That was already addressed in his latest video: his local home center (Menards, I think?) came out with a cheaper version (it tried to have old-timey colors, but still used colored LEDs underneath instead of white), and no, it didn't suffice.
The series about the RCA video disc player thing is WILD. That they made that fucking thing work at all is a testament to what can be accomplished if you throw a huge sum of money and enough smart people at a problem .
I also have strong opinions about Christmas lights.
Unfortunately, they do not perfectly align with Technology Connections. We agree is almost all respects: flickering is bad, purple is not a valid Christmas color, white lights should be warm and not bluish. I just can't agree about this one thing though, I LOVE the super saturated colors of LEDs for the red, blue, and green lights. I care much less about the saturation of the yellow and/or orange lights.
I agree with you, but my excuse is being in the southern hemisphere where Christmas lights must compete with summer evenings. The bold colours do better at early twilight
Indoors though I like the less saturated colours, and lack of options has had my tree lit with warm white only for the last decade - I get colour only where the white light plays off transparent and reflective baubles (decorations, I think they're called in America) and tinsel
It's all decorations, baubles specifically are 'ornaments,' though in the deep south you'll sometimes hear baubles, but generally only when referencing something as frivolous and stupidly expensive, not in reference to Christmas ornaments.
In Australia all the ball style things you hang from the tree are definitely baubles, other hanging things are mostly still baubles, candy canes are candy canes and tree toppers are tree toppers varying between stars, angels, and anything else for the non-religious
The most annoying thing for me is that i can't find any powder detergent where I live which worked best in his videos, and the compartment is so poorly designed that i frequently find half the detergent pod still in the compartment after the dishes are done.
Well since nobody else is giving away the spoiler on the 6 hours of technology connections videos( didn’t know there was a third now), it’s to fill the little compartment with the dishwasher manufacturers(not the detergent bottles) recommended amount of detergent and to also add a little bit in the bottom of the dishwasher too to help that pre rinse cycle before the main cycle begins.
I love watching his videos but not everybody does. To those people, you’re welcome
Note that this is only true when not using eco mode, which opens the door right away so you can just chuck the tablet in like a caveman. Mine happens to work well enough in eco mode and the little door tends to get stuck on things, so that's what I usually do.
If your (modern) dishwasher isn't cleaning properly in eco mode, either you have very hard water, or you should clean the filter more often.
If you don't remember when the last time you cleaned the filter is, go clean it now.
I pretty much trust Technology Connections and their advice is to use the machine's smart setting (or whatever it's called on your brand) as the main job of eco is to score well on water and energy usage. Mine has "6th sense" as its second program which is the only program that does a pre-wash
Eco on my machine doesn't dry the dishes well. We have pretty soft water
For good reason. I don't live in the family home anymore, but last winter when I did move back in for a while, I had approximately half as much work to do keeping the damn place warm, thanks to the heat pump. But I mean sure, I could also just buy one of those fancy newer automatic furnaces to replace the old furnace, and there'd be no work at all! Except that costs at least 5x as much as I paid for a single air to air heat pump that also makes summers bearable.
All this for a relatively modest cost in terms of electricity because yo what the hell, heat pumps are more than 100% efficient when heating. It seems like we hacked physics, honestly.
My parents have a heat pump and they hate it. It can either provide hot water or heating, but not both at the same time. If someone has just had a shower then the heating switches off for hours while it refills the hot water tank. Bullshit in winter.
Assuming you don't have a manual to read:
First, start with a freshly -emptied clean dishwasher, no spills in the bottom. Wear rubber gloves if you're easily grossed out. Pull out the bottom drawer.
Look in the bottom, you see anything that looks like you could turn it 🛞, with maybe a couple arrows ▶️ ◀️ to line up? Lefty-loosey it, pull it out and take it to the sink, along with any screenlike thingamabobs that come out with it. Run warm water and use hands, sink brush, or scrunge to gently remove all the gunk. You don't have to abuse it, you want it to last the life of the machine. Also feel in the hole, removing any gunk left behind. If the filter pieces come apart easily, do that, but put them back as they were before reinserting into the machine. Fit it back into the hole and righty-tighty to match up the arrows. Don't over-tighten! Go rinse out your sink, dry your hands, and set a monthly notification on your phone. It's much less gross if you do it monthly.
oh that doesn’t sound as bad as i was expecting. thank you for the explanation. i believe i have found the wheel and i will give it a go this coming weekend after i secure some gloves and prepare myself mentally for what’s to come. the reminder thing sounds like a good idea, i have a poor habit of letting some of these home maintenance things slip my mind and the new year might be a good excuse to try to do those things more routinely. we’ll see how it goes.
Even if you find a lot of gunk, remember it's had hot soapy water washing through it every time you ran the dishwasher, killing a lot of the germs at least.
One of the most useful videos on YouTube that EVERYONE in the world should watch.
The money saved. I bought a pack of tablets for 10$ a month, now its 15$ a year for the powder. That's 6.300$ saved in a lifetime
The amount of waste reduced since there is no individual packaging of the tablets
The dishes are cleaner than ever
NO downsides. It's less work to pour some powder than it is to grab a tablet. Well at least almost no downside: It's hard to find powder, there are like 15 different tablets in the supermarket and maybe 1 package of powder.
Still, this video improved my dishwasher-life soooo much.
Powder is still cheaper. Just less cheap for you since you probably don't use your dishwasher that much, but it's cheaper
The dissolved material is still waste material, the waste is just in the sewage and not in your bin
I just add this point because of the formatting
This is subjective, but I think it's slightly less work. You either have to make sure your hands are dry to not dissolve the wrapper or you have to throw away the wrapper. Either way it's not a lot of difference
It makes it really easy to add the tablespoon of detergent to the tub for the prewash as well as the needed dose for the dishes (which is really not much unless you have it loaded with greasy plates)
Technology Connections on YouTube has several relevant videos
The dissolvable packets of a dishwasher detergent are very different than the forever microplastics that people are worried about. Those are designed to be durable and last while the detergent pods are made to dissolve.
That said the powder detergent is great and SO much cheaper per wash. Also you can put some in the prewash for better washing.
The microplastics issue is more contentious, and while many say it’s bad that it enters the water supply, I suspect the smallest of the particles do not wash away so well
It's not the microplastic people are concerned about but it's a plastic that sticks around in the environment and bioaccumulates.
There are properties we're good at designing plastics around like hardness, stiffness, and environmental resistance. But there are properties we're very bad at designing plastics for decomposition, especially alongside niche other traits like water solubility
Target has a store brand detergent that works well. But I find it's easier to use too much with powder. Compared to gel, It's harder to control the pour, and if you have too much it leaves a residue.
I'm confused about what possible reason you could have to say "yeah yeah I know" about Amazon that doesn't apply at least as much to Walmart.
On a related note, I would like to switch to powdered dish detergent after watching the Technology Connections video, but have stuck with liquid because Costco doesn't carry powder.
The Bezos make the Walton's look like good people. That's not saying much for the Walton's. It's saying a lot less for the Bezos. Like grading on a curve and the class was already dogshit but then somebody else came a long and somehow scored negative points on a test.
The one by me (rural) and by my parents (city) both carry Great Value powder, though my local one only carries the smaller box with a pour spout and not the scoop box you can get in the city
I have a friend who does this. I tried explaining to her that she's doing it wrong. She told me I'm wrong and she won't discuss it further. I don't get some people.
Most people hate being wrong, or corrected. They seem to see it as an affront to their very existence, and will often fight back tooth and nail when confronted with any evidence that the things they believe about the world might not be 100% correct.
Source: Any substantial comment thread on any social media platform, ever.
People who are readily willing to admit they're wrong and learn why, and on the flip side be able to correct others in an educational/non-condescending way, are the best people.
Everyone saying to rtfm has not lived in rental housing with the landlord special dish washer. You can only rtfm when you have tm.
But anyway, putting a bit of soap in with your pre wash isn't a bad idea. Maybe not a whole tablet but then again, maybe they never thought to look for powdered soap before. I certainly didnt until I watched the technology connections video.
I bought a new Bosch dishwasher this year, we'd been using our old broken one as a place to dry dishes for about 2 years. Supposedly this new one has wifi and whatnot. Only ever pushed the "start" button. Yes, I work in IT. 🤷🏽♀️
I refuse to buy a dishwasher with any kind of wifi or network connection in it. This is a hill I will die on. I will wash my clothes with a god-damned washboard before I buy a washing machine with wifi in it.
