I love that there are people who will go into this much detail on stuff. It's really cool that they do. But the whole thing is that if you follow some sequence of steps, powder will clean as well as or better than pods for a third the cost. All right, this isn't a significant portion of my expenses so I'll pay the 3x cost since my dishes come out clean anyway.
I wish the description of the video was like an abstract.
There's more to the video than just that. For example: you should run your hot water tap before turning on your dishwasher, and you should experiment with the dishwasher settings, because they can make a big difference.
My kids would routinely put in too much powder, which would gunk up the dispensing mechanism, requiring my time and effort to clean it out and fix it. Eventually the dispenser broke entirely and had to be replaced. We since switched to pods and haven't had any problems with the dispenser. The pods are worth every extra cent.
Miele has home dishwashers that do this now. But like all things consumer, it's a proprietary system that's designed to keep you locked into a subscription relationship with the company.
I have one of these. The detergent gizmo is a hard plastic shell with an interesting shape, powdered detergent inside, and a plastic film cover that looks like it’s heat-sealed on. It contains no electronics whatsoever. You can refill it, and the only limitation is that it’s kind of awkward to open, fill, and re-seal. The easiest way IMO is to cut a large flap in the hard plastic on the sides, then tape it down after refilling. It works fine.
Also, the Miele powdered detergent, in my personal opinion, sucks. And it leaves some residue behind. Yuck.
True for their dishwashers. But to their credit, Miele's washing machines actually come with two additional cassettes that you can fill with your (liquid) detergent of choice. You don't have to use Miele's proprietary ones.
PowerDisk? As long as you load salt and rinse aid, it works like a charm. As you said, if you want to save a bit of money, you can 3D print a replacement. But they last long enough that I don’t mind the cost.
My Samsung bespoke combo washer dryer has that feature. It uses less detergent than we are used to so my wife uses pods, but I think this is better un general since the clothes come out clean even if they don’t smell like detergent. So not only do I not need to load detergent, I don’t need to transfer to the dryer. Still have to load sanitizer in unfortunately.
I had that on a GE Profile from I think 1999 if I remember right. It was pretty nice. I think it's still a feature on some of them.
That dishwasher was great and lasted over 20 years. The previous owners had definitely abused it and never cleaned it. I repaired it and had about the best dishwasher for a few more years. Eventually the main logic board went out (can't blame it too much, had electrical issues that killed a few things) and a replacement board was going to cost a few hundred dollars in parts even from questionable third party sellers. Seemed to be a good bit to sink on what was a highly abused >20 year old washing machine at the time.
as someone who's gone down the rabbit hole of dishwasher home repair, I've created more problems than I've solved. I agree that maintenance is important, but when you get into replacing the seals and gaskets that can result in water flooding into your kitchen, i decided recently to draw a line. I'm now the proud owner of some fancy leak detection / moisture detection IOS products as a result. (and yes I'm aware there are better, low tech solutions like the "frog" on the market, but I chose to torture myself instead)
He says that having the ability to tailor the amount of powder for the size of the load is one of the selling points of powder. But I'm guessing most people would much rather waste the few cents of savings in exchange for not needing to think about their dishes even that tiny bit extra.
My process is to use cheap Walmart powder for prewash and Kirkland pods in the dispenser. Avoids any over filling issues.
I used to just use the Kirkland pods and they worked fine too. The reason I started using powder in prewash is to get any loose fat dissolved so that it doesn’t clog over a period of time, not sure if that’s a valid concern. And yes, I do run hot water before starting the dishwasher.
My issue is the pods fail to dissolve ~5% of the time and leave a gunk that clogs the dispenser which again requires time and effort to clean. I'm convinced by the video to try powder again but I've had the filming issue with almost every powder I've tried. So, we'll see what happens...
While I’m sure dismissing the video is easy for someone with a dishwasher that already works fine with pods, having worked through all four(?) of those dishwasher videos, I have finally made an enzymatic powder work after months of effort when pods did not help.
Heavy Duty + Hot Wash doesn’t usually work. Doesn’t finish washing.
Heavy Duty + Sani Rinse doesn’t usually work. Weird residue issues for entire top rack.
Heavy Duty + Hot + Sani doesn’t work. Both of the above issues at once!
But, as it turns out —
Normal + Hot + Sani does work, perfectly, repeatedly.
The takeaway from the latest video for me is that the options aren’t Boolean on/off flags for different cycle-specific parameters, the cheap U.S. rental dishwasher comprehensively alters the entire program based on which total set of options are selected in non-intuitive ways.
So I have to use Normal not Heavy, Hot Wash and Sani-Rinse, or my wash cycle doesn’t wash properly. Which is absurd and obnoxious, but TIL, and suddenly I’ve had two consecutive loads of dishes come out clean for the first time in a year of trying.
No, the pods didn’t work either, as it turns out my dishwasher doesn’t reach the “enzymatic cleaning” temperatures off my rental’s barely-120F water using Hot Wash alone. No, the filter isn’t dirty. Yes, it drains fine. Yes, I’ve run cleaning cycles with several cleaning powders. Yes, run the tap to hot. Etc etc.
TLDR for the entire video: If your dishwasher isn’t cleaning fully, even if you use maximum powder or pods or cleaning it, make sure you’ve tried counterintuitive combinations with Light/Normal instead of Heavy, or Sani Rinse to improve the wash cycle, etc. Ruling out unlikely combos because they seem illogical may prevent you from finding a working set. (And if you’re using a powder formulated by anyone who sells colorful dishwasher pods, it’s probably designed to be less effective than the powder in their pods.)
It's interesting - YouTube does show AI summaries now - here's the one for this video:
This video explores dishwasher detergent, focusing on a new powder formulation. The creator details the science behind effective dishwashing, including pre-wash cycles and water temperature. Independent testing results comparing the new powder to leading pods are revealed.
I've noticed that they all seem to not give away too much so you still have to watch the video to get the conclusion. It makes sense why they do this for creators, but I do agree it would be awesome to just read the conclusion on many of these.
Hah! I had watched this just last night. I have a Fisher & Paykel Dishdrawer so this prompted me to check the instruction manual and sure enough, I had been putting Rinse Aid in the pre-wash area. I don't even really know what Rinse Aid is honestly but it's fun having some things be a black box. Turns out the correct spot is turning a knob, pulling it out and pouring it down a hole containing a glowing red light. I had assumed there was just some sort of circuitry down there and doing so would be a horrible idea. Thanks Technology Connections!
It's a volatile surfactant. Thus, it allows water to drip off your dishes before drying, so you don't get spots, but also doesn't produce a residue of its own.
I wouldn’t use rinse aid. It’s not good for you - damages your gut and may contain dioxane byproducts. I also would avoid detergents with ethoxylated alcohols (AEs).
What to look for is any powder or powder-filled pod with a) no AEs and b) does contain amylase and protease , two food-eating enzymes that are often omitted for who knows why.
We absolutely need rinse aid here, even with a water softener. But we make our own with ethanol and citric acid. For us works just as well as the pricey stuff and costs us…. A large bottom shelf bottle of vodka (sorry, don’t drink and don’t buy this enough to remember) and about $0.50 in citric acid will last me 6 months.
Household usage levels are probably fine [1]. That being said, we don't use rinse aid and I don't see any issues with glasses. I can see how it could be a problem in areas with harder water.
The guy in the video disagrees with you. From his other video, 23 mins in,
> next, rinse aids. use them. this isn't a scam.
I'll trust the dishwasher expert until there's some proper citations.
You have to realize that every time you sip a glass or eat off a surface that's provided by a commercial entity, you're getting items that have come in contact with industrial appliances that dispense rinse aid.
I have a difficult time believing that something so ubiquitous is as harmful as you claim, but I'm open to being convinced.
The creator argues that most dishwashers are designed to use a pre-wash dose and a main wash dose of detergent, a fundamental often ignored by single-dose pods, and presents independent ASTM testing confirming the new powder matches or exceeds the performance of a leading premium pod. The video also features a detailed demonstration using temperature logging and peanut butter to stress the importance of purging cold water from the hot water supply line before running a dishwasher, particularly in North America, to ensure the water reaches the optimal enzymatic temperature needed for effective cleaning. This is further reinforced by showing how adding pre-wash detergent dramatically improves the initial cleaning phase, especially with fats and oils.
This has been his stance for a long time. He has a lot of dishwasher videos for some reason!
One thing I can't get a good answer to is whether the "prewash" step is universally the case or not. I have a good Bosch dishwasher and there's no compartment for a bit of pre-wash detergent. I don't even know if my dishwasher cycle has a pre-wash step. I would assume the dishwasher manufacturer knows what's best.
The owner's manual gives advice about not pre-rinsing the dishes because the food bits actually help the wash cycle, so I'm wondering if it works differently from the two-step process in this video.
What your manual says is common to most dishwashers.
You can tell if your dishwasher has a pre-wash cycle if it does a short run, then you hear it draining, and then it does a longer full run. I expect it probably does.
Also, you can always add a bit of detergent to the main compartment of the dishwasher for prewash. The normal detergent compartment has a lid so the the detergent stays dry until the main wash cycle, and most prewash compartments are just an open tray.
