Comment by orra | Hacker News Reader

Comment by orra | Hacker News Reader

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If your dishwasher isn't performing well on eco mode for typical loads, then you have a bad dishwasher. Good dishwashers exist. I'd recommend looking at impartial reviews, like Which?.

Spending an extra £100 on a better dishwasher, to wash at 50 °C, will pay itself back several times, over the lifetime of the dishwasher. It adds up. You're wasting a fortune by washing dishes at say 70 °C.

Also, pre rising dishes is an anti pattern, a bad habit which people have gotten into. These days the advice is specifically to not do it. Otherwise you're fooling the sensors, etc. Plus, energy efficient cycles are long, giving plenty of time for the dishes to soak and clean.

If dishes aren't coming out clean, and your dishwasher doesn't have terrible reviews, then buy a bottle of dishwasher cleaner for £3, and put that in an empty hot cycle. That'll refresh the dishwasher to as-new performance. Clean the filter too, obviously.

> pre-rinsing dishes is an anti-pattern

The previous owners of my house had a very expensive KitchenAid, which we had to replace shortly after moving in due to the stench. There was pink sludge EVERYWHERE, and no amount of disassembly and cleaning fully removed it.

Replaced with a Bosch (forget the model number, but one with the CrystalDry feature, which is awesome), which I like better anyway. I pre-rinse, because enzymes in detergent aren’t magic, and food eventually becomes a pink sludge.

Even if you do pre rinse, the soap grime will become pink sludge; the minimal required maintenance is rinsing the removable filter every month / 50 runs - a good wipe down (and lubrication of the hinges) and drain mechanism cleaning can help too.

The magic part for the food particles is that they serve as abrasives during the wash process after being ground by the dishwasher grinder.

Tbf I do religiously perform maintenance, and the previous owners did not, as evidenced by the HVAC filters being caked with dirt (and the aforementioned pink sludge).

Re: dishwasher grinder, not all makes have those. My Bosch doesn’t.

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