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Dishwashing detergent hack: Two ingredients (2015)
- superasn 6y agoCame across this hack for using ordinary liquid soap in dishwasher. Posting it here since a hack is a hack :) tldr: use a few tablespoons of baking soda with the regular dishwash soap. The reason for not being able to use regular dishwash soap is because it makes lots of suds which floods your dishwasher. But baking soda prevents that from happening. Would love to know the pros and cons from an expert here.
- Domenic_S 6y agothat is literally what the article says to do
- refurb 6y agoI was a chemist in my past life, but not a soap chemist, so no doubt someone will be along to correct me. At a high level, soap is soap. They are basically molecules with a greasy end (long carbon chain) and a polar end (ionic group). The molecules form stable micelles that looks like little cell membranes almost, with the greasy ends pointing inward and the polar ends pointing outward (in contact with water, which is polar). That allows the soap to combine with greasy molecules you are trying to clean away. You're basically suspending the grease in water using the soap molecules. Now, there are a ton of different soap though. The polar functional groups can be carboxylic acids (typical homemade soap, hydrolyze fats with lye), or phosphate groups (now banned as the phosphates end up in waterways and cause algae blooms) or sulfates (the most typical last time I looked). There are no doubt others I'm not as familiar with. Now soaps all do the same thing, but there are important differences. So this "hack" works in terms of providing a soap and killing the foaming with baking soda (we used this trick in the lab all the time to break up foams and emulsions). The baking soda can also act as a water softening agent. That said, dishwashers are usually made for specific detergents because you don't want build up from leftover soaps and you also don't want to corrode any metal parts. So this works, but probably not as good as actual dish detergent (but it might not matter if your dishes aren't that dirty), but you are taking a risk that continued use might gunk up your machine. Or maybe it won't.
- pedantsamaritan 6y agoI think most dishwasher detergents switched to enzymes to replace phosphates: https://www.cnet.com/news/appliance-science-how-dishwasher-detergents-digest-food-stains/ https://www.cnet.com/news/appliance-science-how-dishwasher-d... That article implies the enzymes do some work, so that surfactants/soap can carry away the tougher components (protein and starch)
- Scoundreller 6y agoI could believe the enzyme bit. Soaps require 3 things to work well: sheer force, concentration and temperature. The higher the better for all 3. Dishwashers can’t do consistent sheer force unless the sprayer hits your dish just right. So makes sense that their cleaning agent will use some other mechanism just requiring application/soaking and not sheer force.
- twic 6y agoDishwasher powder is also extremely alkaline, i believe. I (cosmetically) ruined an aluminium Moka coffee pot by putting it through a dishwasher.
- refurb 6y agoNothing cleans quite as good as strong alkaline. In the lab, we'd use a 50% lye bath and it strips off everything. If you want to add a bit of punch, you can add some 30% hydrogen peroxide as an oxidizer. Caution is needed as mixing a strong oxidizer and organic material is a recipe for fire or an explosion.
- Scoundreller 6y agoYah, lye won’t just clean, but also help make new soap from anything fatty!
- rstuart4133 6y ago> Nothing cleans quite as good as strong alkaline. Depends on what you are cleaning. Most oven cleaners are strong alkalines, often sodium hydroxide. They work well enough on grease, but neglect it a bit and the heat turns the grease into a char that nothing short of a steel scraper and lot of elbow grease will remove. (On reflection, that char may be a combination of what was grease and protein.) In any case, alkaline cleaners and soaps won't touch it. But allow to ammonia at it for 12 or so hours (it doesn't have to be wet - just exposed), and it just wipes away. The usual technique is to put the stainless steel fittings in a garbage bag, pour in a cup of cloudy ammonia, and tie off overnight. (If you want to have working nostrils afterwards, open bag outside.) It even works on the glass door. Open so it's flat, cover with paper towels, soak paper towels in cloudy ammonia, hide outside for an hour so the smell doesn't take you out and burnt on crap wipes off. I don't the chemistry is, but it's magic. It would be interesting to find out what the chemistry is, actually.