It's pretty obvious where they want to take these things. The clothes washer and dish washer companies look at the printer companies with envy. Why do you think they've been pushing dish and clothes pods so heavily? Eventually your washing machine or dishwasher will not work off of generic powder or liquid at all. Instead it will only use "cartridges," plastic boxes maybe the size of 1-lb box of butter. Such a thing would have enough detergent to supply a dishwasher or washing machine for many months. But if they really want to pull the printer game, they need the devices to be wifi enabled so they can let them phone home to keep the DRM working properly.
They are trying to turn dishwashers and clothes washers into printers. That is the ultimate goal of connecting these devices to the net.
I would argue that your career has given you the wisdom to understand how the phrase "just because you can, doesn't mean you should" applies to technology. So you just instinctively know that a dishwasher doesn't need a network stack to do the job it was built for. And adding one is creating a lot more complexity for very demising returns.
I read somewhere that around ⅓ of people (at least in my country) are effectively illiterate. They can read but they can’t really understand what they read. They can’t solve logical tasks and would fail for example to take medication according to written instruction. It does explain a lot.
This is a way broader phenomenon than just the US, though granted the US educational system might skew things a bit in a negative direction versus most other supposedly "Developed" Nations.
IMHO, in general very few people have to really think things through in their life or work and most people can live life in what's pretty much an auto-pilot of habits most of which were picked up in childhood, teen and early adult years, and such people simply don't have any "training" on figuring complex things out by themselves and will have trouble understanding complex subjects.
Further, the instructions for advanced domain stuff (for example Medicine and some kinds of Tech) are often riddled with domain specific language that people without a broader vocabulary won't understand.
I call all the autopilot people "Listers" aka, they need a list of steps. If anything happens that the steps do not account for, they get stuck and cannot proceed.
I work in IT support and the number of times I've gotten a call from a lister who hit a random, benign dialog during a routine process, called me, and I only clicked "ok" to resolve the concern.... Well, it's too damn high.
The fact that we don't teach people critical thinking and problem solving in standard (and generally mandatory) education, is baffling to me. Education has become a list of things to memorize in order to pass.
I think that's less due to low intelligence or poor education it's just being completely out of their depth. I could probably do a car engine rebuild if I had perfect instructions that tell me EXACTLY what to do (and the right tools). But as soon as I got off track I'd be pretty clueless.
I've worked with sysadmins all over the world and I agree it's not just a US problem. Lots of people will remember the exact sequence of steps to accomplish a task, but when something goes wrong they don't know how to read what's on screen and adapt to it.
If you've ever tried to read a foreign language book when your knowledge of the language is merely basic and tried to use a dictionary to solve the problem of many words being unknown, you'll know how frustrating that becomes and fast - one actually learns faster at the beginning by just keeping on reading even if not understanding a lot of things.
Further some of the "words" are often not words but acronyms, so not likely to be in a dictionary, plus a lot of domain specific words aren't in general dictionaries either (good luck finding the names of certain chemical chains and their properties in a general dictionary when trying to understand the booklet in a box of medicine).
Last but not least often even the explanations for some words require understanding of some concepts that people do not understand (most people probably know what "analgesic" is, but how many know what "antipyretic" - a not to far away concept given how many common medicines have both - is?).
Things which are supposed to be simple can turn into veritable dives down the rabbit hole to fully understand for those outside that expert domain if they were not simplified for ease of access to the general population, so it's hardly surprising if many people just chose to blindly use something as advised without even trying to understand it (which, let's be honest, it's probably the correct way for most people to used things like for example medicine if the source of the advice is a medical doctor).
Don't get me wrong: people should be more curious and more often trying and figure things out beyond the merely "how to use". At the same time, the information that comes with from expert domains in things targeted at non-experts should be as much as possible reduced to common language (though even that is a balance, since a ton of things required several layers of explanation to fully explain to non-experts).
foreign language book when your knowledge of the language is merely basic
There are dictionaries for this too.
one actually learns faster at the beginning by just keeping on reading even if not understanding a lot of things.
Yes and no. I used to do this, but when I sat down with dictionaries and translated one giant chapter of fanfic without skipping unknown words and preserving all jokes, I greatly improved my understanding of foreign language.
so it's hardly surprising if many people just chose to blindly use something as advised
Many people don't even have RTFM skill, so they can't follow advises they didn't read.
At the same time, the information that comes with from expert domains in things targeted at non-experts should be as much as possible reduced to common language (though even that is a balance,
If you don't, then expert domain becomes common language. How many people don't know what voltage is?
since a ton of things required several layers of explanation to fully explain to non-experts).
Try to open wikipedia article for something very common. Soon you will end up reading 5 articles about scientific disciplines and 6 articles about mathematical fields.
It's funny because i learned 6 foreign languages, 2 of which to fluent level and another 2 to good level (and the other 2 to "I manage to get away with it" level ;)), and the approach of using of a dictionary to learn the meaning of the words which I tried at first didn't work at all well (it was slower and way more frustrating) and what did work best was just exposing myself to the language (in two different ways for two different languages, one by just consuming media of that language whilst the other by living in a country were people spoke the language) and going along with the flow without worrying about the words I didn't know, so quite a different experience from that.
Anyways, my point isn't that most people can't dig down on things by for example going into Wikipedia or that I wouldn't prefer if they did, it's that most people either don't have the time or the inclination to do so, and expecting them to be different is denying human nature.
In my experience with explaining expert domains to non-experts, you have to try and meet them in the middle, which will pull more people in to try and understand it that merely standing fast on my side of the domain language barrier and demand that the climb that mountain to get to me.
That said, some people will never even try, no matter how much effort you put in making it easy for them, and sometimes it's not even stupidity (which, as something one is born with, it's kinda excusable, IMHO), it's just laziness.
That's a tiny minority of people and an ultra-specific belief.
I would say that the prevalence of the belief in fairy stories being real (aka Religions, Cults and so on) would be a pretty good indication of just how common and widely spread the Comprehension Handicapped are all over the World.
I think the modern flat earth idea started in the UK but I don't actually know of anyone who believes it, it's still very much a "village idiot" thing.
If believing one thing with every fibre of your being is your new foundation stone, dismissing another belief that doesn't contradict your first one can become tricky.
Even of the literate people, far too few bother reading instructions. People who can read and interpret law texts, but they still click away a pop-up unread when setting up a new phone for example. The only people who I've only ever had a good experience with when it came to diligently reading and following instructions + escalating the problem when the instructions were unclear, were professional accountants.
A long time ago, as I was getting ready to get dinner with a friend. I asked her if she could start my dishwasher. It was all loaded and just needed the detergent which was under the sink...well, we got back and the kitchen was flooded and filled with suds and bubbles. Turned out she used the dish soap next to the sink instead of the detergent. Cleaned it up, laughed, and was reminded of the different experiences we all have from people who grow up in more wealthy households.
I ran out of dishwasher detergent one time. I KNEW you can't use regular soap, but I said if I just use a tiny amount, I'll rewash later if I have to. It can't be THAT bad.
No.
No amount is ever the right amount other than none.
I almost always have two boxes of washing powder, when one goes empty I can replace it while using the other. I usually go shopping more often than I use a box of detergent
That's super true! I've been renting for so long that it's one of those conveniences that I love having, but I can get by totally okay without one (currently don't have one). Growing up, chores were just normal things, but I meant so many people who never had to do them, and they had a lot of household experiences to gain later in life!
Also people may live with their parents and have never used the dishwasher that they do have, or perhaps only loaded or unloaded it, never having run it
I did this! So many bubbles. There was a bunch of water too. On the bright side I had very clean linoleum till everything dried up, then the corners in some spots started to curl up at the edges.
And next we'll tell you what the little hatch labeled "rinse aid" is for.
In other news, major manufacturers are starting to ship appliances now without including any printed instructions. I can see that it's just as well; it's clear that nobody would read them anyway.
Really cheap appliances that are still entirely electromechanical might come with complete schematics, but I've yet to encounter an electronic one that does (where "complete" means "including the details of the PCB, not just treating it as a black-box component").
You'll never find a schematic of the PCB because the manufacturer not only treats it as a black box, but it will also be incessantly revised mid-production run by their OEM's to cut costs every time a component comes out that's 2 cents cheaper.
My previous diswasher had the compartment just for powdered detergent. Tablets were supposed to go directly into the dishwasher, per the manual. So the approach works with some machines.
Mix both worlds. Like I have learned from a very investigative YT video. He tested and measured dishwashing in many different ways, and came to the result that a) tablet in that place in the door is the thing to do, but also b) a bit of dishwasher powder into the little compartment right next to it under the flap. This is for the first cleaning stage, and since we use this trick, our dishwasher runtime (which is dynamically depending on cleanlyness of the dishes) has gone down by about 20 minutes.