Come to think of it, if there is a latching door on the detergent tray, your dishwasher definitely has a prewash cycle, or else they’d skip the door entirely
> Come to think of it, if there is a latching door on the detergent tray, your dishwasher definitely has a prewash cycle, or else they’d skip the door entirely
Alec also mentions this briefly in the linked video; if manufacturers could avoid the cost of a latching mechanism, they absolutely would. Its presence means a pre-wash cycle exists.
My GE seems to skip the prewash cycle on the default setting for whatever reason. It does use a prewash on its "heavy duty" cycle though. Incidentally "heavy duty" also works infinitely better, with no more damage done to my dishes. YMMV of course.
The owners manual for my Bosch 500 says prewash detergent is not necessary. But it does have a prewash cycle as I can hear it draining before the main wash.
Note: This dishwasher provides the optimum cleaning performance without the use of a prewash detergent and further enhances our standards of sustainability and efficiency.
I have a Bosch as well, i sprinkle a bit of powder on the door. It has a pre-wash run which goes quick.
The manual is likely referring to not hand rinsing dishes before loading them which was very common 30 or 40 years ago. I had to train my Mother to stop doing that.
his dishwasher detergent videos are a good example of an "improved" product being more expensive and less effective (like disposable razors).
With better understanding you can achieve far better results. I no longer rinse or even scrape dishes. with the right approach my dishwasher performance has been stellar. The user manual also includes proper tuning to local water hardness levels.
Poor dishwashing also discourages people from cooking at home, which leads to less healthful diets. So it's an important thing to get right.
I find his videos to have quite a bit of hand waving and poor methodology together with being overly verbose.
For example, he kept on saying that pods are not better in previous videos, but in the study he presented in this video, it showed that pods are performing significantly better than powders in every category. The study (which was not linked and I couldn't find it) was sponsored by a powder maker which the video recommends, but even this study showed just on par results with pods.
He does mention that a number of manufacturers aren’t making powders at all anymore, and also suspects out loud that they just aren’t trying with their powder detergents anymore, or are not bothering to apply improvements to their formulae to the powder form because manufacturers would rather sell the powders anyway.
He also specifically calls out Great Value brand powder as one he finds to be consistently on par with pod performance
He said a lot of things that are not backed up by the study he shared but didn't link, where powders clearly underperform pods.
At the end of the day, it'd have been much better for this community if we could have just gained access to a proper study comparing different cleaning options and learn from it instead of watching a 40 minutes video that doesn't say much and doesn't link to the study which is briefly mentioned there.
That has not been my experience with pods. When we switched back to powder the difference was night and day. Even my husband who used to swear by pods eventually gave in and agreed powder is much better. It is a bit fiddly yes but powder getting 99.9% of our dishes getting cleaned on the first run sealed the deal for us -- previously we were always having to add dishes to the next run or falling back to doing it manually. What makes it even more intersting is that even the cheapest powder beats every brand of pods etc we've tried. And we have a shitty cheap dishwasher that came standard with our new build house.
I have a Miele dishwasher. Not only is there no place to put prewash powder, but I can hear the little door for the detergent pop open like 2 minutes into the cycle when on the default program.
This dishwasher also came with a box of Miele pods (and they encourage you to buy more). I think it's designed first and foremost to not use powder.
Pods have become so ubiquitous that many companies ditched that powder compartment altogether. But you don't need one anyways just pour it into the cabin.
The video explains why there always is a pre-wash step. Regardless of whether it comes with a pre-wash-powder compartment or not. I will try his solution.
omg thank you. my dishwasher has a prewash compartment so it's fine, but my clothes washer has a prewash step but no prewash detergent place. this elegant solution never occurred to me
I have installed several dishwashers for friends and find them fascinating. All of the ones I have seen basically dumped the contents of the closing soap compartmens as soon as it started washing. Some dishwashers (looking at bosch) even have a little tray in the upper drawer that catches the pod.
It depends on the cycle for some. Mine one doesn't do a prewash for the 45mins QUICK cycle. But the ECO cycle does follow the normal prewash-then-wash process as described in the video. Hence I normally use the ECO cycle and put the correct amount of powder in both components. However in a hurry I sometimes just use the QUICK cycle and only use the main component as I know there is no point in adding more. The manual explained all this.
Some US washers don't but many do. However, US washers tend to not heat water as quickly or to as high of a temp. The video cites two reasons: 1. US power being 110V vs 220v. 2. US dishwasher heating elements being limited to 800 or 1000 watts because many are designed to potentially share one 20A residential circuit with an oven and/or fridge due to possibly being retrofitted into a kitchen built before built-in dishwashers were standard and manufacturers not wanting to create different models for retrofit vs new installs.
This plus the comment about sharing a circuit with an oven. If the oven is electric, even in the US it is 220v. If it is gas only, then it could be 120v as it only needs to run the igniter and other circuitry without running any heating elements.
I think he said sharing a circuit with a fridge, which are generally 110 in the US -- i think this is how my apartment is wired (2-phase 30A to oven dedicated, one 20A for the whole rest of kitchen)
Trying to run a resistive heater on the same circuit as a fridge compressor without tripping leans towards very conservative wattage
That's funny. Code in Ontario Canada is that the fridge needs to be on its own circuit. It's funny because we have an extra-big-ass inverter drive fridge that never draws more than an amp or two, even at startup because it's inherently soft-start.
But also helps avoid the case where your coffee maker trips the breaker shared with your refrigerator and you don't notice until the food in the refrigerator is warm. (which was a risk in my previous apartment - the counter circuits were shared with the refrigerator). I think it makes sense to have it as a separate circuit.
in traditional times it was customary to buy a few outfits high quality clothing that would last, and wear the same clothes for a week at a time, and then really boil them clean. This is the European market.
post world war 2 consumer choice culture in the US led to people buying cheaper clothing but varying their outfits every day and cleaning them (with copious availability of water) with less intensity.
once these patterns are established in the market, they become more like customary and it's what consumers expect of their appliances, detergents, etc.
I can’t speak to Australian dishwashers, but trying to skip the video by catching a summary has failed you. Heating is discussed extensively in the video
American dishwashers are typically hooked up to hot water. Some will have heaters but they're not that powerful and they may only run for the main wash cycle
This has always struck me as dumb, as until recently it was far cheaper to use your existing (gas-fired) hot water than to use a resistive element. However, with gas going out of fashion (and already hugely expensive in the Eastern states), and abundant solar PV, the calculus has changed.
The problem is that the first few litres of the water coming from the hot water pipe may be cold or warm. Therefore adding a resistive element is a better solution to guarantee a specific temperature.
Gas (especially just in time) still works well for water heating even if you can use heat pumps for everything else. No sure when that will flip, I assume it will eventually.
Gas is already outlawed for new builds in Victoria, despite vast gas resources in the Bass Strait. Presumably that's the direction other states are heading too.
It was a direction some states in the USA were heading before Trump, but now… anyways there will come an economic/technological point where electricity just makes more sense like it does for almost everything else. No need to legislate a transition when one will happen naturally, but we aren’t there yet.
The video explains that dishwashers sold in 110V countries often has a hot water connection as it's too slow heating water off a 110V/10A circuit so it is more efficent to utilise the hot water pipes. However we live in NZ, a 230V country so we get dishwashers that can heat water from cold fine off a 230V/10A circuit so no need for a hot water connection.
Modern heat pump dishwashers will heat water on 110V just fine, but you are looking at 3 hour wash/dry times anyways. My Bosch isn’t connected to hot water and even has a sanitize mode.
I feel like it's probably pointless. The dishwasher will be full of water before the hot water starts coming out the pipe. Depending on how far the dishwasher is from the water heater I guess.
In most kitchens I've seen, the dishwasher is pretty close to the sink. In fact the sink and the dishwasher often share a shut-off valve. So if you run the water at the sink until it's hot, then start the dishwasher, it will get hot water.
Problem is, that most dishwashers have a prewash and a main wash. By the time the prewash is finished and the main wash starts, the water in the supply line will have cooled off quite a bit.
Is that the point of the air gap? I can't even get a straight answer from plumbers on what it's for. I don't see how that could possibly help with a clogged drain, just seems like a secondary point for the drain water to come out.
I'm fairly sure the point of air gaps on drainage is to prevent sewerage water from backing up in to appliances if the sewerage line is blocked. It will instead spill on the floor where it will be more easily noticed and cleaned.
That’s exactly what it’s for. If you block the sink drain and fill it with water, you can have water flow down the dishwasher drain hose and into the sump in the dishwasher. If that happens during the rinse cycle you’re rinsing with grey water.
Pumped out water has to go somewhere . With the airgap, it will either back out your garbage disposal or pour out your airgap into the sink basin, depending on the location of the blockage.
The airgap causes the pump to be physically incapable of backfeeding the drinking water supply with dishwasher waste
iirc its less about contaminating drinking water (there is a valve and pump to get through. rather tricky) and more about waste getting into dishwasher during cycle and you getting contaminated dishes.
my wife once decided to dump into garbage disposal a bunch of uncooked broccoli at once. it clogged garbage disposal and drain. when i tried to unclog it with plunger it backed into dishwasher (was hooked directly to garbage disposal bypassing airgap). took me hour to get everything out of dishwasher.
Thus the video's advice (also in my dishwasher's manual) is to run the water from a nearby sink until it's hot before starting the dishwasher. Because it helps significantly to get hot water at the input when US dishwashers are limited to 1200W of heating.
