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Comment by mgdlbp | Hacker News Reader

This is about dishwashers, but I once read about regulation-enforced water/energy-saving cycles resulting in ineffective cleaning, which backfired, as people then got in the habit of always selecting the heaviest cycle or even re-adopted pre-rinsing.

Searching for the concept now, I can only find this article:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/make-dishwashers-that-clean-aga...

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My “modern” (20-year-old, which is solidly modern by this standard) dishwasher cleans much better than I remember my childhood dishwasher cleaning. It also doesn’t melt plastic on the bottom rack, which is a fantastic feature. The main downside is it takes two hours, and I think my childhood dishwasher took one hour.

My modern front load washer gets clothes clean. It also doesn’t severely abrade them. As I understand it, this combination of features is unavailable in a top-loader. Top-loaders with agitators clean well but damage clothing due to rubbing against the agitator. Top-loaders without agitators don’t clean well.

(Fundamentally, front loading is just a better design. There is no reason to submerge clothes for the whole cycle; to the contrary, one wants the clothes to move relative to the water. With a top loader, the clothes and the water move as a unit and gravity doesn’t help at all except to the extent that it avoids needing a seal on the door. With a front loader, gravity actively assists the process. And, aside from saving water, the fact that less water is used means that less detergent is needed to achieve a given concentration.)

Make fun of modern low-water appliances all you like, but a lot of them are much better than the things they replaced even if you don’t care about water usage.

My new(2 years old) Bosch dishwasher cleans much better than any other dishwasher I used in my life. I'm like 60% sure that the buttons on the front don't actually do anything, because it cleans equally well in all modes, from ECO(50C) to Heavy Load(70C). Yeah the eco mode takes 3 hours by default, but press "Vario Speed" and is done in 1:05h with the exact same result.

> Yeah the eco mode takes 3 hours by default, but press "Vario Speed" and is done in 1:05h with the exact same result.

I wonder about people complaining about this - whether it takes 1 hour or 3 hours, are you sitting in your kitchen waiting for the dishwasher to complete? Put it on after a meal and next time you're in the kitchen it will be done...

I mean, it's nice to have an option for a quick programme when you have guests over and actually it's good to do a couple loads in a single day. But yes overnight I don't care, it can take 6 hours and I wouldn't mind.

Time it to finish when you get up and it will release a lot of warm (humid) air to help you warm up your house

It's on a timer anyway because we have cheap electricity from 00:30-04:30, so I just run it alongside all the other appliances within thouse hours(and charge our car too).

Honestly my only complaint is that my Bosch dishwasher's beep cannot be disabled. If I start it late, the damn thing wakes me up in the middle of the night.

I've seriously considered taking it apart to remove the buzzer.

A quick DuckDuckGo search for “bosch dishwasher turn off beep” comes up with some promising results.

I cook a large meal for family maybe and bake some desert and then rest of the days build up and it's full. Put it on the 3hr cycle and by the time dinner is finished there is a while new load to go in, which has to sit around until it is complete (still 1.5 hour to go after we finish eating)

I have a modern Bosch benchmark washer and it also cleans better than anything I've ever used from past decades. It's also extremely expensive.

I have friends with cheaper dishwashers and they do not clean well at all on eco modes.

Everything's relative.

Yeah I mean....of course. My sister got a cheap dishwasher couple years ago and it never broke, it just never cleaned properly, we cleaned the filters, all tubing, all the arms, used the dishwasher cleaner several times.....nope, would still leave residue and bits of food on plates, literally regardless of mode. It was basically useless for its main function. It was under warranty but the engineer came out and said yeah, there's nothing wrong with it, it's just not very good. We ended up recycling it and buying the cheapest Bosch Series 2, it's not fancy but at least it works as a dishwasher.

> My modern front load washer gets clothes clean. It also doesn’t severely abrade them.

I had rented a place with a washer that ruined all of my clothes. I didn't figure out whats happening untill it was too late

Yeah, I’ve had front loaders trap a sheet in a seal and then scorch a bunch of stuff when it spun at a bajillion rpm against the 0rpm fabric.

Wash on delicate with Cold water my friends!

I’ve had a top loader get clothing stuck in regrettable places on the agitator and shred them. I’ve never met a washer that was impossible to misuse.

Dishwashers take longer now because they only run half of the jets at once. Cycling between the top and bottom half. Cleans just as well, uses half the water, takes twice as long.

I can’t say I have ever really cared about the time taken for a dishwasher as it’s set and forget.

Exactly. We pre-rinse the dishes, get the water running hot before starting the machine, and choose the heavy cycle. Even so, the dishwasher barely cleans our dishes. And it's a Bosch, well reviewed by Consumer Reports when we got it!

People in this thread are talking about the SpeedQueen washing machine. Is there something similar for dishwashers? I would pay good money for a dishwasher that actually cleaned my dishes. I don't even care if it's loud!

> get the water running hot before starting the machine

Interesting if this is a US difference - but here (in the UK) at least dishwashers (usually? I suppose I don't want to claim to speak for 100%) only have a cold water inlet; they do their own heating.