Yeah exactly, that guy above you is a fucking idiot who brought nothing to the discussion. I'd hate to be related to them, or even use the same brand of cigarettes
Not quite fair, since once you know it's a compartment it's obvious that it's for something, but with all the sensors and access panels appliances have that are not user serviceable it's not that surprising that there could be a plastic panel in the door of your dishwasher that appeared to do nothing.
Really the only thing that might raise an eyebrow is that it is in a door that gets wet so limiting extra things like that would be good, but perfectly reasonable to assume it was for some type of sensor if you didn't notice the little latch for the door.
There's a little protrusion in the base to check the height of the water, have you ever closely examined that to see if it says 'put bleach in here' or something?
We had a new washing machine that for the first two washes smelled really bad and made a screeching noise as well. Just before sending it back I noticed that we forgot to remove the styrofoam around the drum..
Houses typically include the appliances, so unless you buy from one of those rare boomer types that filed everything away, you probably don't have it. I guess you could search it online, now I'm typing this out...
Or maybe you buy a house and later renovate the kitchen, adding in a brand new dishwasher because there never was one to begin with.
Or maybe you buy a new development and it either has no kitchen appliances or furniture, or it has brand new appliances so the manuals and other documents are kept.
Lots of ways to still have the manual. Where I live, the cost of a new development is maybe 20-30% more per unit of area than a condo in a 40-60 year old commie block, but they look way nicer inside and out and they keep heat way better, which is important when you get really damn cold winters. Plus you can get better loan terms if it's certified C energy class or above usually. For some banks it has to be A. Downside is you have to wait while they build the damn thing.
Or maybe like me, buy a house that had a dishwasher, pull it out and throw it away because you're a single man.
Get married wife wants a dishwasher, buy a new one go looking for the manual one day and find the original dishwasher manual in the boomer folder of things left behind by the previous owner
I read that it's an American thing. Americans have dryer vents in the house that need to be regularly cleaned or they are a fire risk, while the rest of the world has a dryer lint compartment in the dryer, that also needs to be regularly cleaned or it's a fire risk. FYI so that nobody gets butthurt: I don't think either of this solution is better or worse, they are just different. This is no "muuuh America Bad Europe Good" comment.
Notable exception: dry/wash combos, they just rinse out the dryer lint with the next wash cycle
Edit: And both make sense respectively. Since in the US you mostly build with drywall, it's cheap and easy to add a vent for the dryer. In other parts of the world where they build concrete walls, it's not so easy, so if you choose to move your dryer room in the future it would be a pain in the ass when the dryer needs to be connected to a vent. So it's much more useful to collect the lint and water in the dryer than to vent it out of your building
My vent line needs to be cleaned regularly to clear lint.
Lint traps are not 100% effective and if you haven't checked your dryer vent for lint recently, you should. If the heat from the dryer builds up enough, the lint can very easily start a fire.
I had a dryer for a while that vented into the room. It didn't just spew damp air though. There was a condenser and collector tank for water that had to be emptied between runs.
My mom told me an embarrassing story about how my dad once used regular old dish soap apparently it didnt end well and suds got everywhere. At least this person knew to use the tablets.
It’s a shame that the dishwasher the landlord installed has a shitty soap compartment that sometimes failed to open during the wash. When I tried to take it apart to see what the issue was, I couldn’t get it back in. So now I just chuck the puck in.
My parents were really adamant about not leaving any food on plates, so it really doesn’t make a difference to me.
I can't wait until they discover rinse aid. If your dishes still look dirty no matter how many cycles you run the machine for, then you probably should have refilled the dispenser ages ago.
Its not that uncommon that some people don't know how to use every day stuff correct and use them wrong. One thing I've noticed that a lot of people use wrong are thermostatic radiator valves. Its not a simple valve and the numbers don't indicate on how far open the valve is, its a temperature setting. I've often told people to not set it to 5 and rather set the target temperature and 3 is about 20°C, so room temperature. At work all engineers don't get it and we stupid little IT guys with a smaller degree get it right.
To be fair, they aren't that accurate. Its pure mechanical and the sensing happens in the thermostat but when it closes the valve, the radiator is still full of hot water. You need to find the correct setting for your room and so on. With electric ones, you can fiddle with the settings, to be more accurate.
Also, they measure right next to the heat source and the markings can't compensate for better or worse insulation. It makes (almost) no sense to put temperature markings on them.
There are people going around TikTok and instagram suggesting you should be chucking your dish detergent in the bottom of the dishwasher and skip the little compartment.
Some people just want to watch the world burn. And everyone wants to encourage them.
For those who don't know, that wastes the detergent if the dishwasher has a prewash cycle, which most do (eco cycles are the most likely to not have a prewash)
Just use powder. Put some in the compartment and a little into the basin/on the door. Now your pre-wash cycle is more effective than ever! Also, powder is cheaper most of the time. And also convenient - no individually wrapped pods!
The pods themselves are a waste. Just get liquid or powder detergent. It's cheaper and does the job just as well (and possibly even better depending on the dishwasher)
Most people use too much detergent. Put the right amount in the wash and pre-wash, it's probably less than what they used before, and the dishes are cleaner. Too much detergent leaves powdery residue.
The Technology Connections content everybody is talking about covers it. The main wash’s detergent goes into the little compartment, which is closed, then a little extra goes on top to help with the pre-rinse.
That is the dumbest thing about pods. If you want to use your dishwasher “correctly” with detergent in both the pre-rinse and the main wash cycle, you need to use two pods for one load of dishes!
Either that or open & divide the pods I guess, but then you aren’t really using “pods” are you, lol.
My parents insist that it works the same either way despite me explaining that there is a pretty wash rinse. But because they put the powder or tablet in while the little compartment is still wet, the detergent occasionally doesn't release properly.
I've been using the soap compartment for years, I only recently just started chucking the packet into the silverware holder because I've heard that might be better (the little compartment might open too late and be less effective). I'm not totally convinced OP was doing a worse job accidentally
Maybe it depends on your model(like it was poorly designed or something), but in general the soap compartment should deploy precisely when it needs to. But, hey, if it's working for you then who am I to say otherwise
I am currently on the other side - my soap compartment broke, and so I have to throw the packet in the bottom of my washer. It works... okay. The problem is, most of the soap goes out with the pre-rinse. So I often have dishes that I have to re-wash by hand now, versus never having to do that before. I dream of the day where I fix my soap dispenser.
If it works for you go ahead... but something is wrong with your dishwasher or you're using the wrong mode (eco) then. This is absolutely not the correct way to use a dishwasher.
The pre-wash cycle is the shortest cycle and by using all of your soap in the beginning you are spending the majority of the wash cycle without soap.
I came here to suggest people not use the pods for the exact reason you mention. My dishwasher went from mediocre to pretty good by switching to gel instead of the packs.
My wife refuses to load the dishwasher because to her she "doesn't do it right" or "don't want to fight with it"
So I get OP.
I've had to teach people how to mop a floor, and how you should sweep first, it's just deer in headlights when explaining it. People just don't go outta their lane to learn new things or fix things that don't work right.
My dishwasher was caked in that white film that denotes very hard water when I got it. Came with the house. Literally did not clean anything put in it. Found some stuff online called Afresh. Comes in tablet form. Tossed one into the machine ran an empty cycle and now it works like it should
I'm not a scientist either, but from what I remember from reading the manual; rinse aid helps with drying the dishes, makes it so that water don't stick to them as well. Added dishwasher salt is what helps with lime scale. My dishwasher has a separate salt container, and I then tell the dishwasher how hard my water is and it will add the appropriate amount of salt to the water.
Rinse aid is what we call a surfactant. It disrupts the surface tension of water, which in turn lessens its ability to cling to surfaces.
You know how when you get a smooth surface of glass or plastic wet, there will be a lot of beads of water that just cling there and don't go anywhere? Unless they grow big enough to start finally running down the side? That's surface tension in action. Adding the rinse aid will reduce water's ability to bead up like this on dishes. Instead, water will be more likely to run down the surface in unbroken sheets instead of beading up.
The primary intent is that more water will simply drip off the dishes due to gravity. This does make dishes come out dryer after a drying cycle, and/or decreases the time the drying cycle takes or the energy it requires to get the same effect. But the main reason wanting water to drip off of dishes is to prevent limescale on them.
