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Comment by ctur | Hacker News Reader

It feels obligatory to reference Technology Connection in a thread about heat pumps. TC is a super fun YouTube channel that digs j to everyday technology and has had a number of episodes on heat pumps and modern thermodynamic management challenges and technologies.

https://youtu.be/7J52mDjZzto

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Came here to post this :D

The TC channel is definitely a hacker's eye view in to all the technologies that we take for granted every day. Tons of fascinating tech history covered, too.

Other fun ones:

- a defense of the simple drip coffee maker https://youtu.be/Sp9H0MO-qS8

- why do the turn signals not sync up when you're at a stop light? https://youtu.be/2z5A-COlDPk

- how humidifiers work and ehy the simple swamp cooler style are pretty ideal https://youtu.be/oHeehYYgl28

- why dishwasher detergent packs are stupid (use powder/liquid) and why you should use the pre-wash slot and not bother pre rinsing your plates https://youtu.be/_rBO8neWw04

- why do light switches click? https://youtu.be/jrMiqEkSk48

I take his stuff with a grain of salt because I found the dishwasher detergent recommendation to be a bad idea.

A while before the TC video came out, I had an appliance repair person working on my fridge and asked him what he thought the best detergent was and he said use powdered, not the packs. So we switched to that.

Not long after our dishes were never getting cleaned. I thought it was a problem with the dishwasher so I took apart the filter, cleaned all the sprayers, etc. but nothing worked. Was thinking we needed a new dishwasher until one day we ran out of powdered detergent but had a couple packs left over so my wife used one.

Bingo! Our dishes came out PERFECT. We haven’t had a single problem since.

What kind of powder are you using? Some really cheap powders are basically just sodium carbonate and silicate, with some enzymes, and no actual detergents. These won't work well if your load is "too clean", as it needs some grease to saponify in order to generate detergent.

The medium/high quality stuff contains more/better detergents, water conditioners, and sometimes rinse aids. The packs are just powder formulations pressed into a pellet.

I mostly used Cascade Complete powder (there was a point early in the pandemic when I had to grab whatever was on the shelf) and use Cascade Platinum packs.

A couple months back we ran out of packs and had some powder leftover, so I ran a load with the powder. I ended up having to run the load again once we got the packs.

When you used powder, did you add detergent to the prewash cycle?

TC did make an apology video after the first detergent video.

I usually put some in the prewash area.

Quite the contrary for me. I suppose your powder detergent might be of lower quality than the packs one, or is not as concentrated and you need to use more of it?

I used Cascade Complete powder and Cascade Platinum packs.

Did you get the powder from Amazon perhaps? I'm pretty sure we got fake detergent on Amazon before and it caused our dishes to not clean properly.

Also if you have a water softener you should typically use less powder.

We definitely get a better wash using the right amount of powder, but had to adjust the levels ourselves.

Powder should be better, but dishwashers can be weird, so whatever works best.

I, too, had to adjust the amount of powder. Roughly 1/2 of recommended dose goes onto tray, and an additional 1/5 directly into the washer for prewash cycle.

Did you change brands or types when you switched to powder?

I used Cascade Platinum packs before and after trying powder. When using powder I primarily used Cascade Complete (there was a short time early in the pandemic when I had to grab whatever was available on the shelf).

I tried the 'add detergent to the pre-wash-cycle' part. While it seems to make sense, it also caused a lot more rust spots on cutlery. The detergent is just too aggressive that way.

the goal is to use the cheapest not the most expensive... my miele tablets were destroying my duralex picardie big time, so I now use the cheapest powder and if I feel like the stainless steel don't shine bright enough (maybe once a month) then I use one miele tablet...

The packs are just powder pressed into a cube with some colorful liquid added to a little pocket to make it look high tech.

> - why dishwasher detergent packs are stupid (use powder/liquid)

? I thought that powder and liquid for dishwashers have come out worse on any consumer reports test (at least here in Germany).

Detergent packs in the US seem to be mostly gel packs. In Germany, most tabs are simply hard pressed powder. Gel packs did fail in their cleaning function and the recommendation generally goes for either tabs or powder, where powder can save you money because you set the dosage according to how full your dishwasher is.

Fine tuning powder per wash sounds like overoptimization. Just useing powder instead of tabs will save most of the money.

Prepackaged tabs with self-disolving packaging is actually the cheapest if you assign a non-zero amount of money to your own time.

How much extra time does it take to dump out some powder? I don't actually measure precisely and just eyeball it. The advantage is I can dump some extra in the bay to act as pre-wash. The cost is 4-10x more for the self-dissolving packs.

I looked on Amazon at Cascade powder ($0.22/oz in large packages) and the same name tablets ($0.30/tablet in large packages).

A load with powder is typically 0.75 oz. ($0.165/load) or about 55% the cost, not 10-25% the cost.

Being able to dump in extra for pre-wash is an advantage to powder for sure.

But I save time by pouring in less when less is needed.

Most dishwashers are designed to do a pre-wash, change the water, then do a wash. Pre-wash requires detergent to work optimally, ideally one specifically designed for pre-washing. Even dishwashers which have no pre-wash detergent dispenser will typically tell you to add some detergent directly on the door in the instruction manual. Most packs are suboptimal for that. Technically they should be used in addition to pre-wash detergent but that kind of defeats the point of using a pack.

Packs should be put in the dispenser so they don't act during prewash.

Best advice I learned from that channel was to run the sink faucet until it’s hot. Then run the dishwasher so it starts its cycle with actually hot water.

A good dishwasher (based on testing) will never need some manual tinkering like this.

Hmm, dishwashers I have had (including my current one) have a large heating element in the bottom, I would have thought that could heat the relatively small volume of water in there pretty quickly?

Most (actually all) dishwashers that I've encountered are designed to not get hot water coming in. Where I live a high-pressure hot-water outlet is not the norm at all. And yet, we don't have a catastrophic country-wide problem with dirty dishes. I'd argue that something else it at play.

Not on this continent. But obviously the advice can be ignored if your dishwasher isn't connected to hot water.

The reason for your setup is probably 240V electricity that is affordable enough to resort to resistive heating.

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