When I do the dishes I hand wash those that can't be put in the dishwasher before I start the dishwasher. This ensures that the water that goes into the dishwasher is already hot.
I don't think the dishwasher will be "full of water" as it doesn't actually fill up - rather, it only uses 2 gallons maximum per cycle, about the amount that would be the bottom of basin of the washer.
That's what I meant. The water drawn from the dishwasher is small enough to not even purge the cold water from the line in many houses. So you would just be wasting heat by filling the pipe with hot water while only taking the cold water from it.
This seems like something that only makes sense when water is scarce but electricity is cheap. You’d be constantly losing heat to the poorly insulated pipes.
They do. I didn't realize this until my natural gas supply company decided to replace my meter on a Friday. Without alerting me ahead of time so that I could, you know, plan to be gone while my house had no hot water.
Whenever natural gas supply is turned off in the US, for any reason, only the gas company can turn it back on. And they can't do so if there's a leak at all. You have to call a plumber to come out, detect the leaks, and fix them. After that, you can call the gas company to come back out (but not on a weekend) to turn it back on. And a same-day request for service requires someone to be home ALL DAY after it's called in.
And this is how I ended up showering at work for three days that week after not having had one over the weekend.
>Whenever natural gas supply is turned off in the US, for any reason, only the gas company can turn it back on
I had a seismic shutoff installed at my gas meter and the plumber who installed it had no problem turning off the gas and turning it back on when he was done. (and then turning it off again to demonstrate to me how it worked).
He re-lit the water heater pilot light before he left. The gas company was not involved at all.
My parents used to have an old cooker which rather than having a spark button, had individual pilot lights for all of the hob burners and the grill. My mother was forever worried about whether one of the damn things had gone out (which they occasionally did). I think if you switched the supply off, switched it on again, and someone has left their house for a week, it might build up a significant amount of gas. Although they are supposed to be small enough not to. Presumably there were hardly any of those left now, but they can't assume they're all gone.
Pilot lights are often designed so that the heat from the flame holds a bimetallic switch in the open position. Should the light go out, the bimetallic switch will shut as it cools.
TBF the amount of gas used in old style pilots is really tiny. I’m sure it’s possible to accumulate dangerous quantities somehow, perhaps in a sealed subterranean basement if using propane instead of natural gas.
Natural gas is mostly methane, which is lighter than air and easily escapes most structures.
Natural gas today is mostly methane, but in the past it often had large concentrations of CO. In 1950 you can turn the gas on and stick your head in the oven as a form of suicide - won't work anymore (unless you get the house to explode).
Fascinating. I double-checked with ChatGPT (FWIW), and it confirmed. It said that currently, natural gas is extracted and shipped in its mostly pure form. In the mid-20th century, natural gas was "town gas," manufactured by heating Cole in the absence of oxygen. That produced a lot of carbon monoxide.
Every country I have ever discussed with its residents has something that, on its face, is a reasonable safety precaution (I definitely don’t want to blow up my house), but in practice is just a way to make your life miserable while helping the people who work there have an easier day.
This just happens to be the one that affected me. Like modern gas water heaters that have electric ignition instead of pilot lights, because the one serious reason to have gas water heaters is that they work when there is no electricity. Now it’s just a price distinction.
often around here in texas, when the gas is turned off due to an issue, the gas company disables the meter, or even removes or bypasses it. And I live in gas land, where we have natural gas piped in to the kitchen, bathrooms, laundry, outside for grills, as well as the furnace. We've seen it a lot, if you call the gas company about smelling gas, they come and remove your gas meter until you hire a plumber to go find the leak.
traditionally (in household washing machine time) US houses were large and had a lot more hot water capacity for the whole house, and putting a heater into individual appliances was not necessary/cost effective.
retrofitting old traditional houses (especially stone) with higher capacity plumbing was expensive and infeasible, so putting heaters in appliances was a cope for markets that needed it.
A dishwasher cycle is usually only going to run for a specific period of time. Its more effective it if starts that time closer to the proper temperature rather than relying on waiting for the heater to get the temperature up to that time. Especially on the pre-rinse cycle, where the heater may or (probably) many not engage.
The ones that do vary in ability by overall dishwasher quality.
The ones that don't are hooked up to the kitchen's hot water line.
This is considered more energy efficient because a home's hot water heater (whether electric, gas, or another fuel) is better at heating the water in a bulk capacity than a tiny heater in the dishwasher.
The downside is that the cold water between the big water heater and the dishwasher has to be purged first for it to be really effective. If your hot water heater is in the other side of the wall, no problem. If it's six rooms away, problem.
Most of the new ones (at least higher end ones?) have heat pumps that heat water and handle drying. They are efficient enough to work on 110V, and the trade off is longer cycle times. Bonus: no more plastic utensils melting because they fell to the bottom resistive heating elements.
Also, I’m way too lazy to look it up right now, but I’m quite certain I’ve heard of dishwashers that run the hot water for a little bit before letting it fill the basin. Like, I’m pretty sure this sort of thing is commonplace.
It’s not like the engineers for heaterless dishwashers are just too stupid to realize there’s an obvious workaround for having to purge the line before filling the basin. Especially when the performance is so much measurably better when you do it.
Like I said though, it’s a guess. It’s also possible efficiency certifications ding you for the excess water use.
Hot water from the house supply isn't that hot though? My dishwasher gets MUCH hotter than the hot water supply... and I don't think the heater is "tiny" I think it's a rather substantial element. The dishwasher also doesn't need to heat up a "bulk" amount of water, just the amount of water used for washing the current load of dishes.
Watch the video; it makes a huge difference even though the hot water input is not as hot as the water can get when the dishwasher runs its heating element.
Also the size of the heating element is irrelevant. What matters is the power dissipated. Most dishwashers in the US will use only about 900 watts of power even when plugged into a circuit that supports 1500 watts. In the EU they often hit 3000 watts. Even when just heating up a gallon or two of water that makes a huge difference.
My cheap GE dishwasher uses a hot water line, but also has an internal heating element to "boost" it, and help dry. My electric bill definitely suffers if cold water is used.
Hot water from the house supply isn't that hot though?
Depends on how you have it set. My current and previous hot water heaters had thermostats which permitted adjusting the temperature.
They also had warning labels on them about scalding water. If it's hot enough to scald, it's hot enough.
The dishwasher also doesn't need to heat up a "bulk" amount of water, just the amount of water used for washing the current load of dishes.
If you're washing dishes and someone is, or has recently, taken a shower; or someone is, or has recently, done laundry; or someone is, or has recently shaved or done any of the other dozen things that draw from the hot water heater, then the water is already hot and available and doesn't need to be heated all the way from cold by the dishwasher. A properly insulated hot water heater can retain heat for quite some time.
Interestingly the Gemini summary is nowhere near as good. But when it is... how helpful will that be! So many things with a very good summary will save so much time / avoid having to dive into unless truly in need of the details.
But the quality of the summary - and maybe the ability to expand it if slightly more details are required - and the low latency with that - are all super important. In that sense, AI can potentially save a lot of time in getting the right information quickly.
I summarise YT videos with Gemini all the time. You can easily control the length and depth of the summary & get it to focus on particular things etc, before investing time in watching it, only to find out it's promotional, superficial, clickbait, or some combination of all 3.
I've micro-optimized my dishwasher setup to have all my 100+ pods and other in-bulk dishwashing-chemicals stored in a compartment between my two dishwashers.
I'm also firmly in the camp of having a flat cutlery compartment at the top and not that inefficient, and uncivilized, scarring, basket in bottom section.
Until seeing that video I thought I was crazy. I've found my master.
i have miele dishwasher with detergent powder cartridge that allows dishwasher to dispense it at will. it never used during pre-wash cycle in any of the programs that dishwasher has.
I wonder if its possible to press powder into pods, and use them. I mean, pre-make a bunch of them from store brand powder, and keep them ready for use.
Not sure if water can be introduced to bind the press, or maybe some other material.
I remember watching this[0] video by the OP a couple years ago. Never would have thought I could listen to someone talk about dishwashers for 30 minutes but it was surprisingly fascinating!
My only addition to this discussion is that the Dirty Labs dish soap has been legitimately better for our baby stuff and other plastic stuff that sometimes gets oily. I recommend it.
I started using powder about a year ago, because of this guy. It legitimately works so much better than pods, because of the bit you 'spill' into the pre-wash part; and it's cheaper!
One surprising thing I got from this is that the "Energy Saver" mode used just as much energy, and even more water.
But he said that almost as a throwaway, with almost no explanation of his methodology in determining this, nor discussion about how common this problem might be.
Tl;dr He actually tested each cycle, timed what it did, and measured the energy with a Kill a Watt. He also found the repair manual, which included a diagram of each cycle that matched his tests.
His ultimate finding was that all of the cycles and modifiers did wildly different things, none of which correlated in any way to their name.
I've found it harder and harder to find powder dishwasher detergent in my country. I think they intentionally pull them off the market, I used to buy a large Finish container and now I can barely find a place that sells _any_ sort of dishwashing powder.
Yeah, in Poland two "premium"-ish brands stopped selling powder in favor of tablets, and the cheaper brand is often missing from shelves, I need to order it in delivery separately. Situation is funny, since salt and rinse liquid are still widely available along with supposedly 3-in-1 tablets :) . I guess they are not so 3-in-1 as the ads say. But I will continue buying powder for as long as it will be manufactured. It's cheaper and more efficient. Same with washing machine power.