When water evaporates, only the water disappears into the air. Anything that was dissolved in that water gets left behind. If your water is hard, that will mean there's a bunch of calcites that will stay behind as a whitish powder called limescale. So if you wash dishes with hard water, let the rinse water stay beaded up on them, and dry it out via only evaporation, you get some limescale buildup on them in the form of so-called "water spots".
If instead you add rinse aid, more of the water will drip off the dishes, taking all the dissolved calcites with it. Less water has to evaporate, fewer calcites are left behind on the dishes, so less limescale and fewer water spots. Thus why many brands of the stuff show photos of crystal-clear glass on the box. A water-spotted glass will be cloudy and speckled. Rinse-aided glass will--supposedly, anyway--be clearer.
Unfortunately the little door on my dishwasher sticks and won’t open 99% of the time so I have no choice but to chuck the pod in the bottom. It sucks, but my dishwasher works well in every other way and my dishes are clean enough so I’m not spending money on a new one until some other part of it breaks.
Mine does that too. I have learned to put smaller things in the front and larger things (like upright plates) at the back and it seems to be working well.
I wish it was that easy, but mine slides vertically rather than flipping out so there’s nothing blocking it from opening. It seems to be the internal mechanism that isn’t doing its job.
Mine has that damn sliding mechanism too. What I found is that the track it slides on can get gummed up with detergent and get stuck. I really wish it had the swing door instead!
Also the dishwasher’s racks already have parts of the coating on them broken and the metal inside is rusting. Really annoying!
I also put laundry pods in the little compartment even though they say to just toss them into the thing where the clothes go. I do this because
The pre-rinse cycle will just flush out all the detergent before the actual cleaning cycle
The plastic shit that dissolves to release the detergent was getting all over my clothes and fucking shit up doing it the way the package instructs you.
One of my former room mates had the same problem with the washing machine. They were two compartments and you put the main detergent in the smaller one. In practice it didn't make much of a difference, but still.
Assuming the other one is for fabric softener, the clothes got agitated with plain water, then soap added during the final rinse. But if you ask my 90 year old uncle, laundry soap is a capitalist scam anyway (their pillow cases feel like they are made of old fashioned oil cloth).
The dishwasher we had when I grew up had a broken soap compartment, it wouldn't stay closed so we would just put the soap in it and shut the door, the soap would spill all over the insides, but everything was clean when it was done.
Only remove solid chunks, you don't need to rinse them before hand. That's exactly what the dishwasher does in its first washing cycle (the one without the soap) and doing it by hand only wastes a lot more water.
Not if you're stuck with a shitty and/or old dishwasher like most apartments and older homes have. Growing up in the 80s/90s with a brand new house we still had to scrape/rinse the crap off if we didn't want to find crud in the bowls and such. All y'all downvoters are some privileged mofos.
Some modern dishwashers don't need a pre-rinse (and are actually more effective if the dishes aren't rinsed first due to how fats work). See this video from Consumer Reports or search dishwasher rinse first.
I mean, if you wash the dishes before they go in the dishwasher I guess they come out clean, but to me the point of a dishwasher is to do a more efficient job of it than I can. I scrape but do not rinse, because rinsing then washing is using more water, not less.
Meanwhile, I know people that should just not use a dishwasher bcz they can't load it properly. Honestly, dishwashers are bloody useless. Washing by hand is faster and cheaper.
The trick to having the dishwasher work is to run the tap on the sink until the water is hot. Using powder or liquid dish detergent instead of those sub-optimal expensive tablets also helps, as does leaving sauces on some of the dishes or cookware (only scraping off solid chunks of food)
Even cheap dishwashers clean very well (assuming no clogged filters or mechanical faults) if you follow the above steps.
Dishwashers may not be as fast as going by hand, but the idea is that you free up time requiring active attention by using the appliance. Dishwashers also use much less water for a cycle than 99% of hand washing setups.
obligatory technology connections comment
Seconded, however:
WARNING:
if you go to Technology Connections YT channel, we are not responsible
ifwhen you find yourself watching a 6 hour play list on light bulbsOr even worse, six hours of video making LED christmas lights look like the incandescent light from 30 years ago.
At least that particular quest is finally at an end
It finally ended‽
Yes, hopefully. For his own sanity. Someone finally made commercially available LED bulbs the way he was trying to DIY it.
But they were a tad pricey…
Should a cheaper alternative come along, won’t we all be curious whether it might suffice? 😇
That was already addressed in his latest video: his local home center (Menards, I think?) came out with a cheaper version (it tried to have old-timey colors, but still used colored LEDs underneath instead of white), and no, it didn't suffice.
Yup
The series about the RCA video disc player thing is WILD. That they made that fucking thing work at all is a testament to what can be accomplished if you throw a huge sum of money and enough smart people at a problem .
I also have strong opinions about Christmas lights.
Unfortunately, they do not perfectly align with Technology Connections. We agree is almost all respects: flickering is bad, purple is not a valid Christmas color, white lights should be warm and not bluish. I just can't agree about this one thing though, I LOVE the super saturated colors of LEDs for the red, blue, and green lights. I care much less about the saturation of the yellow and/or orange lights.
I agree with you, but my excuse is being in the southern hemisphere where Christmas lights must compete with summer evenings. The bold colours do better at early twilight
Indoors though I like the less saturated colours, and lack of options has had my tree lit with warm white only for the last decade - I get colour only where the white light plays off transparent and reflective baubles (decorations, I think they're called in America) and tinsel
That must suck. I don't even turn on my Christmas lights until the sun's gone.
It's all decorations, baubles specifically are 'ornaments,' though in the deep south you'll sometimes hear baubles, but generally only when referencing something as frivolous and stupidly expensive, not in reference to Christmas ornaments.
When I say bauble I’m always referring to one of two things:
A mock scepter carried by a court jester.
A trifling piece of finery; a gewgaw; that which is gay and showy without real value; a cheap, showy plaything.
::: spoiler 😉
:::
In Australia all the ball style things you hang from the tree are definitely baubles, other hanging things are mostly still baubles, candy canes are candy canes and tree toppers are tree toppers varying between stars, angels, and anything else for the non-religious
WHY is it so hypnotic??
The subjects are interesting, the script is tight and packed with insight, and he uses the magic of buying two of them
I now say that damn phrase whenever I buy two of anything. No one gets it :(
For the uninitiated
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Ll6-eGDpimU&list=PLFOQW4J4mT3E4f_Y6O7H4OFq2SXKpWLF2&index=2&pp=iAQB
There's a third video now (A condensed version I think)
https://youtu.be/jHP942Livy0
Nice! Thanks for that
Well now I've gotta see if he's on Nebula.
Sadly no. I wish he was.
We all came here to say this ^
The most annoying thing for me is that i can't find any powder detergent where I live which worked best in his videos, and the compartment is so poorly designed that i frequently find half the detergent pod still in the compartment after the dishes are done.
Well since nobody else is giving away the spoiler on the 6 hours of technology connections videos( didn’t know there was a third now), it’s to fill the little compartment with the dishwasher manufacturers(not the detergent bottles) recommended amount of detergent and to also add a little bit in the bottom of the dishwasher too to help that pre rinse cycle before the main cycle begins.
I love watching his videos but not everybody does. To those people, you’re welcome
Note that this is only true when not using eco mode, which opens the door right away so you can just chuck the tablet in like a caveman. Mine happens to work well enough in eco mode and the little door tends to get stuck on things, so that's what I usually do.
If your (modern) dishwasher isn't cleaning properly in eco mode, either you have very hard water, or you should clean the filter more often.
If you don't remember when the last time you cleaned the filter is, go clean it now.
As Tech Connections points out, knowing what your water is like is crucial.
I use powdered detergent - 1 Tablespoon in the wash door, one in the prewash. This is about 1/3 of what I'm told to use.
I pretty much trust Technology Connections and their advice is to use the machine's smart setting (or whatever it's called on your brand) as the main job of eco is to score well on water and energy usage. Mine has "6th sense" as its second program which is the only program that does a pre-wash
Eco on my machine doesn't dry the dishes well. We have pretty soft water
Ah, mine straight up doesn't have a smart setting, but eco mode works for me so I'm using that, no need to waste water and electricity if it works...
Thank you. I got about 1/3 through, checked to see if it was almost over, and proceeded to close the tab.
obligatory Technology Connections video on dishwashers
Was gonna say, someone's not subscribed to Dishwasher and Christmas Lights Rants.
You forgot about the heat pumps! The man LOVES his heat pumps!
Chest freezers
Really anything that involves a bi-metallic strip.
Anything that the budget says can be bought in pairs.
Through the magic of buying two of them...