- reaperducer 6y agoThe reason for not being able to use regular dishwash soap is because it makes lots of suds which floods your dishwasher. And by "floods your dishwasher" he means "makes enough suds that they escape from the bottom of the dishwasher door and spread themselves across the entire kitchen in a giant soapy mess. Found this out when my grandmother, who had never seen a dishwasher before and had no concept of "dishwasher detergent," came to stay for a while.
- analog31 6y agoAn additional function of the powdered detergent is that it's an abrasive, so it helps scour the dishes.
- noxToken 6y agoI ran out of dish soap a few weeks ago, and I came across this same recipe. I found that my dishes were clean, but glassware and ceramic had a film on it. It wiped off easily with a towel. Note that I tried this exactly 1 time.
- dreamcompiler 6y agoAdding a teaspoon of Lemi-shine (which is just citric acid, which you can buy in bulk online) to the late rinse cup will solve that problem. (The late rinse cup is the one with the door that seals; the early soap cup is the one the door doesn't seal; it is labeled "pre-wash" in the article photo. The pre-wash cup is where you should put the baking soda/Dawn mixture.)
- wrycoder 6y agoAdding some TSP should help.
- core-questions 6y agoTSP is magic. I put it in the laundry from time to time. Used to be built into laundry detergent back in the day, right? Banned now. Well, I only use it for nasty stains and really dirty stuff.
- Tagbert 6y agoTSP - Tri Sodium Phosphate It was an effective cleaner and an even more effective fertilizer that fed toxic algae blooms in aquatic environments. Not the best choice unless you don’t have anything else.
- core-questions 6y agoOxi-Clean is what I use 99.99% of the time. TSP is a rarity, and since the vast, vast majority of people here are never putting it in the drains, I don't think it's going to be the end of the world.
- andrewla 6y agoDo dishwasher manufacturers publish any sort of guidance for detergent companies for what kinds of detergent are acceptable or problematic for the dishwashers? Or has this become a chicken and egg problem, where the manufacturers design for the currently available detergents and the detergent manufacturers design against current machines?
- throwaway889900 6y agoThe dishwasher itself is pretty much all plastic for plumbing and doesn't have any problems with any detergent; it's the dishes that might not react well to specific detergents/temperatures/etc. The two don't really design for/against each other outside of small stuff like the detergent holder being able to take a detergent pod instead of loose powder. Dishwasher manufacturers are more concerned about form factor and efficient power use while detergent companies are focused on cleaning efficiency.
- moistly 6y agoIn my experience, plastics are not immune to damage from “detergent.” Parts of my dishwasher became quite brittle and ultimately failed—and the zip ties used to cobble it back together also become brittle over time.
- every 6y agoYou can also use straight baking soda as an emergency laundry detergent. Depending on the machine and size of the load, 0.5 cup/125 ml to 1.0 cup/250 ml. Just put it in directly with the clothes. No dispenser. Also, definitely NO dishwashing soap should be added...
- exabrial 6y agoI would probably _not_ do this long term without expertise from someone that understands the 'why' on the ingredient list on commercial detergents... but my limited intuition says it's probably ok in the short term. The hotter the water the better, and always dry as hot as possible. Dishwashers save a ton of water, definitely use them when available
- phalangion 6y agoWhy dry as hot as possible? I was always told that the dry cycle was a waste of energy unless you need the dishes dry faster.
- exabrial 6y agoSanitization. Your dishwasher spreads dirt and bacteria around and tries to remove as much as possible with a clean water rinse. Bacteria get into every micro-pore and nano-sized crack, where detergent is unlikely to penetrate effectively. Heat doesn't discriminate (unless we're talking prions, but I digress) and will kill everything that remains.
- reaperducer 6y agoDoes it really get to 150°F inside a dishwasher?
- joosters 6y agoI can't see how that's true. A quick search tells me that dishwashers can get up to a max of around 60c, that's nowhere enough to kill most bacteria, especially ones hiding deep inside cavities. Maybe you could pasteurize milk in an extra-long run of your hot cycle, but it won't come close to sterilizing stuff.