They usually are the same in the US too based on my own anecdata of having ~10 different ones over past twenty years.

I admit that I'm not actually sure. We got this advice from a local appliance shop.

We have a Bosch 800 that is capable of heating its own water, but it's still plumbed for hot just because the gas-heated water is cheaper, and the only cold supply under the kitchen sink is unsoftened.

Overall I've been quite happy with my premium-dishwasher experience, though there are a few little things that I don't love, like the fact that the rollers on the middle rack are no longer independently-replaceable. Seems like a huge step backward to have to replace the entire rack for like $200 just because one of those fails.

This depends on the manufacturer. Some manufacturers make dishwashers that can utilize both hot and cold water and others only work with cold or hot water.

As an example Frigidaire, GE, KitchenAid, Whirlpool will only work with hot water; Samsung, Ikea, Beko will only work with cold water; and Bosch, Miele, Electrolux, LG will work with either.

Interesting, I don't think it does here other than extreme minority of cases - because it's just not standard plumbing. You typically have a washing machine & dishwasher hookup & waste under the sink; it's pretty standardised and it's on cold.

> As an example Frigidaire, GE, KitchenAid, Whirlpool will only work with hot water

Yeah, afaik without actually looking into it, of those only Whirlpool is distributed here (KitchenAid stuff yes for sure, but not I think dishwashers) and as above I'm pretty sure they must be different models, just like LH/RH driver cars.

Of course you can import whatever you want, but then you should probably expect to deal with some such plumbing (and potentially electrical, at very least changing the plug) oddities.

How do you handle softened water in the UK?

In the US, it's common to have a water softener on the hot water line, intended to soften the inputs for appliances and showers. The cold water line is not softened, to avoid drinking sodium-laced water.

I wouldn't like to estimate an installation percentage, but it's probably not quite 'standard' to have at all. In the systems I've known, I believe it's been on the cold-water line pre-boiler; in the scullery with the sink there pre-softener so you get one (cold) tap without.

I don't claim authority on the matter though.

Ours is a US model, has a pre-heat water cycle. I think it does have a hot water inlet, but we do not use it.

Are you using pre-wash detergent? My parents struggled with pampering their washer for 20 years, turns out a spoonful of detergent in the body of the washer gets the same performance as all the pre-rinse etc etc.

Video on the subject: https://youtu.be/_rBO8neWw04

Thank you! Another comment recommends the same video, so I will certainly check it out.

Are you perhaps using tabs? Dishwashers need detergent in the rinse cycle, otherwise they don't rinse well, and tabs don't let you do that. I've had friends who have always pre-rinsed because of wrong dishwasher use. Once they switched to powder and put some in the rinse cycle their dishes don't need pre-rinsing.

See https://youtu.be/_rBO8neWw04

Thank you, I will definitely watch this. We have tried pre-wash detergent, tabs, liquid soap, powder detergents, in various combinations.

There may be something unusual wrong with our dishwasher. Although we clean its filter regularly, sometimes a kind of brown slime forms along the walls and around the filter, and I have to give it a deeper cleaning. Bosch had no idea what this was! I'm curious if anyone else has experienced something like that.

whoa. sounds like your drainage might be at fault. i have never heard of anything like this. I'm not a plumber, or anything related, but dishwashers should not have slime and should not need cleaning. yikes.

That almost sounds like your washer isnt using hot water. It would explain the poor cleaning performance and the weird growth in the filter.

I'm constantly confused by these threads; the only time I've seen these sorts of problems with dishwashers of any vintage is where people aren't cleaning the filters. You're cleaning the filters, right?

We are now, but there's a little more to it. When we first got this dishwasher, we never cleaned the filters. Our previous washer didn't need that, and we didn't know better.

So it got pretty bad before we realized we needed to do that. We cleaned it very thoroughly at that point and now clean the filters at least weekly, but we still have these problems.

I choose the eco-mode setting and lie to the machine that it's only half-full and my dishes are still cleaned properly. This is a newish Bosch model.

I also choose the eco setting on my washing machine and wash at 30 degrees and my clothes become clean (but I don't roll around in mud very often). That's a cheap Beko model that is about 8 years old.

Exactly. I read "Eco mode" (which can be found on virtually any product today) as 'ignore entirely'.

The Department of Energy actually banned the SpeedQueen TC5 washer model a few years back because it didn't have a sufficient eco mode (read this as: it automated more of the washing work for you than the government would allow)

The workaround is that modern SpeedQueen washers have a "normal/eco" default mode which doesn't do a good job at all. This mode exists to satisfy the DoE policy. The washer is intended to never be run on this mode, and all the other modes do a fantastic washing job.

I have the newer TC5 with the bogus "normal/eco" cycle. It's a great washer as long as the government mandated useless mode isn't selected.

Here's a nyt/wirecutter article about it: https://www.nytimes.com/wirecutter/reviews/speed-queen-revie...

I have a dishwasher and washing machine from Siemens (nowadays the same as Bosch, just different branding). European models around 400€ each. Eco mode washes perfectly fine on both of them, that's what I always use. Takes over three hours but that's not an issue for me.

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