I, too, went through like 18 months in the UK with the big stores not selling any until one reintroduced it recently. Alternatives on the internet were like 3+x the price, at least. It was incredibly frustrating. I now stock up and have 2-3 boxes of the stuff, in case it does vanish again.
Doubly frustrating since mine is a small, single-drawer dishwasher, so pods are even worse since I can't break them down. It leads to me having way too much detergent in the dishwasher and I end up with residue on the dishes.
I thought about it but wasn't sure if it would really do the trick. I kinda don't wanna buy more detergent right now because I'm stuck with a lot of pods
Interesting, here in New Zealand every supermarket has at least one brand of powder. Normally Finish is one and competing brands includes locally made and/or eco-friendly ones. Hopefully that practice doesn't reach here!
I went to my Costco right before they banned phosphates in the dishwashing detergent and got a pallet of Cascade with 5% phosphates. People looked at me like I was was crazy. I'm still going through my pallet 15 years later and my dishes are always clean :-)
I just throw a bit of the detergent in the tub for prewash rather than put it in the cup, as it will leak out anyway.
One thing you could probably do for the phosphate-free stuff is to add a "teaspoon of TSP" to the detergent and that would probably help - not sure if the formulation in today's detergent would agree with it though. I'll find out in another 5 years I guess....
I wonder if that's why my now something like nearly 40-year-old dishwasher is so bad for leaking, on certain cycles? Maybe the pods foam up too much, because it seems hell of a foamy inside.
At some point, I'll maybe post up the pics of repairing the door hinges - previously it was leaking badly because the chunky metal hinges had cracked and bent, pushing the door up enough to not squash the bottom lip seal. Unobtainable parts now, but if you have a welder...
If you don't use a JTAG cable and a MIG welder on the same project in the same day, can you really call yourself "full stack"?
> Maybe the pods foam up too much, because it seems hell of a foamy inside.
Dishwasher detergent doesn't make suds. Dish soap does. Are you sure you're using the correct stuff? Or prewashing the dishes for some reason and not getting all the soap off?
Anecdote: My spouse and I visited some friends for supper at their place. After the meal, was when they decided to try out the dishwasher in their apartment for the first time.
With dish liquid.
It's almost like the movies where the wash machine fills the house with suds, and the occupants go floating out the front door.
Anecdotally we started using these dishwasher sheets and the dishwasher started erroring during the cycle and also leaked slightly. On observation when it errored it looked very foamy inside.
Simply changing back to powder completely stopped the error and the leaking and this was in a 1 year old dishwasher
At 40 years, there is an expectation that the rubber and most plastic components have become embrittled. The hinges likely only wore out after the spring had reduced function (and lack of lubrication)
After your weld, I hope you consider replacing all rubber with silicone, and add lubrication to at least an annual list.
i replaced few years ago dishwasher that was at this point of time 20 years old (GE). When it was removed from below countertop plastic connector on top of dishwasher (water hookup) fall apart into dozen of small pieces.
I haven't got space for a TIG. However a couple of weeks ago Hofer had an inverter gasless MIG about the size of a Commodore 64 power brick, not including the spool of wire. Can't say I wasn't tempted to get myself a hot-glue-gun-for-metal kind of tool.
I hate when people use that term the G in MIG stands for Gas. If you are not running a Gas (argon, CO2...) it isn't Mig. There are flux core wires that are commonly used and called Mig, but they are not Mig (unless there is also a gas flow - this isn't uncommon) and have very different weld properties.
I have been using Dirty Labs dishwasher powder for about a year, since we got a new dishwasher, and inspired by some of his older videos on this topic. The performance has been good, no complaints. I don't torture-test my dishwasher like Alec does :). With the powder, I can do the whole some-on-the-door, some-in-the-dispenser thing mentioned here, or just use less for light loads. It is without a doubt not a budget option.
One aspect I like about it is that they have a fragrance-free variant, and even the "fragrance" one is not too bad. A second aspect I like is that it's biodegradable, et cetera. So a bit lighter on the environment, I hope, and the SDS is prominently available on the website.
I think another thing which is under-appreciated is that you need to know how to do the basic cleaning chores for your dishwasher-- for example if it has a filter, learn to clean it! Otherwise its ability to clean will probably be compromised.
I watched the video, but may have missed this, but shouldn't the testing have shown that the powder was substantially better?
Or did they not test the "putting some powder into the prewash" thing and so it was just "powder released all at once" vs "tablet released all at once".
Even there I'd expect some mild improvement from the powder mixing more easily than a plastic wrapped tablet (though maybe if the content inside is liquid this factor is reversed?).
Does this mean the big corps do have some chemical advantage that cancels out the crappy delivery mechanism?
Or does it mean that a mechanical spray prewash step isn't meaningfully improved by chemicals in most circumstances?
I was more alarmed by the wrappers being plastic. I had assumed they were some clever biodegradable thing but they're not.
Pods work great for me, and I love not having crumbs of powder under the sink, or a bottle of liquid detergent with encrusted drips down the side. It's just gross.
They are more expensive, but I buy them on sale at Costco for about $16/100, so at $0.16 per load I really don't care if powdered detergent is only $0.03 per load or whatever.
There is clearly a revealed preference for pods among consumers for these things, and "proving" that everyone is wrong for liking them is just not a very interesting exercise imo.
His specific thesis is that pods fundamentally clean worse than powder because they're inherently single-stage releases of detergent in machines designed for two-stage releases. Despite this, he still explicitly says that pods have their uses. So I'm unclear on how his goal is "proving that everyone is wrong." Did we watch different videos?
i have dishwasher that is loaded with cartridge that has 400g of powder. ideal scenario for dispensing detergent at will. yet, never mind what cycle I am using, it dispensed only during main wash cycle.
i also had in past machines from 5 different manufacturers. none of them had mechanisms that facilitate 2 releases or pre-wash compartments
I'm 1.5 minutes in and I already learned to purge cold water from the pipes before running the dishwasher. Assuming this is evidence based and true, I mean come on! Is it really so alarming to see someone deep dive hard and do the work to mass educate the public?
It seems like it would be trivial for the machine to pump water in, turn on the heating element, and wait until it reaches optimum temperature before beginning the cycle.
My understanding is that energy efficiency requirements prevent this. Dishwashers have a fixed energy budget they are allowed to expend, which may not be enough to heat cold tap water up to the optimal cleaning temp.
So instead it pulls in hot water, but not for long enough to purge the line, so all the 140F water it pulls from the water heater sits in pipes till it cools off.
Read the manual of your washer. I’m willing to bet it instructs you to run the tap until it’s hot before you start the dishwasher. This is common for American dishwashers, because they can’t get the water hot enough, fast enough, for the prewash cycle
i also went to american lg website and checked manual of cheapest dishwasher that they have. it doesn't instruct to run water either. it says that if water is not hot enough cycle will run longer.
anticipating comments that LG is not american enough, i went to GE and checked manual of cheapest (349) dishwasher. it doesn't instruct to run tap either. it does say just like LG that if water not hot enough, cycles that use hot water will take more time (because water needs to be heated)
depends very much on where you are, unfortunately. in USA, this is definitely not the case, they're almost all incredibly dumb. especially the cheapest-possible models that most renters are forced to use (and renters account for about a third of all households).
as a concrete example, the video has a section in it where he shows that his doesn't so any sensing - hot or cold water have exactly the same timing on the heater's use (and resulting water temperature graphs).
so like. I agree with you that it should be true, it's simple and cheap to implement and it obviously works better. unfortunately it's not a sane reality for tens (hundreds?) of millions of people.
i am in usa. rented few times here. both in apartment complexes and houses.
cheapest GE dishwasher that i found now - $349 heats water. of course, for video he could go and find some ancient dishwasher that doesn't heat water just to make a point (or maybe he has a broken one ? ), but i think it will be outlier today.
many (vast majority I've seen) have a heater, but won't heat the water sufficiently for the pre-wash cycle from cold. or, frequently, the second / wash cycle, unless you set it to a high temp mode, and even then it's questionable / often just a timer and not thermometer-based.
check your user manual. huge numbers of them tell you to run your nearby tap until it's hot before starting a cycle because of this exact reason. this is also part of the video, and it has been true for literally every washer I've lived with (I read essentially all manuals), including the "good" ones.
In the video he mentions that the machines heat for a set time and not for a target temperature. So as majority of machines (in US market) are meant for hot water input. Then if you feed cold water they don't heat it enough
if you have powder crumbs under your sink you might need to improve your technique.
This reminds me of how some of my house guests will accidentally splash water all over the bathroom counter and even the mirror when they wash up in the morning. I don’t say anything, to be polite, but they clearly lack technique lol.
This works for me:
0. store the dishwasher powder (box) under sink.
1. Open dishwasher door
2. grab box, place OVER the opened door.
3. dispense powder into cartridge in door (with spoon, tilting box, etc)
4. put spoon back in box OR fully tilt box back upright. “Crumbs” will drop onto the door, that’s OK.
5. move box back under sink.
Even if I was messy, I personally couldn’t make myself spend 5x on pods to avoid cleaning crumbs under the sink once a month. When i think of convenience i think of a dishwasher saving me hours every month. Not saving 10 seconds a month to wipe crumbs under the sink. :-)
We clearly all have different preferences and ideas of “convenience”. I respect that.