- pixxel 6y agoCould someone please confirm what “dish soap” is please for those of us that aren’t American. It’s soap for cleaning dishes in the sink, right? (as opposed to soap for washing hands). In the UK we refer to dish soap as washing-up liquid. Don’t want to use the wrong stuff! Thanks in advance.
- throwaway889900 6y agoDish soap is for dishes. Hand soap is for hands. Bar soap is also for hands.
- y2bd 6y agoBarkeeper's Friend is definitely not for hands though!
- 3pt14159 6y agoCanadian here. Detergent is what you put in an automated dishwashing appliance. Dish soap could be either detergent or dish soap for washing things by hand. Dish pods are pre-bundled detergent with liquid that helps stains from forming.
- jandrese 6y agoSometimes you see "dishwasher soap" or "dishwasher detergent" for the stuff you put in the machine, as opposed to "dish soap" which is used in the sink.
- amagumori 6y agoYeah, dish soap is soap for washing dishes. Us Americans can get pretty craaazy with our naming conventions!
- vinay427 6y ago> Us Americans can get pretty craaazy with our naming conventions! This really goes both ways. :) Wait until you find out about "public schools" in the UK, or at least England. (They're independent private schools which are not government-funded, and are in fact far less public than government-funded state schools. As I understand it, they came to be known as "public" because they were successors to traditional homeschooling in a private environment.)
- khazhoux 6y agoWow, author runs dishwasher twice a day, sometimes three times a day on weekend. That's insane. Life-hack: reuse dishes and glasses when possible throughout the day. Wipe off crumbs after breakfast and lunch and set the plates aside. Don't freak out if there's a little left-over grease smear on the dish or dried up fruit-water in the bowl from three hours ago, it won't kill you. If the dish is actually in gross shape (caked on cheese or whatever) then fine, throw it in dishwasher and grab a new one.
- plutonorm 6y agoKids.
- mumblemumble 6y agoWhen we doubled the size of our household, we quadrupled the volume of dishes and laundry.
- halfFact 6y agoWe switched to cloth diapers and need to do a load every day or 2. Hopefully this is better for the environment than disposable.
- pmoriarty 6y agoFor decades, I used the dishwasher exclusively to wash my dishes, but once the pandemic began, I started washing my dishes by hand and have been doing so ever since. I used to hate washing dishes by hand, because I found touching the leftover food and grease to be really gross, but since the pandemic I started using nitrile gloves when washing dishes by hand, and then since the leftover food was no longer touching my skin I didn't find it gross any longer. In fact, I was surprised to find that washing dishes became sort of a meditative experience for me, when I took a break from whatever I was involved in in my day-to-day life, and for 10 minutes or so focused on just doing the dishes. So I almost started to enjoy washing dishes by hand, and only rarely run my dishwasher any more. Really, the only time I run the dishwasher now is when I'm too exhausted to do the dishes by hand, instead of every single time. It's also nice not to have to wait for hours for the dishes to be washed and dried, and not to waste so much electricity to just do a handful of dishes.
- parliament32 6y agoThere are typically a lot more ingredients in detergent, so YMMV depending on a number of factors, including the composition of your dishwasher (corrosion), how well you clean the dishes before putting them in (a few drops of Dawn isn't going to penetrate 3-day-old melted cheese), how much you care about disinfecting (bleach), etc. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishwasher_detergent#Composition https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dishwasher_detergent#Compositi...
- jeffrallen 6y agoHere's another solution. Next time you run out, buy two bags of dishwasher soap. Then when one bag is done.... wait for it... USE THE SECOND BAG! All that's left is to put one bag of soap on your shopping list and you have 5 to 20 days to manage to buy it before you're back in fish soap and baking powder hell.
- cryptoz 6y agoThat trick only works if you have lots of money. And lots of space. Do you apply it to other things too, like garbage bags? Or olive oil? What about hand soap? All of a sudden you're spending 2x normal for a while. Not a lot of people can do that.