They're dope as hell. I got one on my dryer. Shit works fine and uses so much less energy.
For good reason. I don't live in the family home anymore, but last winter when I did move back in for a while, I had approximately half as much work to do keeping the damn place warm, thanks to the heat pump. But I mean sure, I could also just buy one of those fancy newer automatic furnaces to replace the old furnace, and there'd be no work at all! Except that costs at least 5x as much as I paid for a single air to air heat pump that also makes summers bearable.
All this for a relatively modest cost in terms of electricity because yo what the hell, heat pumps are more than 100% efficient when heating. It seems like we hacked physics, honestly.
My parents have a heat pump and they hate it. It can either provide hot water or heating, but not both at the same time. If someone has just had a shower then the heating switches off for hours while it refills the hot water tank. Bullshit in winter.
How big is their accumulation tank? Or did they skimp on getting one?
Additional advice: Clean the dishwasher filter regularly.
the what?
You may want gloves for this one...
Not all of them have one, if yours does and you're just learning about it, I'm very sorry. But you have a truly terrible job ahead of you.
Ooooooh! Do the washing machine filter next!
Assuming you don't have a manual to read: First, start with a freshly -emptied clean dishwasher, no spills in the bottom. Wear rubber gloves if you're easily grossed out. Pull out the bottom drawer. Look in the bottom, you see anything that looks like you could turn it 🛞, with maybe a couple arrows ▶️ ◀️ to line up? Lefty-loosey it, pull it out and take it to the sink, along with any screenlike thingamabobs that come out with it. Run warm water and use hands, sink brush, or scrunge to gently remove all the gunk. You don't have to abuse it, you want it to last the life of the machine. Also feel in the hole, removing any gunk left behind. If the filter pieces come apart easily, do that, but put them back as they were before reinserting into the machine. Fit it back into the hole and righty-tighty to match up the arrows. Don't over-tighten! Go rinse out your sink, dry your hands, and set a monthly notification on your phone. It's much less gross if you do it monthly.
oh that doesn’t sound as bad as i was expecting. thank you for the explanation. i believe i have found the wheel and i will give it a go this coming weekend after i secure some gloves and prepare myself mentally for what’s to come. the reminder thing sounds like a good idea, i have a poor habit of letting some of these home maintenance things slip my mind and the new year might be a good excuse to try to do those things more routinely. we’ll see how it goes.
Even if you find a lot of gunk, remember it's had hot soapy water washing through it every time you ran the dishwasher, killing a lot of the germs at least.
Oh no
Don't forget about the seal ring around the washing machine door!
And the HVAC and cabin air, huge laundry list of them it seems
angry Alec noises
Technology connections would like to know your location
One of the most useful videos on YouTube that EVERYONE in the world should watch.
Still, this video improved my dishwasher-life soooo much.
A cheap liquid also works just fine.
That though his episode about can openers also has had improvements to my life
I watched the video and was not really convinced
For 2. you should know that coating isn't like plastic, it is plastic, and just because it dissolves doesn't mean it breaks down
Powder is objectively cheaper though.
Such a good episode! Or...entry into his YouTube series? Idk what to call it. Just "video" seems wrong.
Powder detergent is much better.
Unfortunately it's getting hard to find at this point
It makes it really easy to add the tablespoon of detergent to the tub for the prewash as well as the needed dose for the dishes (which is really not much unless you have it loaded with greasy plates)
Technology Connections on YouTube has several relevant videos
I’m getting more and more concerned about microplastics coating the dishes afterwards: powdered detergent helps me feel better about that.
The dissolvable packets of a dishwasher detergent are very different than the forever microplastics that people are worried about. Those are designed to be durable and last while the detergent pods are made to dissolve.
That said the powder detergent is great and SO much cheaper per wash. Also you can put some in the prewash for better washing.
I agree that powdered is better and cheaper.
The microplastics issue is more contentious, and while many say it’s bad that it enters the water supply, I suspect the smallest of the particles do not wash away so well
What is the material coating the pods?
It's not the microplastic people are concerned about but it's a plastic that sticks around in the environment and bioaccumulates.
There are properties we're good at designing plastics around like hardness, stiffness, and environmental resistance. But there are properties we're very bad at designing plastics for decomposition, especially alongside niche other traits like water solubility
That makes zero sense. Powder is obviously much better, but not because of microplastics.
Target has a store brand detergent that works well. But I find it's easier to use too much with powder. Compared to gel, It's harder to control the pour, and if you have too much it leaves a residue.
I've never even heard of powdered detergent for the dishwasher. Where does it go in the machine?
the little compartment. and ideally a little just in the machine for the prewash.
as others noted: check the technology connections video(s)
Pretty much every dishwasher has a little door that opens mid cycle.
Plus a little indent for pre-wash detergent
Walmart
If that fails
Amazon, tons of brands for about the same price (yeah yeah I know, Amazon)
I get one with dried goats milk to help with smells edit- this is my laundry soap I am a silly lad sometimes, but the rest applies
I'm confused about what possible reason you could have to say "yeah yeah I know" about Amazon that doesn't apply at least as much to Walmart.
On a related note, I would like to switch to powdered dish detergent after watching the Technology Connections video, but have stuck with liquid because Costco doesn't carry powder.
The Bezos make the Walton's look like good people. That's not saying much for the Walton's. It's saying a lot less for the Bezos. Like grading on a curve and the class was already dogshit but then somebody else came a long and somehow scored negative points on a test.
Internet behaviour. Ime people hate Amazon more by default, but they're both terrible
Yeah Walmart usually has just the one box of Cascade
The one by me (rural) and by my parents (city) both carry Great Value powder, though my local one only carries the smaller box with a pour spout and not the scoop box you can get in the city
I have a friend who does this. I tried explaining to her that she's doing it wrong. She told me I'm wrong and she won't discuss it further. I don't get some people.
Most people hate being wrong, or corrected. They seem to see it as an affront to their very existence, and will often fight back tooth and nail when confronted with any evidence that the things they believe about the world might not be 100% correct.
Source: Any substantial comment thread on any social media platform, ever.
People who are readily willing to admit they're wrong and learn why, and on the flip side be able to correct others in an educational/non-condescending way, are the best people.
I love those people.
Shut up, nerd.
/s jk <3.
She might be right, it depends on the type of the dishwasher.
Maybe she thinks it’s just vibes.
This guy clearly doesn't subscribe to technology connections
.....or has much common sense—what did he think that thing on the door was all about.
Wait till this guy discovers he should probably use rinse aid and salt too
Edit: oh....and he's definitely never cleaned the filter
Guys, guys...guys.....
LET'S TALK ABOUT HEAT PUMPS!!!!! :D
Did you know that most central heaters are over sized and inefficient?
Did you know most residential "car chargers" are just glorified extension cords?
Did you know all but one specific brand of LED Christmas lights fucking suck?
Two brands now! He did it!
Everyone saying to rtfm has not lived in rental housing with the landlord special dish washer. You can only rtfm when you have tm.
But anyway, putting a bit of soap in with your pre wash isn't a bad idea. Maybe not a whole tablet but then again, maybe they never thought to look for powdered soap before. I certainly didnt until I watched the technology connections video.
In this day and age, a manual pdf is only a search away. All you need is the model number which should be easy to find for any appliance.
I bought a new Bosch dishwasher this year, we'd been using our old broken one as a place to dry dishes for about 2 years. Supposedly this new one has wifi and whatnot. Only ever pushed the "start" button. Yes, I work in IT. 🤷🏽♀️
I refuse to buy a dishwasher with any kind of wifi or network connection in it. This is a hill I will die on. I will wash my clothes with a god-damned washboard before I buy a washing machine with wifi in it.
It's pretty obvious where they want to take these things. The clothes washer and dish washer companies look at the printer companies with envy. Why do you think they've been pushing dish and clothes pods so heavily? Eventually your washing machine or dishwasher will not work off of generic powder or liquid at all. Instead it will only use "cartridges," plastic boxes maybe the size of 1-lb box of butter. Such a thing would have enough detergent to supply a dishwasher or washing machine for many months. But if they really want to pull the printer game, they need the devices to be wifi enabled so they can let them phone home to keep the DRM working properly.
They are trying to turn dishwashers and clothes washers into printers. That is the ultimate goal of connecting these devices to the net.
I would argue that your career has given you the wisdom to understand how the phrase "just because you can, doesn't mean you should" applies to technology. So you just instinctively know that a dishwasher doesn't need a network stack to do the job it was built for. And adding one is creating a lot more complexity for very demising returns.