I have a bad habit of not fully drying my hands when retrieving pods. The pods all clump together if they get wet. This is one of the many reasons I prefer powder.
"if they get wet". Ok, so don't get them wet. If not wet, did you ever consider using chopsticks to pick one out of the bag/container? That might work well.
With pods you can’t add some detergent to the prewash while adding the rest to the main wash cycle. That’s the thing that makes one of the biggest differences.
I used an old container with a 3" lid and a handle, and fill it regularly with the cheap dishwasher powder that I buy in bulk. I put a whole in the screw on lid so I can just pour out the powder. 98% clean and much much cheaper than any pods and much better for the environment because the packaging is all paper.
even the cheap costco pods are 3x the cost of powder. And his point is that the pods undermine the dishwasher because they don't let you control when and how much detergent is deployed during the multiple washing cycles.
powder deploys during rinse and wash. pods deploy only during wash (or only rinse if people put the pods into the tray, which is common)
And the dishwashers are designed with a hardness index in the hopper . you're supposed to line up the soap with your local hardness level to avoid residue.
But the multi-pod strategy means you can give the machine soap to use in various cycles. Put some in the little flap, and some just in with the dishes.
I'm not sure if my machine even has a hardness marking, but when I used liquid dishwasher soap, I simply filled up the compartment every time.
As to the cost, yes it's 3X, but if you're reading this and you have a Costco membership, it's still a rounding error.
Pods just make life simpler and cleaner (no messy powders and gunky liquids in the soap cabinet), which is why I even have a dishwasher in the first place.
I thought that the multi-solution pods - they're usually have differently-colored, for I presume marketing reasons - have pockets with different dissolve rates, so that the solutions are dispensed in sequence. I've not tested that, though.
Making part of the pod out of 3mil PVA and bonding it to another part made of 1mil PVA does not sound like unachievable technology to me. In fact, the first Google result for PVA films that I see sells them based on their various dissolution times.
It would be probably very difficult to engineer a good dissolution rate that takes into account the different length and water temperature of the pre-wash cycle of the many many different dishwashers out there. So no, as the video in the sibling comment shows, it's just fancy marketing.
I was a long-time adherent of powder for all the reasons in the video. I used the Seventh Generation powder that is widely available, or once was. One day I couldn't find it, so I got Cascade Free & Clear Pods. I was completely blown away by how much better the pods work. And they work faster, too, because my dishwasher cycles are based on water clarity and they end sooner if the detergent is working faster. So I permanently switched, nevermind the cost difference.
Perhaps part of the issue is that the presenter in the video is using a somewhat primitive machine.
We attempted an experiment in our own dishwasher after the video, trying Cascade Platinum boxed powder (only stuff available here) and Cascade Platinum Plus pods (which we had been using before). The experiment showed that, for our dishwasher and our water, the pods just worked significantly better. The main difference was in the silverware (tiny bits would occasionally be left with the powder).
A couple of months into the experiment with the powder, the dishwasher started to smell a bit foul, which usually indicates time to clean the filters, which I did. But this happened vastly sooner than I was used to with the pods.
Even if the powder's performance sucks intentionally because Cascade made it worse now, as a sibling comment suggested, ultimately that's the only powder option still available here.
I used pods and tried out powder after one of his previous videos on this, it was pretty terrible even following his advice and using rinse aids.
I like chocolate milk, made by mixing chocolate powder (Nesquik) into milk, and somehow everything except pods manages to leave a film of the chocolate powder over everything. I haven't watched this video yet, but my suspicion is he's using bad pods - ones that really are just packaged detergent without the extra chemicals they often include in the pods nowadays.
Same here. Tried using just power, and his other advice and it didn't work out. Didn't clean as well and many dishes (especially plastic) ended up with a white film despite trying multiple brands of powder and dish dry solution.
I wonder if part of it is differences in water hardness and such.
Because the pods are so much more expensive, it means they make more money on them. There’s a very real incentive for the companies to intentionally reduce the performance of the powders just so they can sell more pods (as people notice the performance difference, they think it’s because powder is naturally inferior instead of being manipulated into being so).
In the video he ran a similar test and had similar results. IIRC his conclusion was that the manufacturer is deliberately sabotaging the performance of powders in order to direct more sales to the higher margin pods.
It's also why he's endorsing a new powder product he was involved in developing: it performs as good or better than the pods.
i used multiple dishwashers in multiple countries. blomberg, ge, bosch, miele, lg. used pods for as long as they exist (with exception of miele that has detergent cartridge that is good for two dozens of cycles). the only times when I had problem with dishwasher performance it's when either dishwasher had physical malfunction, dishwasher arms were blocked by some object or when i forgot to put pod.
pods are about convenience. exactly same reason that i got dishwasher with detergent cartridges and washing machine with build in container for detergent.
but if we talk about powders, they can be very different with different performance. There are commercial powders (for restaurants and such where dishwashers run on very short cycles) that I afraid to put in my dishwasher and there are eco powders that are made from unicorn tears (tried once, they cleaned dirt but leave stains on clear glass). i went through sds of a bunch of them. most of them have same similar basic ingredients, but in different proportions
I can't remember if it was main video or second channel one, in which Alec states with confidence that big brands make powder worse on purpose to push their higher margin pods.
The opinion is based on his experience (horrible residue left by big-name powder in contrast to store-branded great-value powders being problem-free) and lab results.
i used cascade powder to refill miele cartridges. there was 0 difference with regards to residue/etc. also SDS was very similiar.
i just went to check amazon. cascade complete powder has 4.6 with 9k reviews. if it was subpar, pretty sure that rating would have reflected it. for example plant based detergents hover around 4.
It's also highly dependent on how soft your water is. The people complaining about performance probably have hard water. Do you ever have to descale your kettle / coffee maker?
i used to live in area with very hard water. used softening salt in dishwasher. later switched to pods that were advertised to have water softening compounds and used them without softening salt.
when i used pods, i had open box under counter. i could with literally closed eyes to take one and put it in machine without looking. using spoon involves more actions and there are chance that some of the powder will end up on floor/inside cabinet/etc.
I bring a bag to the store. Is it more convenient? no, is it the right thing to do? yes. I'm just making the point that they are more convenient for people in this situation.
Having the cleanest dishes is not always the optimization one is looking for.
I like pods because there is less of a chance my clumsy self, or younger kids can accidentally spill costly soap for my dog to try to lick up or overfill the dispenser. My dishes are almost never caked in fats and oils when I put them in. I do not use a pre-wash. If I do I break a pod in half and toss in the bottom.
This guy makes me roll my eyes. There is nothing more exhausting than a self-assured YouTuber lecturing others as if he has all the right answers. He is not wrong per se but not everyone has their own preferences and needs.
I love that there are people who will go into this much detail on stuff. It's really cool that they do. But the whole thing is that if you follow some sequence of steps, powder will clean as well as or better than pods for a third the cost. All right, this isn't a significant portion of my expenses so I'll pay the 3x cost since my dishes come out clean anyway.
I wish the description of the video was like an abstract.
There's more to the video than just that. For example: you should run your hot water tap before turning on your dishwasher, and you should experiment with the dishwasher settings, because they can make a big difference.
My kids would routinely put in too much powder, which would gunk up the dispensing mechanism, requiring my time and effort to clean it out and fix it. Eventually the dispenser broke entirely and had to be replaced. We since switched to pods and haven't had any problems with the dispenser. The pods are worth every extra cent.
I just want a dishwasher and washing machine that I can load with gallons of soap once a month or whatever, and let it do the detail work for me.
I know they exist in the commercial realm, but I'm not 100% certain the wife is ready for a Hobart machine in the kitchen ...
Miele has home dishwashers that do this now. But like all things consumer, it's a proprietary system that's designed to keep you locked into a subscription relationship with the company.
I have one of these. The detergent gizmo is a hard plastic shell with an interesting shape, powdered detergent inside, and a plastic film cover that looks like it’s heat-sealed on. It contains no electronics whatsoever. You can refill it, and the only limitation is that it’s kind of awkward to open, fill, and re-seal. The easiest way IMO is to cut a large flap in the hard plastic on the sides, then tape it down after refilling. It works fine.
Also, the Miele powdered detergent, in my personal opinion, sucks. And it leaves some residue behind. Yuck.
True for their dishwashers. But to their credit, Miele's washing machines actually come with two additional cassettes that you can fill with your (liquid) detergent of choice. You don't have to use Miele's proprietary ones.
PowerDisk? As long as you load salt and rinse aid, it works like a charm. As you said, if you want to save a bit of money, you can 3D print a replacement. But they last long enough that I don’t mind the cost.
My Samsung bespoke combo washer dryer has that feature. It uses less detergent than we are used to so my wife uses pods, but I think this is better un general since the clothes come out clean even if they don’t smell like detergent. So not only do I not need to load detergent, I don’t need to transfer to the dryer. Still have to load sanitizer in unfortunately.
I had that on a GE Profile from I think 1999 if I remember right. It was pretty nice. I think it's still a feature on some of them.
