2 was by _far_ the most impactful thing I've done; I can essentially now scrape dishes of large food chunks then put them straight in the dishwasher, and have a >= 98% confidence they'll come out completely clean.

Very interesting. Can you tell me what specific brand this is?

Not the person you asked, but Cascade dry powder detergent is all I need. No pre-washing necessary.

If you use a modern dishwasher and your plumbing is up to spec your dishwasher will be far more efficient then hand washing.

Cascade Platinum, thought I've gotten similar results from the "Complete" version one step down.

I’ll second the cascade platinum recommendation. I though my dishwasher was broken when we used another detergent brand. I took it apart to see if the filter was plugged and even put a GoPro camera and led light in it to make sure the washing arms were spinning. Turns out it was because we used a cheap detergent.

They use less water.

https://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?c=dishwash.pr_handwash_....

https://austintexas.gov/department/save-water-while-washing-...

https://www.epa.gov/sites/production/files/2017-10/documents...

Modern dishwasher have a garbage disposal system that uses a motorized blade to chop up food bits. No need to rinse. High end dish washer have built in water softeners to prevent hard water film. They also make the detergent more effective at cleaning.

Aside from the time/effort spent, manual washing also uses 5x more water on average than a dishwasher. And I'd rather not clean the rest of my house with dirty dish water.

What kind of pre-wash routine is factored into that 5x number? I completely buy it if you just chuck the dirty dishes into the dish washer, but in my experience getting good results from a machine requires pretty extensive rinsing at the very least.

We never pre-wash, and the only thing that our dishwasher has trouble with is parmesan cheese

We have a dishwasher in our local hackerspace. I personally insist that most kitchenware go into the dishwasher before they get placed back on the shelves.

In a communal space with a lot of generic kitchenware, would you trust a random person to clean their own dishes thoroughly enough before someone else uses them?

I have a dishwasher but never use it.

Instead I, like you, wash all dishes by hand in the sink. There's only two of us and we eat simple meals with few dishes. My algorithm (I have two sinks):

1. Foreach dish:

- squirt dish with water-soap solution,

- stack dish into sink.

2. Leave dishes in sink for 5-15 minutes, allowing the water-soap solution to soak/penetrate food cruft, Good time for a cup of coffee!

3. Turn on (hot or cold) water and

Foreach dish:

- clean and rinse,

- set on drying rack or in 2nd sink.

4. Dry and put up dishes as required.

The trick is in step (2) to allow the soap solution time to penetrate oil-based food cruft. Once that happens cleanup and rubbing is minimal. I use a soap-water solution of 1 part dishwashing soap(e.g., Dawn) to 9 parts water.

I once was a firm believer in the dogma that "civilization is based upon soap and hot water." until some Taiwanese graduate students took offense and insisted that hot water was unnecessary! Further experimentation indeed revealed that cold water sufficed with a slightly longer soak time.

I can wash our dishes in 10 minutes or less after dinner. If I'm cooking I can wash any dishes as required as cooking proceeds. There's no way I use more water than a dishwashing machine does.

Disclaimer: I should admit that from childhood until college I was the chief dishwasher for a family of 12 and so was obsessed with the optimization of dishwashing/drying, that several college jobs involved commercial dishwashing and that, at an early age, my father told me that "there is probably a best way to do anything, or almost anything!" (whilst showing me how to properly sweep a driveway).

Some disruption occurred when I left home for college since the primary dishwasher/clothes-folder/putter-upper was now absent. Those tasks and others were dispersed to younger family members whom I had unfortunately failed to train.

You can also use straight baking soda as an emergency laundry detergent. Depending on the machine and size of the load, 0.5 cup/125 ml to 1.0 cup/250 ml. Just put it in directly with the clothes. No dispenser. Also, definitely NO dishwashing soap should be added...

Other hacks.

Instead of fabric softener like downy, use same amount of white vinegar. It is cheaper, your clothes smell fresher, and anyone with allergies will thank you.

For cleaning a tub or shower, make a mixture of 50% white vinegar and 50% dish detergent (like dawn). Spray the mixture on tile/tub/curtain/doors. Let sit for 15 - 30 minutes. Spray down with water. Done. This is way cheaper than the industrial cleaners, much less smelly, and usually works better.

Do dishwasher manufacturers publish any sort of guidance for detergent companies for what kinds of detergent are acceptable or problematic for the dishwashers? Or has this become a chicken and egg problem, where the manufacturers design for the currently available detergents and the detergent manufacturers design against current machines?