Wait until he discovers that you can clean the filters at the bottom and get things even cleaner.
Just RTFM?
I read somewhere that around ⅓ of people (at least in my country) are effectively illiterate. They can read but they can’t really understand what they read. They can’t solve logical tasks and would fail for example to take medication according to written instruction. It does explain a lot.
Is your country the USA?
This is a way broader phenomenon than just the US, though granted the US educational system might skew things a bit in a negative direction versus most other supposedly "Developed" Nations.
IMHO, in general very few people have to really think things through in their life or work and most people can live life in what's pretty much an auto-pilot of habits most of which were picked up in childhood, teen and early adult years, and such people simply don't have any "training" on figuring complex things out by themselves and will have trouble understanding complex subjects.
Further, the instructions for advanced domain stuff (for example Medicine and some kinds of Tech) are often riddled with domain specific language that people without a broader vocabulary won't understand.
I call all the autopilot people "Listers" aka, they need a list of steps. If anything happens that the steps do not account for, they get stuck and cannot proceed.
I work in IT support and the number of times I've gotten a call from a lister who hit a random, benign dialog during a routine process, called me, and I only clicked "ok" to resolve the concern.... Well, it's too damn high.
The fact that we don't teach people critical thinking and problem solving in standard (and generally mandatory) education, is baffling to me. Education has become a list of things to memorize in order to pass.
Don’t get started on UI updates to their most used programs.
I think that's less due to low intelligence or poor education it's just being completely out of their depth. I could probably do a car engine rebuild if I had perfect instructions that tell me EXACTLY what to do (and the right tools). But as soon as I got off track I'd be pretty clueless.
I've worked with sysadmins all over the world and I agree it's not just a US problem. Lots of people will remember the exact sequence of steps to accomplish a task, but when something goes wrong they don't know how to read what's on screen and adapt to it.
That's why dictionary exists.
If you've ever tried to read a foreign language book when your knowledge of the language is merely basic and tried to use a dictionary to solve the problem of many words being unknown, you'll know how frustrating that becomes and fast - one actually learns faster at the beginning by just keeping on reading even if not understanding a lot of things.
Further some of the "words" are often not words but acronyms, so not likely to be in a dictionary, plus a lot of domain specific words aren't in general dictionaries either (good luck finding the names of certain chemical chains and their properties in a general dictionary when trying to understand the booklet in a box of medicine).
Last but not least often even the explanations for some words require understanding of some concepts that people do not understand (most people probably know what "analgesic" is, but how many know what "antipyretic" - a not to far away concept given how many common medicines have both - is?).
Things which are supposed to be simple can turn into veritable dives down the rabbit hole to fully understand for those outside that expert domain if they were not simplified for ease of access to the general population, so it's hardly surprising if many people just chose to blindly use something as advised without even trying to understand it (which, let's be honest, it's probably the correct way for most people to used things like for example medicine if the source of the advice is a medical doctor).
Don't get me wrong: people should be more curious and more often trying and figure things out beyond the merely "how to use". At the same time, the information that comes with from expert domains in things targeted at non-experts should be as much as possible reduced to common language (though even that is a balance, since a ton of things required several layers of explanation to fully explain to non-experts).
There are dictionaries for this too.
Yes and no. I used to do this, but when I sat down with dictionaries and translated one giant chapter of fanfic without skipping unknown words and preserving all jokes, I greatly improved my understanding of foreign language.
Many people don't even have RTFM skill, so they can't follow advises they didn't read.
If you don't, then expert domain becomes common language. How many people don't know what voltage is?
Try to open wikipedia article for something very common. Soon you will end up reading 5 articles about scientific disciplines and 6 articles about mathematical fields.
It's funny because i learned 6 foreign languages, 2 of which to fluent level and another 2 to good level (and the other 2 to "I manage to get away with it" level ;)), and the approach of using of a dictionary to learn the meaning of the words which I tried at first didn't work at all well (it was slower and way more frustrating) and what did work best was just exposing myself to the language (in two different ways for two different languages, one by just consuming media of that language whilst the other by living in a country were people spoke the language) and going along with the flow without worrying about the words I didn't know, so quite a different experience from that.
Anyways, my point isn't that most people can't dig down on things by for example going into Wikipedia or that I wouldn't prefer if they did, it's that most people either don't have the time or the inclination to do so, and expecting them to be different is denying human nature.
In my experience with explaining expert domains to non-experts, you have to try and meet them in the middle, which will pull more people in to try and understand it that merely standing fast on my side of the domain language barrier and demand that the climb that mountain to get to me.
That said, some people will never even try, no matter how much effort you put in making it easy for them, and sometimes it's not even stupidity (which, as something one is born with, it's kinda excusable, IMHO), it's just laziness.
Which other country believes Earth is Flat?
That's a tiny minority of people and an ultra-specific belief.
I would say that the prevalence of the belief in fairy stories being real (aka Religions, Cults and so on) would be a pretty good indication of just how common and widely spread the Comprehension Handicapped are all over the World.
I think the modern flat earth idea started in the UK but I don't actually know of anyone who believes it, it's still very much a "village idiot" thing.
Your username 🥺
For the love of God, and all that is holy...
The ones I know have been born-agains.
Which kinda tracks.
If believing one thing with every fibre of your being is your new foundation stone, dismissing another belief that doesn't contradict your first one can become tricky.
Even of the literate people, far too few bother reading instructions. People who can read and interpret law texts, but they still click away a pop-up unread when setting up a new phone for example. The only people who I've only ever had a good experience with when it came to diligently reading and following instructions + escalating the problem when the instructions were unclear, were professional accountants.
Call communists, they are good at illiteracy elimination.
A long time ago, as I was getting ready to get dinner with a friend. I asked her if she could start my dishwasher. It was all loaded and just needed the detergent which was under the sink...well, we got back and the kitchen was flooded and filled with suds and bubbles. Turned out she used the dish soap next to the sink instead of the detergent. Cleaned it up, laughed, and was reminded of the different experiences we all have from people who grow up in more wealthy households.
I ran out of dishwasher detergent one time. I KNEW you can't use regular soap, but I said if I just use a tiny amount, I'll rewash later if I have to. It can't be THAT bad.
No.
No amount is ever the right amount other than none.
Same experience.
I almost always have two boxes of washing powder, when one goes empty I can replace it while using the other. I usually go shopping more often than I use a box of detergent
"Two is one, one is none."
It applies to essential household commodities just like it does computer backups.
It's not just wealthy people who don't load their own dishwashers. People who don't own dishwashers are used to manually doing the dishes.
[x] I'm in this picture and I do not like it.
*Cries in poor while manually doing the dishes*
That's super true! I've been renting for so long that it's one of those conveniences that I love having, but I can get by totally okay without one (currently don't have one). Growing up, chores were just normal things, but I meant so many people who never had to do them, and they had a lot of household experiences to gain later in life!
Also people may live with their parents and have never used the dishwasher that they do have, or perhaps only loaded or unloaded it, never having run it
I did this! So many bubbles. There was a bunch of water too. On the bright side I had very clean linoleum till everything dried up, then the corners in some spots started to curl up at the edges.
Funny learning experience.
I also did this as adult when I got my first dishwasher
This is the level of understanding I'd expect from someone who thinks vibes affect modern appliances.
And next we'll tell you what the little hatch labeled "rinse aid" is for.
In other news, major manufacturers are starting to ship appliances now without including any printed instructions. I can see that it's just as well; it's clear that nobody would read them anyway.
I do. And more importantly, I judge others by whether they do or not. Any manufacturer who doesn't ship a manual will get permabanned by me.
Well, no GE or Whirlpool for you anymore, then.
Meanwhile, here I am still lamenting that they no longer come with circuit diagrams.
Surprisingly, a lot of them do. Check behind the toe kick or in a lot of machines, inside the control panel cover.
Really cheap appliances that are still entirely electromechanical might come with complete schematics, but I've yet to encounter an electronic one that does (where "complete" means "including the details of the PCB, not just treating it as a black-box component").
You'll never find a schematic of the PCB because the manufacturer not only treats it as a black box, but it will also be incessantly revised mid-production run by their OEM's to cut costs every time a component comes out that's 2 cents cheaper.
I understand that, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.
yes, please, stick a QR code on it which leads to the manual in a PDF format. Why do I get a book in 20 languages instead? What century is this?
My previous diswasher had the compartment just for powdered detergent. Tablets were supposed to go directly into the dishwasher, per the manual. So the approach works with some machines.
