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Comment by losvedir | Hacker News Reader

This has been his stance for a long time. He has a lot of dishwasher videos for some reason!

One thing I can't get a good answer to is whether the "prewash" step is universally the case or not. I have a good Bosch dishwasher and there's no compartment for a bit of pre-wash detergent. I don't even know if my dishwasher cycle has a pre-wash step. I would assume the dishwasher manufacturer knows what's best.

The owner's manual gives advice about not pre-rinsing the dishes because the food bits actually help the wash cycle, so I'm wondering if it works differently from the two-step process in this video.

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What your manual says is common to most dishwashers.

You can tell if your dishwasher has a pre-wash cycle if it does a short run, then you hear it draining, and then it does a longer full run. I expect it probably does.

Also, you can always add a bit of detergent to the main compartment of the dishwasher for prewash. The normal detergent compartment has a lid so the the detergent stays dry until the main wash cycle, and most prewash compartments are just an open tray.

Come to think of it, if there is a latching door on the detergent tray, your dishwasher definitely has a prewash cycle, or else they’d skip the door entirely

> Come to think of it, if there is a latching door on the detergent tray, your dishwasher definitely has a prewash cycle, or else they’d skip the door entirely

Alec also mentions this briefly in the linked video; if manufacturers could avoid the cost of a latching mechanism, they absolutely would. Its presence means a pre-wash cycle exists.

The default program on my Miele pops the door open like 2 minutes into the cycle. Maybe the slower ones don't?

My GE seems to skip the prewash cycle on the default setting for whatever reason. It does use a prewash on its "heavy duty" cycle though. Incidentally "heavy duty" also works infinitely better, with no more damage done to my dishes. YMMV of course.

That sounds like the behavior of the Eco program, which is often the default.

his dishwasher detergent videos are a good example of an "improved" product being more expensive and less effective (like disposable razors).

With better understanding you can achieve far better results. I no longer rinse or even scrape dishes. with the right approach my dishwasher performance has been stellar. The user manual also includes proper tuning to local water hardness levels.

Poor dishwashing also discourages people from cooking at home, which leads to less healthful diets. So it's an important thing to get right.

Dishwashing is fascinating.

I find his videos to have quite a bit of hand waving and poor methodology together with being overly verbose.

For example, he kept on saying that pods are not better in previous videos, but in the study he presented in this video, it showed that pods are performing significantly better than powders in every category. The study (which was not linked and I couldn't find it) was sponsored by a powder maker which the video recommends, but even this study showed just on par results with pods.

Nobody expects better results from a higher-priced product!

That has not been my experience with pods. When we switched back to powder the difference was night and day. Even my husband who used to swear by pods eventually gave in and agreed powder is much better. It is a bit fiddly yes but powder getting 99.9% of our dishes getting cleaned on the first run sealed the deal for us -- previously we were always having to add dishes to the next run or falling back to doing it manually. What makes it even more intersting is that even the cheapest powder beats every brand of pods etc we've tried. And we have a shitty cheap dishwasher that came standard with our new build house.

Generic $5 walmart powder is the best and is constantly sold out . I buy 2-3 boxes whenever I can

He does mention that a number of manufacturers aren’t making powders at all anymore, and also suspects out loud that they just aren’t trying with their powder detergents anymore, or are not bothering to apply improvements to their formulae to the powder form because manufacturers would rather sell the powders anyway.

He also specifically calls out Great Value brand powder as one he finds to be consistently on par with pod performance

He said a lot of things that are not backed up by the study he shared but didn't link, where powders clearly underperform pods.

At the end of the day, it'd have been much better for this community if we could have just gained access to a proper study comparing different cleaning options and learn from it instead of watching a 40 minutes video that doesn't say much and doesn't link to the study which is briefly mentioned there.

I agree with that

I have a Bosch as well, i sprinkle a bit of powder on the door. It has a pre-wash run which goes quick.

The manual is likely referring to not hand rinsing dishes before loading them which was very common 30 or 40 years ago. I had to train my Mother to stop doing that.

I still rinse dishes because it keeps the trap from getting absolutely filthy in one load.

> I still rinse dishes

This! I mean, at least get all of the low-hanging fruit with a quick, needle-spray pass of hot water. And to do so while the plates are still fresh so that stuff hasn’t had the time to dry.

