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Comment by dkurth | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

> 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.

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.

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