The dishwasher itself is pretty much all plastic for plumbing and doesn't have any problems with any detergent; it's the dishes that might not react well to specific detergents/temperatures/etc.

The two don't really design for/against each other outside of small stuff like the detergent holder being able to take a detergent pod instead of loose powder. Dishwasher manufacturers are more concerned about form factor and efficient power use while detergent companies are focused on cleaning efficiency.

In my experience, plastics are not immune to damage from “detergent.” Parts of my dishwasher became quite brittle and ultimately failed—and the zip ties used to cobble it back together also become brittle over time.

I tried a few of these DIY dishwasher detergent recipes a few months ago (random things I did during lockdown) and the results were ok. I usually use all-in-one tablets, which in my country all come individually wrapped in a plastic wrapper which I was looking to avoid. The main thing I found my DIY detergent didn't clean was tea stains in cups, everything else came out pretty good, although sometimes they were a few limescale stains on glasses.

Recently my supermarket had a promotion on dishwasher powder, so I decided to try that. If anything it's worse than my DIY detergent. The all-in-one tablets clean perfectly every time, so I'm wondering what else they have which gives superior results. I regularly fill up the salt and rinse aid (even though this probably isn't needed with the tablets).

I find it interesting, at a glance, most of the comments here seem to take for granted that everyone uses a dishwasher.

I haven't used a dishwasher in about 20 yrs (not bragging, just stating a fact). In those 20 years 13 of them were in Japan, and 7 in SF. In Japan dishwashers are not common AFAIK and when I was in SF partly I was just used to not using one and partly it would have really annoyed my neighbors to run it when I wanted to and scheduling around that made me just mostly forget it was there.

I'm curious what other countries they are common/not common.

Probably depends on your local water and energy cost/regulations. Energy star dishwashers are so energy efficient that you have to run them basically empty before it’s better to hand wash. We really should be encouraging more countries to install more dishwashers, counterintuitively.

I probably need to read the studies in more detail but they always seem to mention "a full dishwasher". Back when I used one it was never full, usually at most 20-30% full and yet it uses the same amount of water regardless. In order to fill it I'd need 4x-5x the dishes and only run it once every 4-5 days and hope that it still got things clean after they'd dried that long and that the machine didn't attract insects for the rotting food inside as waited for their to be enough dishes for it to be full.

That’s not the right comparison to make.

The comparison is between the amount of water the dishwasher uses (regardless of load) and how much water washing by hands uses. Dish washers use a surprisingly small amount of water (3 gallons per load on average). So the correct comparison is “do I run the sink long enough to consume more than 3 gallons of water when hand washing?” Chances are it’s slightly more efficient for you to run the dishwasher half full than hand wash.

I actually think the dishwasher and clothes washer/dryer has done more increase quality of life (especially women's) in the past 100 years than any other invention. IMO they are the ultimate in time-saving inventions, taking a task of pure drudgery and cutting down on the time. Only missing piece IMO is a decent clothes folding machine.

I've seen the hans rosling talk on washing machines and that made sense but I don't think the same holds true for diswhwashers. Even at an 8-10 person party it never takes us more than 10 minutes to do all the dishes including pots etc. On a typical night, family of 4 it takes less.

> Even at an 8-10 person party it never takes us more than 10 minutes to do all the dishes including pots etc.

Wow, you're much faster than I. It takes me probably 10 minutes just to load the dishwasher for a party that big.

Just get Barkeepers Friend. It’s magic and made from natural ingredients. Seriously, if I have kids this will probably be the most important life lesson I teach them. I don’t even know how soap competes.

Wait, you can use Barkeepers Friend in the dishwasher?

I also love that stuff, but didn't know it could be used that way.

I'm not sure it would be cost-effective.

On the other hand it is the greatest for cleaning pans with burned-on food.

stuff that I just don't normally keep around my house, or stuff that I'm not sure I'm comfortable putting on my dishes (Borax...

Borax, a naturally occurring mineral, is worth considering as a home staple. It has many good uses. The best laundry detergent I’ve ever used was something my wife made with Borax. I’ve used it for pest control and it worked better than sprays and other products.

Since this is HN I’m sure others will fall down the rabbit hole of why it’s not as popular as it used to be.

Surprised no one mentioned that "this one weird hack saved a cook-mom" clickbait-style of writing. SEO-optimizing writing style was mentioned in comments, still.

And of course it mentions a specific brand of dish soap to use and has an ad for a bottle to hold it. Makes me question if the whole thing isn't made up just to sell those things.