- tsm 6y ago> All of a sudden you're spending 2x normal for a while. Not a lot of people can do that. Then stagger it—an extra box of dishwasher tablets this paycheck, an extra box of garbage bags next paycheck. Overall consumption doesn't double. The space concerns are very real though and probably harder to solve…that's my bottleneck
- davidivadavid 6y agoYes, that's the reason why shopping at Costco isn't the solution to everything. I don't want to store 300 toilet paper rolls.
- rootusrootus 6y agoAlso, Costco isn't always automatically the best price per unit anyway. Especially for staple items, I find that Fred Meyer (Kroger) is frequently less expensive on a per-unit basis for really common household items. It's deeply ingrained that buying in bulk must be cheaper, but pricing in grocery stores isn't always that intuitive.
- codetrotter 6y ago
- oh_sigh 6y agoOn the topic of dishwashers, can anyone tell me why no dishwasher let's me fill it with, say, 20 loads worth of detergent and then it just dispenses it as needed? My dishwasher can do that with "rinse aid"(which I don't use), but I've never seen one that can do it with regular detergent. Another "hack" is that the tray you're supposed to fill with detergent is almost always way too big. People think "more soap -> more clean", but that is only true to an extent. You will be just fine filling it only halfway up, even if you have a full load in there. The same goes with laundry detergent.
- jandrese 6y agoMy dishwasher can't do that, but my clothes washer can. The limitation is space inside of the device for the reservoir. In a clothes washer there's plenty of space between the cylindrical wash basin and the square housing, but in a dishwasher there is much less available space between the square dish cavity and the housing, and that space is generally filled with sound deadening and thermal insulation.
- preinheimer 6y agoGreat observation on space utilization!
- amluto 6y agoGE makes dishwashers that do exactly this. You look up your water hardness in a table, push some magic buttons as described in the manual to tell the dishwasher how hard your water is, and you pour detergent into the reservoir. Interestingly, you are strongly advised not to mix chlorine-based detergent with enzyme-based detergent at risk of turning the mixture into hard-to-remove goo.
- drivingmenuts 6y agoSeems like determining water hardness would be something the dishwasher could do.
- bob1029 6y agoMy dishwashing hack is to simply clean them in the sink by hand and to never use the dishwasher. I find this encourages efficient reuse of dishes wherever feasible, and ensures that things are always cleaned to my expectations. You might think this takes some extra time, but there are major advantages to having a sink full of hot soapy water available to you each morning. Wiping down arbitrary surfaces, mopping floors, etc, is a trivial next step after you finish with the dishes.
- halfFact 6y agoI'm not sure you sold me on any time savings.
- jasonhansel 6y agoWashing dishes by hand can be a surprisingly meditative experience. (Granted, I live alone--hand-washing dishes for an entire family would drive me insane.)
- reaperducer 6y agoI agree. A few years ago I went a year without a dishwasher, and while I complained about having to do the dishes every day, while I was doing it, it was kind of an escape. I eventually looked forward to it. Time to listen to a podcast, or some new music, or to simply be alone with my thoughts because nobody wanted to be around the guy doing dishes. Very therapeutic.
- bob1029 6y agoI also find it to be highly meditative. Its almost like a mental switch when I put on the gloves now. Sometimes I find myself avoiding washing dishes temporarily because I subconsciously know I will be forced to think slowly through whatever is bothering me instead of frittering away time clicking across the internet at hyperspeed.
- tropdrop 6y agoIn my experience, dishwashers use more water, not less. Growing up, we used a dishwasher regularly, and the process looked like this: a) remove all bits of food with regular washing, stack next to sink b) transfer from next to sink to dishwasher c) (after running dishwasher) wipe off hard water residue from all glass dishes d) put away dishes When I moved out on my own, I discovered the joy of a simple wooden dish rack next to your sink: a) remove all bits of food (and oil) with regular washing, stack next to sink And the above is all one has to do! The dishes dry naturally, and putting them back into the cabinet is optional. Notice almost identical step a). How am I supposed to believe dishwashers save water? We used twice the water simply to get rid of oil! After my partner got tired of wiping hard-water residue, we abandoned our dishwasher and never looked back.
