Hacker News Reader

Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

Add dishwasher pods to the list. It’s literally just smoke and mirrors for nearly the same formula as powder, only less of it per package. All those fancy colors? It’s die. It’s the same formula across the entire pod. So… Yep: more cost, more waste, and it has some reasonable downsides. For “convenience,” since I guess deciding how much to put into the tray is just too much work.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll6-eGDpimU

View on HN

I watched this video and was very excited to try out the powder, since I’ve just been using the pods they sell at Costco for my entire adult life.

But there are Problems.

1. You can’t find powder anywhere. Not a single grocery store near me sells it. Gel, sure. Pods, sure. Powder, not even Wal-mart had it, and they have everything. I finally found a faded and dented box at an Ace Hardware, where I wasn’t even looking for it.

2. The pour spout is a pain in the butt to open. I don’t have long nails (due to a very bad habit), and it takes me dozens of seconds every time to open.

3. A single clump makes it even more annoying. Now you have to figure out how to break the clump (because it’s blocking the spout), or you have to shake the box for a long time.

4. Speaking of shaking. If you get too much powder in the cracks around the dispenser, it won’t close anymore! Now you have to figure out how to get the powder out of the cracks before you can close and run the machine.

I’m sure it’s cleaning my dishes a little better, but I am not going to buy another box of powder. The marginal convenience of the pods is much higher than Alec claims. I’m going back to the product that I can actually buy in enormous bulk at Costco.

>You can’t find powder anywhere.

Some dishwashers don't even work well with non-powders.

Get yourself one of those coffee dosing spoons or just a normal tablespoon. Have not had any problem with dosing.

Check the dollar store.

For comparison, this is my experience:

1. Easily available at every grocery store for half the price of pods

2. I just leave the spout open and it's fine

3. It doesn't clump

4. Occasionally the door does fail to close but I quickly brush it off

The dishes are perfectly clean after a normal program, whereas the pods required me to use a three hour power wash program for the same result.

The gel detergent is more convenient than the powder for the reasons you mentioned

Not sure how hard you looked but:

https://www.walmart.com/ip/Great-Value-Automatic-Dishwasher-...

https://www.target.com/p/lemon-scented-dish-detergent-powder...

Maybe you were looking during peak shortages?

Definitely possible there was a powder shortage. Pods and gel were always available though.

Yep, that seems like what happened. I went down the detergent aisle at my local grocery store today, and they had a brand-name and two different scents of store-brand powdered detergent.

It's also easy to tell how many pods/loads you have left. Switched to Finish pods after Cascade powder stopped working for me. They took out the phosphorus or whatever apocalyptic chemical du jour it was. Things are almost as clean.

Didn’t they take the phosphorus out of everything due to algae overgrowth or something?

I've seen that video, the takeaway was the difference in price is so miniscule you might as well use what you're comfortable with.

His video about dish washer pods explain they also work significantly worse since your dishwasher was designed with a pre-rinse area to use soap twice during a cleaning cycle. A pod will not be able to be used twice and leaves dishes dirtier.

I’m skeptical this is universally true since my dishwasher actually suggests to use pods.

Not saying this is the case as I don't know what dishwasher you have, but one of the points of the video is that this recommendation is often part of a marketing deal and as such shouldn't be trusted. I think it'd say in small print in the manual if this is the case.

I don't understand, the pod goes into the same spot as the powder though? It shouldn't matter if its wrapped in a little membrane since a the end of the day you are putting in the same amount of powder into the same spot. The cascade pods at least are just powder aliquoted out for you.

Look at where your powder goes, there is typically a second tray for pre-wash.

Modern ones just have one tray that says put the pod here

Except that it’s also way more expensive and wasteful (edit: both because you have to buy them more often and because each pod is more packaging and the packaging for all of the pods has to be sealed, unlike powder in cardboard…) than just grabbing the powder. If the discomfort from using powder over plastic pods is anything more than completely trivial to you, I’m not sure we can communicate meaningfully on this subject matter.

The tablets I use are wrapped into some kind of wrapper that dissolves in the dishwasher (I think it's some sort of gelatin) so there's no real waste other than the bag they came in. A big bag of tablets lasts me over a year so I really see few downsides here.

To me that sounds like you don’t use your dishwasher that often. Which is fine, good even. But the thing is, for me, the box of powder lasts like, multiple times longer. If a huge bag of pods lasted me a year, I can only imagine the powder would last three. Across the whole industry, the trivial increase in plastic waste instead of less cardboard waste is probably quite colossal, and all for basically nothing.

I use pods because, of the options available at my grocery store, the only ones available that I know won't etch glass are sold as pods.

I ditched pods some time ago and use powder now. I had an issue that occurred almost every time I used the dishwasher (with pods), it left things slightly smelly. Nothing major, other people didn’t really notice it but for me it was a major source of frustration. Powder got rid of the smell, and now I am a happy man. I can pick a glass from the cabin and it doesn’t smell like anything. Wish I had learned this 10 years ago when we got our first dishwasher, and it’s cheaper too!

Smelly "dishwasher smell" on your dishes is usually fixed by cleaning out the filters in my experience, and ensuring the dishwasher is actually loaded properly.

In particular, it's critical to ensure the washing arms can rotate freely, something my flatmates (some of whom are engineers) will never understand no matter how many times I try to explain it to them! Otherwise the dishes will come out looking clean-ish but actually smelly and not properly clean.

Heh, I ran out of detergent not that long ago and had to improvise some with an Internet Recipe of baking soda and a few drops of dish soap. Some of plastics came out with a bit of chalky water marks, but the dishwasher itself was completely odorless for the first time. Filed it away in my memory to run some baking soda every now and then.

Oh, if you're in a hard water area (like many parts of the UK), it really helps to use salt! Where I grew up we never used salt because the water wasn't hard, but in London (for example) it makes a massive difference.

All dishwashers seem to have a reservoir for salt but of course people only tend to use it in regions where it's needed.

Cascade platinum is the only thing that works for me yet only comes in pod form. Buying a 90 pack from Costco improved the economics of having to use them however.

The fact that it takes 3 seconds to grab a pod and put it in verse 10 seconds to get the correct amount of powder is not nothing.

How do you live your day where 7 seconds is a a significant amount of time?

It's not a question of where you live, but of how much you value your time.

It's been estimated that Elon Musk's time, for example, is worth around $22,000 per minute. So if he's wasting 7 seconds messing around with his dishwasher, that's a lost opportunity cost of $2566.

At that point, you save money by paying a servant. Not by messing around with a dishwasher yourself.

If we do one dishwasher load a day, that is 42.5 minutes saved a year. I value my time at around $150 an hour, which means unless the pods cost me more than $100 extra a year, the trade off is worth it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com