That dishwasher was great and lasted over 20 years. The previous owners had definitely abused it and never cleaned it. I repaired it and had about the best dishwasher for a few more years. Eventually the main logic board went out (can't blame it too much, had electrical issues that killed a few things) and a replacement board was going to cost a few hundred dollars in parts even from questionable third party sellers. Seemed to be a good bit to sink on what was a highly abused >20 year old washing machine at the time.
as someone who's gone down the rabbit hole of dishwasher home repair, I've created more problems than I've solved. I agree that maintenance is important, but when you get into replacing the seals and gaskets that can result in water flooding into your kitchen, i decided recently to draw a line. I'm now the proud owner of some fancy leak detection / moisture detection IOS products as a result. (and yes I'm aware there are better, low tech solutions like the "frog" on the market, but I chose to torture myself instead)
He says that having the ability to tailor the amount of powder for the size of the load is one of the selling points of powder. But I'm guessing most people would much rather waste the few cents of savings in exchange for not needing to think about their dishes even that tiny bit extra.
My process is to use cheap Walmart powder for prewash and Kirkland pods in the dispenser. Avoids any over filling issues.
I used to just use the Kirkland pods and they worked fine too. The reason I started using powder in prewash is to get any loose fat dissolved so that it doesn’t clog over a period of time, not sure if that’s a valid concern. And yes, I do run hot water before starting the dishwasher.
My issue is the pods fail to dissolve ~5% of the time and leave a gunk that clogs the dispenser which again requires time and effort to clean. I'm convinced by the video to try powder again but I've had the filming issue with almost every powder I've tried. So, we'll see what happens...
I'm convinced pods broke my dishwasher. I switched to powder years ago and haven't had a problem since.
Is it not possible to teach your children to put the proper amount of detergent?
While I’m sure dismissing the video is easy for someone with a dishwasher that already works fine with pods, having worked through all four(?) of those dishwasher videos, I have finally made an enzymatic powder work after months of effort when pods did not help.
Heavy Duty + Hot Wash doesn’t usually work. Doesn’t finish washing.
Heavy Duty + Sani Rinse doesn’t usually work. Weird residue issues for entire top rack.
Heavy Duty + Hot + Sani doesn’t work. Both of the above issues at once!
But, as it turns out —
Normal + Hot + Sani does work, perfectly, repeatedly.
The takeaway from the latest video for me is that the options aren’t Boolean on/off flags for different cycle-specific parameters, the cheap U.S. rental dishwasher comprehensively alters the entire program based on which total set of options are selected in non-intuitive ways.
So I have to use Normal not Heavy, Hot Wash and Sani-Rinse, or my wash cycle doesn’t wash properly. Which is absurd and obnoxious, but TIL, and suddenly I’ve had two consecutive loads of dishes come out clean for the first time in a year of trying.
No, the pods didn’t work either, as it turns out my dishwasher doesn’t reach the “enzymatic cleaning” temperatures off my rental’s barely-120F water using Hot Wash alone. No, the filter isn’t dirty. Yes, it drains fine. Yes, I’ve run cleaning cycles with several cleaning powders. Yes, run the tap to hot. Etc etc.
TLDR for the entire video: If your dishwasher isn’t cleaning fully, even if you use maximum powder or pods or cleaning it, make sure you’ve tried counterintuitive combinations with Light/Normal instead of Heavy, or Sani Rinse to improve the wash cycle, etc. Ruling out unlikely combos because they seem illogical may prevent you from finding a working set. (And if you’re using a powder formulated by anyone who sells colorful dishwasher pods, it’s probably designed to be less effective than the powder in their pods.)
It's interesting - YouTube does show AI summaries now - here's the one for this video:
This video explores dishwasher detergent, focusing on a new powder formulation. The creator details the science behind effective dishwashing, including pre-wash cycles and water temperature. Independent testing results comparing the new powder to leading pods are revealed.
I've noticed that they all seem to not give away too much so you still have to watch the video to get the conclusion. It makes sense why they do this for creators, but I do agree it would be awesome to just read the conclusion on many of these.
>I wish the description of the video was like an abstract.
Business opportunity something something AI
YouTube are already doing it! :(
Not very well, it's always too vague. Good opportunity to compete with a browser extension or service!
Hah! I had watched this just last night. I have a Fisher & Paykel Dishdrawer so this prompted me to check the instruction manual and sure enough, I had been putting Rinse Aid in the pre-wash area. I don't even really know what Rinse Aid is honestly but it's fun having some things be a black box. Turns out the correct spot is turning a knob, pulling it out and pouring it down a hole containing a glowing red light. I had assumed there was just some sort of circuitry down there and doing so would be a horrible idea. Thanks Technology Connections!
It's a volatile surfactant. Thus, it allows water to drip off your dishes before drying, so you don't get spots, but also doesn't produce a residue of its own.
I wouldn’t use rinse aid. It’s not good for you - damages your gut and may contain dioxane byproducts. I also would avoid detergents with ethoxylated alcohols (AEs).
What to look for is any powder or powder-filled pod with a) no AEs and b) does contain amylase and protease , two food-eating enzymes that are often omitted for who knows why.
365 Whole Foods brand pods are my go-to
We absolutely need rinse aid here, even with a water softener. But we make our own with ethanol and citric acid. For us works just as well as the pricey stuff and costs us…. A large bottom shelf bottle of vodka (sorry, don’t drink and don’t buy this enough to remember) and about $0.50 in citric acid will last me 6 months.
[Several citations needed]
Household usage levels are probably fine [1]. That being said, we don't use rinse aid and I don't see any issues with glasses. I can see how it could be a problem in areas with harder water.
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36464527/
Do they make a powder?
The guy in the video disagrees with you. From his other video, 23 mins in,
> next, rinse aids. use them. this isn't a scam.
I'll trust the dishwasher expert until there's some proper citations.
You have to realize that every time you sip a glass or eat off a surface that's provided by a commercial entity, you're getting items that have come in contact with industrial appliances that dispense rinse aid.
I have a difficult time believing that something so ubiquitous is as harmful as you claim, but I'm open to being convinced.
"This isn't a scam" means that rinse aid works. It doesn't imply anything regarding its safety.
There is some research (see my other comment) hinting that industrial level use can be harmful (households dilution levels are probably fine).
I think this is the research that suggests possible damage - https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36464527/
summary:
The creator argues that most dishwashers are designed to use a pre-wash dose and a main wash dose of detergent, a fundamental often ignored by single-dose pods, and presents independent ASTM testing confirming the new powder matches or exceeds the performance of a leading premium pod. The video also features a detailed demonstration using temperature logging and peanut butter to stress the importance of purging cold water from the hot water supply line before running a dishwasher, particularly in North America, to ensure the water reaches the optimal enzymatic temperature needed for effective cleaning. This is further reinforced by showing how adding pre-wash detergent dramatically improves the initial cleaning phase, especially with fats and oils.
This has been his stance for a long time. He has a lot of dishwasher videos for some reason!
One thing I can't get a good answer to is whether the "prewash" step is universally the case or not. I have a good Bosch dishwasher and there's no compartment for a bit of pre-wash detergent. I don't even know if my dishwasher cycle has a pre-wash step. I would assume the dishwasher manufacturer knows what's best.
The owner's manual gives advice about not pre-rinsing the dishes because the food bits actually help the wash cycle, so I'm wondering if it works differently from the two-step process in this video.
What your manual says is common to most dishwashers.
You can tell if your dishwasher has a pre-wash cycle if it does a short run, then you hear it draining, and then it does a longer full run. I expect it probably does.
Also, you can always add a bit of detergent to the main compartment of the dishwasher for prewash. The normal detergent compartment has a lid so the the detergent stays dry until the main wash cycle, and most prewash compartments are just an open tray.
Come to think of it, if there is a latching door on the detergent tray, your dishwasher definitely has a prewash cycle, or else they’d skip the door entirely
> Come to think of it, if there is a latching door on the detergent tray, your dishwasher definitely has a prewash cycle, or else they’d skip the door entirely
Alec also mentions this briefly in the linked video; if manufacturers could avoid the cost of a latching mechanism, they absolutely would. Its presence means a pre-wash cycle exists.
The default program on my Miele pops the door open like 2 minutes into the cycle. Maybe the slower ones don't?
My GE seems to skip the prewash cycle on the default setting for whatever reason. It does use a prewash on its "heavy duty" cycle though. Incidentally "heavy duty" also works infinitely better, with no more damage done to my dishes. YMMV of course.
The owners manual for my Bosch 500 says prewash detergent is not necessary. But it does have a prewash cycle as I can hear it draining before the main wash.
Note: This dishwasher provides the optimum cleaning performance without the use of a prewash detergent and further enhances our standards of sustainability and efficiency.
I have a Bosch as well, i sprinkle a bit of powder on the door. It has a pre-wash run which goes quick.
The manual is likely referring to not hand rinsing dishes before loading them which was very common 30 or 40 years ago. I had to train my Mother to stop doing that.
his dishwasher detergent videos are a good example of an "improved" product being more expensive and less effective (like disposable razors).
With better understanding you can achieve far better results. I no longer rinse or even scrape dishes. with the right approach my dishwasher performance has been stellar. The user manual also includes proper tuning to local water hardness levels.
Poor dishwashing also discourages people from cooking at home, which leads to less healthful diets. So it's an important thing to get right.
Dishwashing is fascinating.
I find his videos to have quite a bit of hand waving and poor methodology together with being overly verbose.