- acd 6y agoAnother environmentally friendly hack you can do is to use pine oil soap for machine washing clothes. Naturally you may not want to run this on your finest shirts and pants. But for other old clothes that you do not care that much about it is just fine. If you do this try it with very little soap first so it does not cause to much bubbling in the machine. Also check if your water is hard or soft, if its soft its more likely to work well. Hard water can cause too much bubbles with pine based soap. You can use pine oil soap for lots of other cleaning tasks, cleaning the oven put a drop out on stuck dirt, heat oven up to 80-100C, wipe off. You can also use green soap for washing the toilet and sink. For washing the coffee maker use vinegar mixed with water, run it a short wile so waster circlulates through the pump, stop. Wait for 30 minutes. For dirt stuck on stove, use vinegar let it stay for a while wipe off. Good natural cleaning items: Baking soda, Vinegar and Pine oil Soap.
- bredren 6y agoWhite Vinegar / Water also replaces Windex! I didn't want to believe it because I thought we needed the blue stuff in the spray bottle. The product. But we were out and push came to shove we tried it. I was wrong. It works.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago50/50 white vinegar and dawn detergent will keep your shower and toilets looking new.
- mdoms 6y agoBut..... you already have dish soap? Just.... wash the dishes?
- chromaton 6y agoI think it's your day to do dishes.
- colonwqbang 6y agoLifehacker news?
- tomohawk 6y agoOther hacks. Instead of fabric softener like downy, use same amount of white vinegar. It is cheaper, your clothes smell fresher, and anyone with allergies will thank you. For cleaning a tub or shower, make a mixture of 50% white vinegar and 50% dish detergent (like dawn). Spray the mixture on tile/tub/curtain/doors. Let sit for 15 - 30 minutes. Spray down with water. Done. This is way cheaper than the industrial cleaners, much less smelly, and usually works better.
- meatmanek 6y agoA fun trick is to google for the safety data sheet (SDS) of household chemical products. They'll tell you rough proportions of some of the ingredients. (Not all, just the ones they're required to -- the more dangerous ones.) For example, the SDS for Cascade Pacs[1] tells us that there's ~40% sodium carbonate (washing soda, a fairly strong base), a few percent of sodium percarbonate (washing soda + hydrogen peroxide), and a few percent of an ethoxylated alcohol, a surfactant. There are also some notes further down about Subtilisin, which apparently is a protease, an enzyme that breaks down protein. (I'm not a chemist, so my interpretations of what these chemicals are/do is based on search results for the chemical names / CAS numbers.) I bet if you looked up the SDS for Dawn dish soap, it'd be mostly surfactants, so sodium bicarbonate + Dawn dish soap is a reasonable approximation of sodium carbonate + surfactants. OxyClean is also sodium carbonate, sodium percarbonate, and ethoxylated alcohols, so it'd also probably do just fine -- whether it's safe to use in a dishwasher depends mostly on the toxicity of those ethoxylated alcohols. 1. https://www.pg.com/productsafety/sds/SDS_2018/SDS_Feb_2018/Cascade_Complete_Action_Pacs_Dishwasher_Detergent_-_Fresh.pdf https://www.pg.com/productsafety/sds/SDS_2018/SDS_Feb_2018/C... 2. https://www.ahprofessional.com/_downloads/sds/SDS%20OxiClean%20Versatile%20Stain%20Remover.pdf https://www.ahprofessional.com/_downloads/sds/SDS%20OxiClean...
- kortex 6y agoI am a (former) chemist, and you are spot on. They are pretty comparable. One is Polyethylene glycol (PEG) isotridecyl ether, one is PEG decyl ether (and friends, various carbon chain lengths. These neutral detergents act as surfactants without much foam. Dawn has anionic detergents which foams up.
- TwoBit 6y agoAre you suggesting the OxyClean dishwasher detergent recipes may be good?