Mix both worlds. Like I have learned from a very investigative YT video. He tested and measured dishwashing in many different ways, and came to the result that a) tablet in that place in the door is the thing to do, but also b) a bit of dishwasher powder into the little compartment right next to it under the flap. This is for the first cleaning stage, and since we use this trick, our dishwasher runtime (which is dynamically depending on cleanlyness of the dishes) has gone down by about 20 minutes.
Are you referring to Technology Connections video on dish washers? This video
If so, it’s a bad summary. The video advocates against tablets
because they don't do prewash, if you're putting a tablet in main wash and powder in prewash, should be fine.
Nope, the one I've seen is way older than just six months.
Obviously.
how was that obvious? do you know how much information is on YouTube with 29 different ways to do something?
Tongue in cheek
Yeah exactly, that guy above you is a fucking idiot who brought nothing to the discussion. I'd hate to be related to them, or even use the same brand of cigarettes
How does a machine know whether the dishes in it are clean?
Ask the machine, I don't know, but it works.
I'm always baffled about people looking at things like this compartment and don't think it has any kind of significance whatsoever.
Like do they think it's just put there fore giggles? How uninterested in the world around you can you be?
It drives me nuts when i encounter people like this.
My 15 year old dishwasher has a hanging basket for tablets... It also has your standard drawer for tablets / powders / liquids.
The impression it's given me is, you do you; I'll spin the hot water and give it my best.
Not quite fair, since once you know it's a compartment it's obvious that it's for something, but with all the sensors and access panels appliances have that are not user serviceable it's not that surprising that there could be a plastic panel in the door of your dishwasher that appeared to do nothing.
Really the only thing that might raise an eyebrow is that it is in a door that gets wet so limiting extra things like that would be good, but perfectly reasonable to assume it was for some type of sensor if you didn't notice the little latch for the door.
There's a little protrusion in the base to check the height of the water, have you ever closely examined that to see if it says 'put bleach in here' or something?
but the door usually snaps and stays open after wasching, so it's clear that you cand put something in there
We had a new washing machine that for the first two washes smelled really bad and made a screeching noise as well. Just before sending it back I noticed that we forgot to remove the styrofoam around the drum..
They do come with a manual. (Says the guy who has never read his dishwasher’s manual.)
Houses typically include the appliances, so unless you buy from one of those rare boomer types that filed everything away, you probably don't have it. I guess you could search it online, now I'm typing this out...
Or maybe you buy a house and later renovate the kitchen, adding in a brand new dishwasher because there never was one to begin with.
Or maybe you buy a new development and it either has no kitchen appliances or furniture, or it has brand new appliances so the manuals and other documents are kept.
Lots of ways to still have the manual. Where I live, the cost of a new development is maybe 20-30% more per unit of area than a condo in a 40-60 year old commie block, but they look way nicer inside and out and they keep heat way better, which is important when you get really damn cold winters. Plus you can get better loan terms if it's certified C energy class or above usually. For some banks it has to be A. Downside is you have to wait while they build the damn thing.
Or maybe like me, buy a house that had a dishwasher, pull it out and throw it away because you're a single man.
Get married wife wants a dishwasher, buy a new one go looking for the manual one day and find the original dishwasher manual in the boomer folder of things left behind by the previous owner
You should get connected with the guy who has the dishwasher but no manual left by the previous owner, maybe it's the same model
Every home I toured when I was buying had a manual stack laid out for the appliances.
I thought it was weird.
Now I own a home and when I get an appliance I just toss the manual on the stack.
I've never had a landlord leave me manuals to my appliances
You can probably find it on the Internet.
I can only imagine what his dryer vent like.
Vent?
Oh god, Roger had okra farts again
I read that it's an American thing. Americans have dryer vents in the house that need to be regularly cleaned or they are a fire risk, while the rest of the world has a dryer lint compartment in the dryer, that also needs to be regularly cleaned or it's a fire risk. FYI so that nobody gets butthurt: I don't think either of this solution is better or worse, they are just different. This is no "muuuh America Bad Europe Good" comment.
Notable exception: dry/wash combos, they just rinse out the dryer lint with the next wash cycle
Edit: And both make sense respectively. Since in the US you mostly build with drywall, it's cheap and easy to add a vent for the dryer. In other parts of the world where they build concrete walls, it's not so easy, so if you choose to move your dryer room in the future it would be a pain in the ass when the dryer needs to be connected to a vent. So it's much more useful to collect the lint and water in the dryer than to vent it out of your building
I live in North America.
My dryer has a lint trap.
My vent line needs to be cleaned regularly to clear lint.
Lint traps are not 100% effective and if you haven't checked your dryer vent for lint recently, you should. If the heat from the dryer builds up enough, the lint can very easily start a fire.
Be safe out there folks.
Do you guys not vent your air externally?
Do you just vent the wet air back into the home?
If not you should get your dryer vent cleaned, your lint trap (which we have in ours also … ) is a first stage filter and does not catch everything.
Hope this helps you not burn your house down!
I had a dryer for a while that vented into the room. It didn't just spew damp air though. There was a condenser and collector tank for water that had to be emptied between runs.
My dryer is connected to the water drainage pipe. Just like the washing machine. 1
Neither. The dryer either collects the water or it is connected to the sewage and dumps the collected water.
My mom told me an embarrassing story about how my dad once used regular old dish soap apparently it didnt end well and suds got everywhere. At least this person knew to use the tablets.
Probably overdosed, I have successfully used dish soap when I ran out of tabs on a Sunday.
why I always read the manual like 2 or 3 times
It’s a shame that the dishwasher the landlord installed has a shitty soap compartment that sometimes failed to open during the wash. When I tried to take it apart to see what the issue was, I couldn’t get it back in. So now I just chuck the puck in.
My parents were really adamant about not leaving any food on plates, so it really doesn’t make a difference to me.
Same. If I use the compartment it has like a 50% success rate. So I Chuck it in and it works well enough
I can't wait until they discover rinse aid. If your dishes still look dirty no matter how many cycles you run the machine for, then you probably should have refilled the dispenser ages ago.
You'd be surprised at how many people are tech-illiterate & end up blaming technology
Its not that uncommon that some people don't know how to use every day stuff correct and use them wrong. One thing I've noticed that a lot of people use wrong are thermostatic radiator valves. Its not a simple valve and the numbers don't indicate on how far open the valve is, its a temperature setting. I've often told people to not set it to 5 and rather set the target temperature and 3 is about 20°C, so room temperature. At work all engineers don't get it and we stupid little IT guys with a smaller degree get it right.
To be fair, they aren't that accurate. Its pure mechanical and the sensing happens in the thermostat but when it closes the valve, the radiator is still full of hot water. You need to find the correct setting for your room and so on. With electric ones, you can fiddle with the settings, to be more accurate.
Also, they measure right next to the heat source and the markings can't compensate for better or worse insulation. It makes (almost) no sense to put temperature markings on them.
There are people going around TikTok and instagram suggesting you should be chucking your dish detergent in the bottom of the dishwasher and skip the little compartment.
Some people just want to watch the world burn. And everyone wants to encourage them.
For those who don't know, that wastes the detergent if the dishwasher has a prewash cycle, which most do (eco cycles are the most likely to not have a prewash)
what's a tiktok
I distinctly remember a scene in Sesame Street where Big Bird telling to always read the manual.
The manual:
Fuck it, do both; clean dishes
Dawn dishwasher soap would get hard reading your comment.
yes, double your consumption for no reason
Just use powder. Put some in the compartment and a little into the basin/on the door. Now your pre-wash cycle is more effective than ever! Also, powder is cheaper most of the time. And also convenient - no individually wrapped pods!
It's what you're supposed to do though, you need soap for the prewash otherwise it does nothing.
Don't do it with pods though that's an insane amount of waste
The pods themselves are a waste. Just get liquid or powder detergent. It's cheaper and does the job just as well (and possibly even better depending on the dishwasher)
True, I'm thinking about the powder or liquid
Does nothing is a bit of an overstatement - I agree that it's working non-optimally without detergent in the prewash-cycle.
Most people use too much detergent. Put the right amount in the wash and pre-wash, it's probably less than what they used before, and the dishes are cleaner. Too much detergent leaves powdery residue.
That’s what you’re supposed to do!
The Technology Connections content everybody is talking about covers it. The main wash’s detergent goes into the little compartment, which is closed, then a little extra goes on top to help with the pre-rinse.
That is the dumbest thing about pods. If you want to use your dishwasher “correctly” with detergent in both the pre-rinse and the main wash cycle, you need to use two pods for one load of dishes!
Either that or open & divide the pods I guess, but then you aren’t really using “pods” are you, lol.