Watching the history of soap I learned that soap was scarce in Germany during WWII. The vegetable oils used to as part of the soap making process were hard to get. Detergent was invented in WWII by German scientists when they tried to create artificial soap. Soap leaves a scum on things detergent doesn't.

Somewhat related to the article is suds and salt. Public fountains that are vandalized with detergent can prevent it by adding salt to prevent suds from forming.

TOP TIP: Do not put Fairy Liquid in the little tablet tray in your dishwasher when you run out of tablets. It does not end well. :(

Oh, come on... Tell us how it ends ;)

This isn't a scientific study of course, but still I do miss the negative reference (i.e. without any detergent). Additionally, it would be nice to quantify the 'cleanness' of a run (perhaps weighing the dishes before and after?). Hmm, perhaps we should take this study to the next level ;-).

Wow, author runs dishwasher twice a day, sometimes three times a day on weekend. That's insane. Life-hack: reuse dishes and glasses when possible throughout the day. Wipe off crumbs after breakfast and lunch and set the plates aside. Don't freak out if there's a little left-over grease smear on the dish or dried up fruit-water in the bowl from three hours ago, it won't kill you. If the dish is actually in gross shape (caked on cheese or whatever) then fine, throw it in dishwasher and grab a new one.

Kids.

When we doubled the size of our household, we quadrupled the volume of dishes and laundry.

We switched to cloth diapers and need to do a load every day or 2.

Hopefully this is better for the environment than disposable.

For decades, I used the dishwasher exclusively to wash my dishes, but once the pandemic began, I started washing my dishes by hand and have been doing so ever since.

I used to hate washing dishes by hand, because I found touching the leftover food and grease to be really gross, but since the pandemic I started using nitrile gloves when washing dishes by hand, and then since the leftover food was no longer touching my skin I didn't find it gross any longer.

In fact, I was surprised to find that washing dishes became sort of a meditative experience for me, when I took a break from whatever I was involved in in my day-to-day life, and for 10 minutes or so focused on just doing the dishes. So I almost started to enjoy washing dishes by hand, and only rarely run my dishwasher any more. Really, the only time I run the dishwasher now is when I'm too exhausted to do the dishes by hand, instead of every single time.

It's also nice not to have to wait for hours for the dishes to be washed and dried, and not to waste so much electricity to just do a handful of dishes.

Dishwashers are usually much more water efficient than hand washing.

...if you only wash a full load and your hand washing is extremely hot water with the faucet at max flow.

How does it balance out when electricity use is taken into account? Saving water might be better in water-poor locations, but saving electricity might be better in high-electric-rate locations. In water-poor locations, it might be more advantageous to use the gray water from hand washing for other uses, such as watering the lawn or flushing the toilet.

Most of the electricity usage is due to the drying cycle of the dishwasher. If you want to be super efficient, set your dishwasher to skip the drying cycle and either prop the door so that the dishes can drip dry, or hand dry the dishes coming out of the dishwasher.

Generally, when hand washing dishes, hot water is used. Typically ~5-10 times more water is required when hand washing, which results in more water needing to be heated (and is less energy efficient as a result).

> Generally, when hand washing dishes, hot water is used. Typically ~5-10 times more water is required when hand washing

Ah, is that so? I've not had a hand washing experience where hot water was used, I thought everyone used cold water. Also, I'm surprised at the efficiency of the dishwasher. Do people leave the faucet running while they do dishes? What I do and typically see is an initial rinse, then water is off while scrubbing, then a rinse to remove the soap. I personally direct the water stream so that the same water passes over other dishes while I rinse the one in my hand, thus reducing the amount of rinsing needed for subsequent dishes.

Sure, if you run the tap the entire time that you're hand-washing. But you can just fill the sink with water, plug it and wash many dishes with that water. I once worked with a guy who lived in a cabin without running water for most of his life. Needless to say, he was very efficient at hand washing dishes with very little water.

I did some quick calculations out of interest.

It seems our sink fits about 25 liters of water. Let's say half of that volume is taken by dishes, so 12.5 liters. You need a second sink for rinsing unless you run the tap (which would be worse), so that's another 12.5 liters.

From experience, you need to change the cleaning side's water at least once if you have as many dishes as a dishwasher would fit. So the total would be 37.5 liters.

Now I checked on Bosch's website for a standard 60 cm size dishwasher and the water usage ranges from 9.5 liters (eco program) to 18 liters (most intensive/quick program). So the dishwasher wins by some margin.

Personally I don't rinse most dishes before putting them in the dishwasher, mostly just remove any solid bits of food with a knife or similar. So I'm inclined to believe that in my usage the dishwasher is much more efficient.