- kortex 6y agoIt's far from the worst. The big unknowns are the PEG chain lengths (how many -CH2CH2O- links in the chain, more means more solubility, to a point) and how clean the product is. It's a dirt simple synthesis and there aren't a ton of real nasties (toxic at low concentration) that can be generated, so there's not a huge amount of risk in my opinion. Like, eating fried food is probably a higher risk in the long term.
- crazygringo 6y agoEverything I know about dishwasher detergent is that it is formulated to clean chemically, i.e. with enzymes etc. that actually break food down over the course of tens of minutes or hours. Dish soap does NOT do that. (It's also why you shouldn't wash dishes by hand with dishwasher detergent, because the chemicals are too harsh.) I don't doubt that this "hack" does some cleaning, but for things like crusted-on tomato sauce, hardened cheese, dried egg yolks, etc. -- it's just not going to work as well. Dish soap simply doesn't break these things down. It's not meant to. (Washing by hand with dish soap works because you're applying intense pressure and abrasion, neither of which a dishwasher can do -- which is why it does it chemically instead.) I just don't find it credible that "the results are identical". Either the author isn't paying enough attention, or else they're doing extensive "pre-washing" of their dishes before loading them, or they're washing so incredibly quickly after eating that food never has the time to dry/harden in the first place.
- tyingq 6y agoWas curious about this, so I looked it up. Sounds like it's usually bacillus protease and amylase, to digest protein and starch, respectively.
- hn_throwaway_99 6y agoAs another commenter mentioned, Dawn dishwashing liquid, used by the author of the article, also includes protease and amylase.
- twic 6y agoI once met a chap who told me he used his dishwasher without any powder or soap at all, and it still worked. Now, maybe he was making it up. But i suspect that there is a common class of dish dirt where prolonged steaming and jetting with hot water is adequate in practice - i'd expect anything water-soluble to dissolve in hot water! So, residues from tea or coffee, water-based pasta sauce, fruit juice, jam, etc. It won't work for everything, of course, but it might work for a surprising range of things.
- 6y ago
- nemo44x 6y agoJust get Barkeepers Friend. It’s magic and made from natural ingredients. Seriously, if I have kids this will probably be the most important life lesson I teach them. I don’t even know how soap competes.
- function_seven 6y agoWait, you can use Barkeepers Friend in the dishwasher? I also love that stuff, but didn't know it could be used that way.
- quercusa 6y agoI'm not sure it would be cost-effective. On the other hand it is the greatest for cleaning pans with burned-on food.
- oliwarner 6y agoA little meta, but can anybody explain why recipe articles like this (but usually food) spend so long waffling on about tangential "oh we can't afford to bit run the dishwasher 24/7" nonsense, and not just get stuck in? Is there some technical advantage to padding it out, or do they just like to see their own words?
- k2enemy 6y agoActually, I thought that was why this article was posted -- to spur a discussion about these types of blogs padding stories with 95% fluff. As another commenter said, it is a SEO thing.
- nemo1618 6y agoThe explanation I've heard it's that it's an SEO thing -- if your page isn't "unique" it gets nuked in the rankings, so recipe sites need to add a long preamble to distinguish their otherwise-identical recipe. Another explanation is that longer articles mean more time spent on the site, i.e. it pumps up those "user engagement" metrics. Plus more space for ads. The saving grace is that most recipe sites have a "Jump to recipe" button. They know people don't want to read their life story, but they can't jeopardize their SEO. EDIT: more well-informed speculation here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/3gkzog/comment/ctz5d9r https://www.reddit.com/r/Cooking/comments/3gkzog/comment/ctz...
- jdmichal 6y agoI think for recipes specifically it started with the fact that a recipe cannot be copyrighted, but that flavor text around a recipe can. This is why recipe books do the same thing.
- Havoc 6y agoDishwasher three times a day???
- ryanmarsh 6y agostuff that I just don't normally keep around my house, or stuff that I'm not sure I'm comfortable putting on my dishes (Borax... Borax, a naturally occurring mineral, is worth considering as a home staple. It has many good uses. The best laundry detergent I’ve ever used was something my wife made with Borax. I’ve used it for pest control and it worked better than sprays and other products. Since this is HN I’m sure others will fall down the rabbit hole of why it’s not as popular as it used to be.