For example, he kept on saying that pods are not better in previous videos, but in the study he presented in this video, it showed that pods are performing significantly better than powders in every category. The study (which was not linked and I couldn't find it) was sponsored by a powder maker which the video recommends, but even this study showed just on par results with pods.
He does mention that a number of manufacturers aren’t making powders at all anymore, and also suspects out loud that they just aren’t trying with their powder detergents anymore, or are not bothering to apply improvements to their formulae to the powder form because manufacturers would rather sell the powders anyway.
He also specifically calls out Great Value brand powder as one he finds to be consistently on par with pod performance
He said a lot of things that are not backed up by the study he shared but didn't link, where powders clearly underperform pods.
At the end of the day, it'd have been much better for this community if we could have just gained access to a proper study comparing different cleaning options and learn from it instead of watching a 40 minutes video that doesn't say much and doesn't link to the study which is briefly mentioned there.
That has not been my experience with pods. When we switched back to powder the difference was night and day. Even my husband who used to swear by pods eventually gave in and agreed powder is much better. It is a bit fiddly yes but powder getting 99.9% of our dishes getting cleaned on the first run sealed the deal for us -- previously we were always having to add dishes to the next run or falling back to doing it manually. What makes it even more intersting is that even the cheapest powder beats every brand of pods etc we've tried. And we have a shitty cheap dishwasher that came standard with our new build house.
Nobody expects better results from a higher-priced product!
I have a Miele dishwasher. Not only is there no place to put prewash powder, but I can hear the little door for the detergent pop open like 2 minutes into the cycle when on the default program.
This dishwasher also came with a box of Miele pods (and they encourage you to buy more). I think it's designed first and foremost to not use powder.
Find a PDF manual for your dishwasher. It generally will describe if it has a prewash.
Perhaps there is an indentation on the outside of the detergent dispenser where you are meant to pour a bit of detergent for the pre-wash.
Like in the video: https://youtu.be/DAX2_mPr9W8?si=Njn749InqNCbjhQd&t=822
Pods have become so ubiquitous that many companies ditched that powder compartment altogether. But you don't need one anyways just pour it into the cabin.
The video explains why there always is a pre-wash step. Regardless of whether it comes with a pre-wash-powder compartment or not. I will try his solution.
it's inverted. the closing soap compartment is the washing step, the pre-wash tray contents can just be dumped.
omg thank you. my dishwasher has a prewash compartment so it's fine, but my clothes washer has a prewash step but no prewash detergent place. this elegant solution never occurred to me
I have installed several dishwashers for friends and find them fascinating. All of the ones I have seen basically dumped the contents of the closing soap compartmens as soon as it started washing. Some dishwashers (looking at bosch) even have a little tray in the upper drawer that catches the pod.
It depends on the cycle for some. Mine one doesn't do a prewash for the 45mins QUICK cycle. But the ECO cycle does follow the normal prewash-then-wash process as described in the video. Hence I normally use the ECO cycle and put the correct amount of powder in both components. However in a hurry I sometimes just use the QUICK cycle and only use the main component as I know there is no point in adding more. The manual explained all this.
Thanks for the summary.
American dishwashers don't have their own heater? All dishwashers I've seen in Australia only have cold water supply.
Some US washers don't but many do. However, US washers tend to not heat water as quickly or to as high of a temp. The video cites two reasons: 1. US power being 110V vs 220v. 2. US dishwasher heating elements being limited to 800 or 1000 watts because many are designed to potentially share one 20A residential circuit with an oven and/or fridge due to possibly being retrofitted into a kitchen built before built-in dishwashers were standard and manufacturers not wanting to create different models for retrofit vs new installs.
> share one 20A residential circuit
15, dishwasher manufacturers can't assume the dishwasher is on a 20.
This plus the comment about sharing a circuit with an oven. If the oven is electric, even in the US it is 220v. If it is gas only, then it could be 120v as it only needs to run the igniter and other circuitry without running any heating elements.
I think he said sharing a circuit with a fridge, which are generally 110 in the US -- i think this is how my apartment is wired (2-phase 30A to oven dedicated, one 20A for the whole rest of kitchen)
Trying to run a resistive heater on the same circuit as a fridge compressor without tripping leans towards very conservative wattage
That's funny. Code in Ontario Canada is that the fridge needs to be on its own circuit. It's funny because we have an extra-big-ass inverter drive fridge that never draws more than an amp or two, even at startup because it's inherently soft-start.
Just a waste of copper and a beaker really.
>Just a waste of copper and a beaker really.
But also helps avoid the case where your coffee maker trips the breaker shared with your refrigerator and you don't notice until the food in the refrigerator is warm. (which was a risk in my previous apartment - the counter circuits were shared with the refrigerator). I think it makes sense to have it as a separate circuit.
in traditional times it was customary to buy a few outfits high quality clothing that would last, and wear the same clothes for a week at a time, and then really boil them clean. This is the European market.
post world war 2 consumer choice culture in the US led to people buying cheaper clothing but varying their outfits every day and cleaning them (with copious availability of water) with less intensity.
once these patterns are established in the market, they become more like customary and it's what consumers expect of their appliances, detergents, etc.
3) manufacturers placing energy star improvement quotas over safety in programming the cycles.
The energy star stuff isn't unique to US dishwashers though.
I can’t speak to Australian dishwashers, but trying to skip the video by catching a summary has failed you. Heating is discussed extensively in the video
American dishwashers are typically hooked up to hot water. Some will have heaters but they're not that powerful and they may only run for the main wash cycle
Not true. Dishwashers get cold very often.
American dishwashers are always hooked up to the hot water supply. It’s right in the installation manual, and I’ve never seen one that wasn’t.
...what's not true? I can't tell what you're disagreeing with.
Quite, another thing to add to the list of USAian weird exceptions.
This has always struck me as dumb, as until recently it was far cheaper to use your existing (gas-fired) hot water than to use a resistive element. However, with gas going out of fashion (and already hugely expensive in the Eastern states), and abundant solar PV, the calculus has changed.
The problem is that the first few litres of the water coming from the hot water pipe may be cold or warm. Therefore adding a resistive element is a better solution to guarantee a specific temperature.
Gas (especially just in time) still works well for water heating even if you can use heat pumps for everything else. No sure when that will flip, I assume it will eventually.
Gas is already outlawed for new builds in Victoria, despite vast gas resources in the Bass Strait. Presumably that's the direction other states are heading too.
It was a direction some states in the USA were heading before Trump, but now… anyways there will come an economic/technological point where electricity just makes more sense like it does for almost everything else. No need to legislate a transition when one will happen naturally, but we aren’t there yet.
Same in NZ, never seen a dishwasher with a hot water connection.
The video explains that dishwashers sold in 110V countries often has a hot water connection as it's too slow heating water off a 110V/10A circuit so it is more efficent to utilise the hot water pipes. However we live in NZ, a 230V country so we get dishwashers that can heat water from cold fine off a 230V/10A circuit so no need for a hot water connection.
Modern heat pump dishwashers will heat water on 110V just fine, but you are looking at 3 hour wash/dry times anyways. My Bosch isn’t connected to hot water and even has a sanitize mode.
If you check the manual you might find that you can hook the single inlet pipe up to the hot water tap.
I feel like it's probably pointless. The dishwasher will be full of water before the hot water starts coming out the pipe. Depending on how far the dishwasher is from the water heater I guess.
In most kitchens I've seen, the dishwasher is pretty close to the sink. In fact the sink and the dishwasher often share a shut-off valve. So if you run the water at the sink until it's hot, then start the dishwasher, it will get hot water.
Problem is, that most dishwashers have a prewash and a main wash. By the time the prewash is finished and the main wash starts, the water in the supply line will have cooled off quite a bit.
Not just the shut off. My dishwasher's drain hose goes up into the sink's drain plumbing much higher than I would have thought.
This almost made a mess when the sink was clogged and the dishwasher tried to pump the water out but had nowhere to go.
You can install airgap for this. In usa building code mandates it on multiple states
Is that the point of the air gap? I can't even get a straight answer from plumbers on what it's for. I don't see how that could possibly help with a clogged drain, just seems like a secondary point for the drain water to come out.
I'm fairly sure the point of air gaps on drainage is to prevent sewerage water from backing up in to appliances if the sewerage line is blocked. It will instead spill on the floor where it will be more easily noticed and cleaned.
That’s exactly what it’s for. If you block the sink drain and fill it with water, you can have water flow down the dishwasher drain hose and into the sump in the dishwasher. If that happens during the rinse cycle you’re rinsing with grey water.
Pumped out water has to go somewhere . With the airgap, it will either back out your garbage disposal or pour out your airgap into the sink basin, depending on the location of the blockage.
The airgap causes the pump to be physically incapable of backfeeding the drinking water supply with dishwasher waste
iirc its less about contaminating drinking water (there is a valve and pump to get through. rather tricky) and more about waste getting into dishwasher during cycle and you getting contaminated dishes.
my wife once decided to dump into garbage disposal a bunch of uncooked broccoli at once. it clogged garbage disposal and drain. when i tried to unclog it with plunger it backed into dishwasher (was hooked directly to garbage disposal bypassing airgap). took me hour to get everything out of dishwasher.
Thus the video's advice (also in my dishwasher's manual) is to run the water from a nearby sink until it's hot before starting the dishwasher. Because it helps significantly to get hot water at the input when US dishwashers are limited to 1200W of heating.