Like, we’re talking about powering through table settings for a half-dozen people at a family dinner in less than 60 seconds. Plates, bowls, cups, silverware; everything done in about 10s per person. This isn’t any kind of a deep scrub; it’s removing everything that will come off easily as fast and expediently as possible before the dishes go into the washer.

Pods have become so ubiquitous that many companies ditched that powder compartment altogether. But you don't need one anyways just pour it into the cabin.

The video explains why there always is a pre-wash step. Regardless of whether it comes with a pre-wash-powder compartment or not. I will try his solution.

it's inverted. the closing soap compartment is the washing step, the pre-wash tray contents can just be dumped.

I have installed several dishwashers for friends and find them fascinating. All of the ones I have seen basically dumped the contents of the closing soap compartmens as soon as it started washing. Some dishwashers (looking at bosch) even have a little tray in the upper drawer that catches the pod.

It depends on the cycle for some. Mine one doesn't do a prewash for the 45mins QUICK cycle. But the ECO cycle does follow the normal prewash-then-wash process as described in the video. Hence I normally use the ECO cycle and put the correct amount of powder in both components. However in a hurry I sometimes just use the QUICK cycle and only use the main component as I know there is no point in adding more. The manual explained all this.

I'm fascinated at the number of people on an ostensibly techincal website who don't learn how their equipment works. You've summed up in a few sentences exactly how mine works, but there are dozens of commenters in this thread who appear to be unaware of the basic funcationality of their dishwasher.

All I would add to what you've said is that when my Bosch does include a pre-wash in a cycle, it checks how dirty the water is and only drains the pre-wash water if is dirty. If the dishes haven't caused the water to become dirty, it keeps the same water for the main wash cycle.

Also, I want to expand upon my first paragraph a little: I'm not having a dig at anyone who doesn't understand their dishwasher. I am just venting/observing that the world is filled with all kinds of different people and reminding myself that I shouldn't make assumptions about people as often as I do.

I've had this realisation many times, but it doesn't hurt to have it again. Communicating with people is lot quicker and easier when I remember that.

Yeah, I think there's some interesting related trends involved to. I still feel inclined with every new appliance to read the full manual, but I know not everyone has that kind of time or attention, especially if "I can just watch a YouTube video of it" is an option.

On the other side, you see appliance companies responding to that and shrinking their manuals of useful content because they assume you might just go watch YouTube videos instead. Some of the better ones might even include a QR code or 3 to officially produced YouTube videos, though so far that still seems rare.

Even in this video is the surprise reveal that something that used to be very common in manuals, full cycle timing diagrams, was "hidden" on a data sheet attached inside the door itself. Admittedly, it's great in that case to know that should that model be taken to repair that a repair shop might find that data sheet easily without having to search manufacturers' websites, but on the other hand some of those diagrams would be quite useful to me if I was the user of that machine.

sometimes even the company that made equipment doesn't know how it works.

my dishwasher after few months suddenly instead of filling water and starting wash cycle initiated some kind of fill & drain cycle that went for a while without going into wash mode.

i called in service. they replaced pump, solenoid. talked with manufacturer directly, swapped a couple of main boards. it made dishwasher snap out of it.

few months later it started again. this time i allowed it to do whatever it was doing. after 15 minutes it started to wash.

over the time i noticed that dishwasher does this water cycling every few months and adds extra time to estimated program duration.

about once a year after asking a few questions if sprayer hands/filters/etc are clean, it will add 2 hours to wash cycle.

none of it described in manual, manufacturer service personal and "Factory support" that service talk to know about it (maybe they do by now. they didn't few years ago)

omg thank you. my dishwasher has a prewash compartment so it's fine, but my clothes washer has a prewash step but no prewash detergent place. this elegant solution never occurred to me

video can explain anything, but reality is different.

my dishwasher manual breaks down each program. pre-wash exists only in half of programs

Find a PDF manual for your dishwasher. It generally will describe if it has a prewash.

The owners manual for my Bosch 500 says prewash detergent is not necessary. But it does have a prewash cycle as I can hear it draining before the main wash.

Note: This dishwasher provides the optimum cleaning performance without the use of a prewash detergent and further enhances our standards of sustainability and efficiency.