Keep in mind though, that dishwashers use less water than washing by hand.

That depends on the dishwasher and the dish washer, though.

Keep in mind that marketing departments will pick and choose statistics that make their product look attractive. Dishwashers use more power and the water savings only apply if people don't rinse the dishes first, which many do.

Not to burst your soap-sud bubble, but modern dishwashers use less water than washing by hand[1], and by extension less electricity (purifying water is high-electricity usage, moving it around within your dishwasher is not)

[1] https://www.npr.org/sections/thesalt/2017/11/24/564055953/to...

I haven't measured my water usage, but 5 GALLONS for a standard dishwasher, and 3.5 for a compact?

I feel like if I tried, I could use less water than that... I already don't run the tap while washing. I wet my sponge and scrub away. I only use 30-50mL of water at a time if my sponge gets dry, and my main water usage comes from rinsing.

If you tried. It takes active effort to use less than that. The typical sink fills with more than that, and even if you fill it half way, you use more than the rest rinsing.

There is some meditation that goes along the lines of:

How do you know that you actually enjoy your tea if you don't enjoy washing the bowl?

It would be nice if somebody could point out a source for that idea.

Sounds like something Uncle Iroh would say, but I can't find the quote.

Since it's HN: Bill Gates has mentioned he likes washing dishes. I can't stand it myself.

Steve Jobs also preferred hand-washing his dishes.

Four humans, all home all day long. We cook.

Minimum one dishwasher run daily, maximum 3, average is about 2.

If the sink isn't clear, I can't refill the water tank for the chiller. If I don't refill the water tank, people don't drink enough water.

Running the dishwasher is cheaper than medical bills.

You may want to consider a simple detachable hose you can connect to the faucet to fill up something external when the sink is full. I use such a thing for filling a bucket of water that can't actually fit in the sink. You will find it in your local hardware store.

You actually think you're going to get sick if you don't run the dishwasher multiple times a day? How do people become this detached from reality?

I grew up in a family of seven and we didn't even have a dishwasher. Believe it or not, we're all still alive.

I read it as "the family will become dehydrated and need to go to the ER if there's not water in the chiller, because straight from the tap is UNACCEPTABLE"

Correct. As it happens, my wife's side of the family is prone to kidney stones, and also has an incredibly high pain threshold.

> If I don't refill the water tank, people don't drink enough water

Huh? What's wrong with water from the tap?

Not everywhere has perfectly clean tap water. See https://www.today.com/news/family-discovers-their-tap-water-...

> If your water starts fizzing, that could be a red flag.

You don't say.

Depends where you live. Where I live now, I filter all my drinking water. Across town where I grew up, the tap water tastes so good you could bottle and sell it. Both places have safe water; it's just a question of how it tastes, and that's highly variable.

It's clean and tasty -- but it isn't cold. I can convince my family to drink water when it's cold. So I have a chiller that I refill from tap water, and everyone drinks water, and all is good.

Five humans, all home most of the day. We cook a lot. Minimum one dishwasher run daily, maximum 3, average is about 2.

And all of the pans, special cooking / prepping utensilien are done by hand.

This raised my eyebrow too, but then I saw that she has 6-8 people in her house and it makes sense. With 2-3 people we usually wash about 2 out of 3 days, I can see if you have that many people running twice a day.

For 6-8 people in a household twice a day is unreasonably frequent. Most of those people are probably kids so it's not like you're racking up tons of wine glasses. So, while it's nice to use an environmentally friendly detergent - the most environmentally friendly thing you can do is just reuse dishes when possible - did you eat a bagel on that plate? Give it a rinse and use it again!

Take it from someone who tried. You can use dish detergent in the washing machine (clothes) but using laundry deterge in the dishwasher has interesting results. You will get bubbles coming out all over the place.

The author specifically addresses this.

I don't see this. All I see is the author replying to a comment that this is not laundry detergent.

The author never mentioned using laundry detergent in a dishwasher. I checked before posting my comment.

I would never have believed this was such a controversial topic.

There are typically a lot more ingredients in detergent, so YMMV depending on a number of factors, including the composition of your dishwasher (corrosion), how well you clean the dishes before putting them in (a few drops of Dawn isn't going to penetrate 3-day-old melted cheese), how much you care about disinfecting (bleach), etc. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishwasher_detergent#Compositi...

Dishwasher three times a day???

>We run our dishwasher at least twice a day here, and often three times on weekends.

What the ever-loving fuck?

Lifehacker news?

But..... you already have dish soap? Just.... wash the dishes?

I think it's your day to do dishes.

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