- stx 6y agoTake it from someone who tried. You can use dish detergent in the washing machine (clothes) but using laundry deterge in the dishwasher has interesting results. You will get bubbles coming out all over the place.
- fyfy18 6y agoI tried a few of these DIY dishwasher detergent recipes a few months ago (random things I did during lockdown) and the results were ok. I usually use all-in-one tablets, which in my country all come individually wrapped in a plastic wrapper which I was looking to avoid. The main thing I found my DIY detergent didn't clean was tea stains in cups, everything else came out pretty good, although sometimes they were a few limescale stains on glasses. Recently my supermarket had a promotion on dishwasher powder, so I decided to try that. If anything it's worse than my DIY detergent. The all-in-one tablets clean perfectly every time, so I'm wondering what else they have which gives superior results. I regularly fill up the salt and rinse aid (even though this probably isn't needed with the tablets).
- dmix 6y agoI would never have believed this was such a controversial topic.
- dghughes 6y agoWatching the history of soap I learned that soap was scarce in Germany during WWII. The vegetable oils used to as part of the soap making process were hard to get. Detergent was invented in WWII by German scientists when they tried to create artificial soap. Soap leaves a scum on things detergent doesn't. Somewhat related to the article is suds and salt. Public fountains that are vandalized with detergent can prevent it by adding salt to prevent suds from forming.
- greggman3 6y agoI find it interesting, at a glance, most of the comments here seem to take for granted that everyone uses a dishwasher. I haven't used a dishwasher in about 20 yrs (not bragging, just stating a fact). In those 20 years 13 of them were in Japan, and 7 in SF. In Japan dishwashers are not common AFAIK and when I was in SF partly I was just used to not using one and partly it would have really annoyed my neighbors to run it when I wanted to and scheduling around that made me just mostly forget it was there. I'm curious what other countries they are common/not common.
- ashtonkem 6y agoProbably depends on your local water and energy cost/regulations. Energy star dishwashers are so energy efficient that you have to run them basically empty before it’s better to hand wash. We really should be encouraging more countries to install more dishwashers, counterintuitively.
- greggman3 6y agoI probably need to read the studies in more detail but they always seem to mention "a full dishwasher". Back when I used one it was never full, usually at most 20-30% full and yet it uses the same amount of water regardless. In order to fill it I'd need 4x-5x the dishes and only run it once every 4-5 days and hope that it still got things clean after they'd dried that long and that the machine didn't attract insects for the rotting food inside as waited for their to be enough dishes for it to be full.
- ashtonkem 6y agoThat’s not the right comparison to make. The comparison is between the amount of water the dishwasher uses (regardless of load) and how much water washing by hands uses. Dish washers use a surprisingly small amount of water (3 gallons per load on average). So the correct comparison is “do I run the sink long enough to consume more than 3 gallons of water when hand washing?” Chances are it’s slightly more efficient for you to run the dishwasher half full than hand wash.
- 6y ago
- mr_woozy 6y ago>We run our dishwasher at least twice a day here, and often three times on weekends. What the ever-loving fuck?
- Jaruzel 6y agoTOP TIP: Do not put Fairy Liquid in the little tablet tray in your dishwasher when you run out of tablets. It does not end well. :(
- mszcz 6y agoOh, come on... Tell us how it ends ;)
- s_gourichon 6y agoSurprised no one mentioned that "this one weird hack saved a cook-mom" clickbait-style of writing. SEO-optimizing writing style was mentioned in comments, still.
- account42 6y agoAnd of course it mentions a specific brand of dish soap to use and has an ad for a bottle to hold it. Makes me question if the whole thing isn't made up just to sell those things.
- ros86 6y agoThis isn't a scientific study of course, but still I do miss the negative reference (i.e. without any detergent). Additionally, it would be nice to quantify the 'cleanness' of a run (perhaps weighing the dishes before and after?). Hmm, perhaps we should take this study to the next level ;-).