I keep my Bosch set to Auto and Extra Dry and use Kirkland pods. Rarely do I have anything that comes out less than perfect.

The Extra Dry setting seems to help with getting the glass and ceramics dryer. Plastics still come out quite wet since it uses a hotter final rinse rather than a heating element to get dishes “dryer”.

I have a previous generation Bosch 500 series dishwasher. For my use case I get the best results with the heavy cycle. However I found that adding loose detergent in there for the "prewash" resulted in soapy residue being left on the dishes if used in conjunction with the heavy cycle (but not with the normal and auto cycles).

Alec's dishwasher videos are based on some rather primitive dishwashers. For instance he talks about his test unit not flushing out the spray arms, but Bosch/Siemens filters the water going to the spray arms so it wouldn't recirculate dirty water anyways. Same deal with the prewash. Bosch uses a turbidity sensor to determine how many "prewash" cycles to run and when to reuse the water, something his test unit very clearly does not.

Yeah, I think one has to understand the man to really get something useful of what he says. He is kind of a cheap man and much of what he says really applies to low-end devices. Some expensive devices may have similar problems to the cheaper stuff but really if you buy a premium device you won't have many of the problem he talk about.

I know this type of person very well. They always have some reductionist approach to things, where for them, the expensive stuff is mostly marketing with added bells-and-whistles and largely works the same. My experience is that this isn't quite right. Some brands do have a premium that is more related to style/status but if you buy some seriously engineered stuff it will work much better most of the time.

He's a midwesterner so some of that's to be expected. But AFAIK KitchenAid is one of the higher end Whirlpool brands. I just checked the orange big box store and the price difference between the KitchenAid dishwasher lineup and that of the Bosch 300/500 series comes down to what's currently on sale.

For reference I'm pretty cheap too but try to be pragmatic. My fridge is a $600 Frigidaire (AEG/Electrolux) top freezer unit. The main selling point was that another youtuber (an appliance repair guy by trade) pointed out that it still has a mechanical timer. They get mocked by appliance sales droids but the top freezer design is significantly more efficient than the alternatives and the lack of electronics mean that you're more likely to be able to repair it.

I don't know enough about US states subculture to infer that, it's just the opinion I formed watching him.

I agree that KitechnAid is more on the higher-end side, he even said himself that it's kind of a premium device. It doesn't surprise me, because at some point in your life you want to stop with the frugality shenanigans and just want stuff to work if you can afford them.

To be clear that's not a critic, I tend to be as cheap as can be reasonable as well, it's generally a decent way to proceed, to avoid overpaying for useless over-marketed, over-engineered stuff. I'm just trying to give some context but I think we are in agreement anyway and I do believe anyone who watches him long enough will get the gist of it at some point.

> He has a lot of dishwasher videos for some reason!

He is known as Angry Dishwasher Man for a reason.

If the detergent container has a door, then that means the soap is dispensed later, which means there is a pre-wash stage it’s trying not to waste the detergent on.

I have a Miele dishwasher. Not only is there no place to put prewash powder, but I can hear the little door for the detergent pop open like 2 minutes into the cycle when on the default program.

This dishwasher also came with a box of Miele pods (and they encourage you to buy more). I think it's designed first and foremost to not use powder.

>This dishwasher also came with a box of Miele pods (and they encourage you to buy more).

This is because the profit margin on them is much, much fatter. Miele still makes powder if you want to use theirs.

Perhaps there is an indentation on the outside of the detergent dispenser where you are meant to pour a bit of detergent for the pre-wash.

Like in the video: https://youtu.be/DAX2_mPr9W8?si=Njn749InqNCbjhQd&t=822

Nope, Bosch 800 series specifically do not have an indentation, and also state in their manual that they do not require any prewash detergent and the prewash does not run with any detergent.

> He has a lot of dishwasher videos for some reason!

have you watched his videos? dude is on the spectrum.

to be clear, he makes good vids. but his fascinations exist for a reason.

it doesnt feel nice to try to dismiss someone's interests and hobbies as "they're autistic"

It always seems a shame when naturally clever people are assumed to have autism, or when their cleverness is attributed to it. Why can't someone just be intelligent without labels?

Reductive and inaccurate.

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