My parents insist that it works the same either way despite me explaining that there is a pretty wash rinse. But because they put the powder or tablet in while the little compartment is still wet, the detergent occasionally doesn't release properly.
So pretty
RTFM
Just RTM
Then RATM
FYIWDWYTM
Fucking dishwasher!
What the heck did he think the little compartment was for?
Storing spare change?
Typical Reddit user in 2024.
All the idiot kids we used to make fun of over on /r/SummerReddit are adults now, and the main demographic of the website.
I've been using the soap compartment for years, I only recently just started chucking the packet into the silverware holder because I've heard that might be better (the little compartment might open too late and be less effective). I'm not totally convinced OP was doing a worse job accidentally
Maybe it depends on your model(like it was poorly designed or something), but in general the soap compartment should deploy precisely when it needs to. But, hey, if it's working for you then who am I to say otherwise
I am currently on the other side - my soap compartment broke, and so I have to throw the packet in the bottom of my washer. It works... okay. The problem is, most of the soap goes out with the pre-rinse. So I often have dishes that I have to re-wash by hand now, versus never having to do that before. I dream of the day where I fix my soap dispenser.
I've switched from using the little door to just chucking the tablet in the bottom. Works just as well, if not better.
If it works for you go ahead... but something is wrong with your dishwasher or you're using the wrong mode (eco) then. This is absolutely not the correct way to use a dishwasher.
The pre-wash cycle is the shortest cycle and by using all of your soap in the beginning you are spending the majority of the wash cycle without soap.
I came here to suggest people not use the pods for the exact reason you mention. My dishwasher went from mediocre to pretty good by switching to gel instead of the packs.
My wife refuses to load the dishwasher because to her she "doesn't do it right" or "don't want to fight with it"
So I get OP.
I've had to teach people how to mop a floor, and how you should sweep first, it's just deer in headlights when explaining it. People just don't go outta their lane to learn new things or fix things that don't work right.
MIL does this on purpose. Fucking grinds my gears - I gave up on preaching that there is a reason for that little closed compartment.
She’s not wrong to put some for the pre-rinse. Just need some in the compartment for after the pre-rinse cycle too.
My dishwasher was caked in that white film that denotes very hard water when I got it. Came with the house. Literally did not clean anything put in it. Found some stuff online called Afresh. Comes in tablet form. Tossed one into the machine ran an empty cycle and now it works like it should
I think you're talking about lime scale.
I'm pretty sure the afresh just descaled your dishwasher.
Many dishwashers have a dedicated spot for a "rinse aid" like jet dry, and I'm pretty sure that is just a prevention method for this exact problem.
IDK, I'm not a scientist or anything.
I'm not a scientist either, but from what I remember from reading the manual; rinse aid helps with drying the dishes, makes it so that water don't stick to them as well. Added dishwasher salt is what helps with lime scale. My dishwasher has a separate salt container, and I then tell the dishwasher how hard my water is and it will add the appropriate amount of salt to the water.
Feel free to correct me if I got it backwards.
I couldn't possibly correct you because I don't know enough to know what I'm doing myself.
Since neither of us are scientists, we might have to patiently wait for someone to come along who is, that can straighten out facts here.
Rinse aid is what we call a surfactant. It disrupts the surface tension of water, which in turn lessens its ability to cling to surfaces.
You know how when you get a smooth surface of glass or plastic wet, there will be a lot of beads of water that just cling there and don't go anywhere? Unless they grow big enough to start finally running down the side? That's surface tension in action. Adding the rinse aid will reduce water's ability to bead up like this on dishes. Instead, water will be more likely to run down the surface in unbroken sheets instead of beading up.
The primary intent is that more water will simply drip off the dishes due to gravity. This does make dishes come out dryer after a drying cycle, and/or decreases the time the drying cycle takes or the energy it requires to get the same effect. But the main reason wanting water to drip off of dishes is to prevent limescale on them.
When water evaporates, only the water disappears into the air. Anything that was dissolved in that water gets left behind. If your water is hard, that will mean there's a bunch of calcites that will stay behind as a whitish powder called limescale. So if you wash dishes with hard water, let the rinse water stay beaded up on them, and dry it out via only evaporation, you get some limescale buildup on them in the form of so-called "water spots".
If instead you add rinse aid, more of the water will drip off the dishes, taking all the dissolved calcites with it. Less water has to evaporate, fewer calcites are left behind on the dishes, so less limescale and fewer water spots. Thus why many brands of the stuff show photos of crystal-clear glass on the box. A water-spotted glass will be cloudy and speckled. Rinse-aided glass will--supposedly, anyway--be clearer.
Unfortunately the little door on my dishwasher sticks and won’t open 99% of the time so I have no choice but to chuck the pod in the bottom. It sucks, but my dishwasher works well in every other way and my dishes are clean enough so I’m not spending money on a new one until some other part of it breaks.
If you're around, wait some minutes and throw it in after it would have opened.
Who’s got time for that? ROFL
Almost everyone. Not like you'd have to stand next to it. Walk by, throw some detergent in.
Mine does that too. I have learned to put smaller things in the front and larger things (like upright plates) at the back and it seems to be working well.
I wish it was that easy, but mine slides vertically rather than flipping out so there’s nothing blocking it from opening. It seems to be the internal mechanism that isn’t doing its job.
A Bosch, huh? My dishwasher's detergent dispenser is identical, and for me it works fine.
I don't think your problem is that it works poorly as designed; I think your problem is that it's straight-up broken and needs to be repaired.
Mine has that damn sliding mechanism too. What I found is that the track it slides on can get gummed up with detergent and get stuck. I really wish it had the swing door instead!
Also the dishwasher’s racks already have parts of the coating on them broken and the metal inside is rusting. Really annoying!
Thanks for adding to my list of features to avoid!
I also put laundry pods in the little compartment even though they say to just toss them into the thing where the clothes go. I do this because
The pre-rinse cycle will just flush out all the detergent before the actual cleaning cycle
The plastic shit that dissolves to release the detergent was getting all over my clothes and fucking shit up doing it the way the package instructs you.
One of my former room mates had the same problem with the washing machine. They were two compartments and you put the main detergent in the smaller one. In practice it didn't make much of a difference, but still.
Assuming the other one is for fabric softener, the clothes got agitated with plain water, then soap added during the final rinse. But if you ask my 90 year old uncle, laundry soap is a capitalist scam anyway (their pillow cases feel like they are made of old fashioned oil cloth).
That's a good point, if he's closing it every time it might be some kind of odd blindspot in processing, but still not stupid or incurious.
The dishwasher we had when I grew up had a broken soap compartment, it wouldn't stay closed so we would just put the soap in it and shut the door, the soap would spill all over the insides, but everything was clean when it was done.
I wash by hand. Please convince me to use a dishwasher?
If it gets stuff clean, you aren't really using it wrong.
But... it didn't.
There are drain cycles. You just drained away the soap in the prewash and now there's no soap for the actual wash.
So not only was he an idiot about the soap, he also didn't scrape or rinse his dishes before putting them in the dishwasher. Awesome.
Only remove solid chunks, you don't need to rinse them before hand. That's exactly what the dishwasher does in its first washing cycle (the one without the soap) and doing it by hand only wastes a lot more water.
Not if you're stuck with a shitty and/or old dishwasher like most apartments and older homes have. Growing up in the 80s/90s with a brand new house we still had to scrape/rinse the crap off if we didn't want to find crud in the bowls and such. All y'all downvoters are some privileged mofos.
Some modern dishwashers don't need a pre-rinse (and are actually more effective if the dishes aren't rinsed first due to how fats work). See this video from Consumer Reports or search dishwasher rinse first.
I mean, if you wash the dishes before they go in the dishwasher I guess they come out clean, but to me the point of a dishwasher is to do a more efficient job of it than I can. I scrape but do not rinse, because rinsing then washing is using more water, not less.
Meanwhile, I know people that should just not use a dishwasher bcz they can't load it properly. Honestly, dishwashers are bloody useless. Washing by hand is faster and cheaper.
The trick to having the dishwasher work is to run the tap on the sink until the water is hot. Using powder or liquid dish detergent instead of those sub-optimal expensive tablets also helps, as does leaving sauces on some of the dishes or cookware (only scraping off solid chunks of food)
Even cheap dishwashers clean very well (assuming no clogged filters or mechanical faults) if you follow the above steps.
Dishwashers may not be as fast as going by hand, but the idea is that you free up time requiring active attention by using the appliance. Dishwashers also use much less water for a cycle than 99% of hand washing setups.
lol