You should actually watch the video so that you can see the graphs; it’s not pointless.
When I do the dishes I hand wash those that can't be put in the dishwasher before I start the dishwasher. This ensures that the water that goes into the dishwasher is already hot.
“16:12 The importance of purging cold water from the line”
I don't think the dishwasher will be "full of water" as it doesn't actually fill up - rather, it only uses 2 gallons maximum per cycle, about the amount that would be the bottom of basin of the washer.
That's what I meant. The water drawn from the dishwasher is small enough to not even purge the cold water from the line in many houses. So you would just be wasting heat by filling the pipe with hot water while only taking the cold water from it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circulator_pump#Use_with_domes...
This seems like something that only makes sense when water is scarce but electricity is cheap. You’d be constantly losing heat to the poorly insulated pipes.
And you're fully losing heat if you dump lukewarm water down the drain (instead of cycling it back to the heater) to eventually get hot water.
People who do it more or less don't care about the price of energy (except maybe in the abstract).
It's for comfort and convenience.
I have all hot water pipes insulated in my house
They do. I didn't realize this until my natural gas supply company decided to replace my meter on a Friday. Without alerting me ahead of time so that I could, you know, plan to be gone while my house had no hot water.
Whenever natural gas supply is turned off in the US, for any reason, only the gas company can turn it back on. And they can't do so if there's a leak at all. You have to call a plumber to come out, detect the leaks, and fix them. After that, you can call the gas company to come back out (but not on a weekend) to turn it back on. And a same-day request for service requires someone to be home ALL DAY after it's called in.
And this is how I ended up showering at work for three days that week after not having had one over the weekend.
>Whenever natural gas supply is turned off in the US, for any reason, only the gas company can turn it back on
I had a seismic shutoff installed at my gas meter and the plumber who installed it had no problem turning off the gas and turning it back on when he was done. (and then turning it off again to demonstrate to me how it worked).
He re-lit the water heater pilot light before he left. The gas company was not involved at all.
My parents used to have an old cooker which rather than having a spark button, had individual pilot lights for all of the hob burners and the grill. My mother was forever worried about whether one of the damn things had gone out (which they occasionally did). I think if you switched the supply off, switched it on again, and someone has left their house for a week, it might build up a significant amount of gas. Although they are supposed to be small enough not to. Presumably there were hardly any of those left now, but they can't assume they're all gone.
Pilot lights are often designed so that the heat from the flame holds a bimetallic switch in the open position. Should the light go out, the bimetallic switch will shut as it cools.
For water heaters and wall furnaces with a gas control valve, yes. For old stoves, they don't.
TBF the amount of gas used in old style pilots is really tiny. I’m sure it’s possible to accumulate dangerous quantities somehow, perhaps in a sealed subterranean basement if using propane instead of natural gas.
Natural gas is mostly methane, which is lighter than air and easily escapes most structures.
Natural gas today is mostly methane, but in the past it often had large concentrations of CO. In 1950 you can turn the gas on and stick your head in the oven as a form of suicide - won't work anymore (unless you get the house to explode).
Fascinating. I double-checked with ChatGPT (FWIW), and it confirmed. It said that currently, natural gas is extracted and shipped in its mostly pure form. In the mid-20th century, natural gas was "town gas," manufactured by heating Cole in the absence of oxygen. That produced a lot of carbon monoxide.
Yes it's not a concern for kitchen stoves. The amount of gas/flow rate is too low.
That is an insane solution to the problem. I’d rather put a match to it.
> And this is how I ended up showering at work for three days that week after not having had one over the weekend.
I discovered the unexpected value of a YMCA membership when my hot water was offline for a while.
As an American expat, I will use this story to explain some of the indignities of living in America. Thank you for sharing.
Every country I have ever discussed with its residents has something that, on its face, is a reasonable safety precaution (I definitely don’t want to blow up my house), but in practice is just a way to make your life miserable while helping the people who work there have an easier day.
This just happens to be the one that affected me. Like modern gas water heaters that have electric ignition instead of pilot lights, because the one serious reason to have gas water heaters is that they work when there is no electricity. Now it’s just a price distinction.
> Whenever natural gas supply is turned off in the US, for any reason, only the gas company can turn it back on
Doesn't match my experience. My colleagues and I are able to turn on or off the gas supply to our houses at will.
often around here in texas, when the gas is turned off due to an issue, the gas company disables the meter, or even removes or bypasses it. And I live in gas land, where we have natural gas piped in to the kitchen, bathrooms, laundry, outside for grills, as well as the furnace. We've seen it a lot, if you call the gas company about smelling gas, they come and remove your gas meter until you hire a plumber to go find the leak.
Sorry how is this story relevant?
traditionally (in household washing machine time) US houses were large and had a lot more hot water capacity for the whole house, and putting a heater into individual appliances was not necessary/cost effective.
retrofitting old traditional houses (especially stone) with higher capacity plumbing was expensive and infeasible, so putting heaters in appliances was a cope for markets that needed it.
A dishwasher cycle is usually only going to run for a specific period of time. Its more effective it if starts that time closer to the proper temperature rather than relying on waiting for the heater to get the temperature up to that time. Especially on the pre-rinse cycle, where the heater may or (probably) many not engage.
American dishwashers don't have their own heater?
Some do, some don't.
The ones that do vary in ability by overall dishwasher quality.
The ones that don't are hooked up to the kitchen's hot water line.
This is considered more energy efficient because a home's hot water heater (whether electric, gas, or another fuel) is better at heating the water in a bulk capacity than a tiny heater in the dishwasher.
The downside is that the cold water between the big water heater and the dishwasher has to be purged first for it to be really effective. If your hot water heater is in the other side of the wall, no problem. If it's six rooms away, problem.
Most of the new ones (at least higher end ones?) have heat pumps that heat water and handle drying. They are efficient enough to work on 110V, and the trade off is longer cycle times. Bonus: no more plastic utensils melting because they fell to the bottom resistive heating elements.
Also, I’m way too lazy to look it up right now, but I’m quite certain I’ve heard of dishwashers that run the hot water for a little bit before letting it fill the basin. Like, I’m pretty sure this sort of thing is commonplace.
It’s not like the engineers for heaterless dishwashers are just too stupid to realize there’s an obvious workaround for having to purge the line before filling the basin. Especially when the performance is so much measurably better when you do it.
Like I said though, it’s a guess. It’s also possible efficiency certifications ding you for the excess water use.
Hot water from the house supply isn't that hot though? My dishwasher gets MUCH hotter than the hot water supply... and I don't think the heater is "tiny" I think it's a rather substantial element. The dishwasher also doesn't need to heat up a "bulk" amount of water, just the amount of water used for washing the current load of dishes.
Watch the video; it makes a huge difference even though the hot water input is not as hot as the water can get when the dishwasher runs its heating element.
Also the size of the heating element is irrelevant. What matters is the power dissipated. Most dishwashers in the US will use only about 900 watts of power even when plugged into a circuit that supports 1500 watts. In the EU they often hit 3000 watts. Even when just heating up a gallon or two of water that makes a huge difference.
Modern dishwashers, especially in Europe, are using heat pumps as well. They don’t really benefit from the extra voltage and watts anymore.
My cheap GE dishwasher uses a hot water line, but also has an internal heating element to "boost" it, and help dry. My electric bill definitely suffers if cold water is used.
Hot water from the house supply isn't that hot though?
Depends on how you have it set. My current and previous hot water heaters had thermostats which permitted adjusting the temperature.
They also had warning labels on them about scalding water. If it's hot enough to scald, it's hot enough.
The dishwasher also doesn't need to heat up a "bulk" amount of water, just the amount of water used for washing the current load of dishes.
If you're washing dishes and someone is, or has recently, taken a shower; or someone is, or has recently, done laundry; or someone is, or has recently shaved or done any of the other dozen things that draw from the hot water heater, then the water is already hot and available and doesn't need to be heated all the way from cold by the dishwasher. A properly insulated hot water heater can retain heat for quite some time.
They do, but they are generally confined to 10 amps, so they do not heat quickly.
Interestingly the Gemini summary is nowhere near as good. But when it is... how helpful will that be! So many things with a very good summary will save so much time / avoid having to dive into unless truly in need of the details.
But the quality of the summary - and maybe the ability to expand it if slightly more details are required - and the low latency with that - are all super important. In that sense, AI can potentially save a lot of time in getting the right information quickly.
I summarise YT videos with Gemini all the time. You can easily control the length and depth of the summary & get it to focus on particular things etc, before investing time in watching it, only to find out it's promotional, superficial, clickbait, or some combination of all 3.
Good to know! Thanks.
I've micro-optimized my dishwasher setup to have all my 100+ pods and other in-bulk dishwashing-chemicals stored in a compartment between my two dishwashers.
I'm also firmly in the camp of having a flat cutlery compartment at the top and not that inefficient, and uncivilized, scarring, basket in bottom section.
Until seeing that video I thought I was crazy. I've found my master.
You have two dishwashers in one kitchen?
i have miele dishwasher with detergent powder cartridge that allows dishwasher to dispense it at will. it never used during pre-wash cycle in any of the programs that dishwasher has.
I wonder if its possible to press powder into pods, and use them. I mean, pre-make a bunch of them from store brand powder, and keep them ready for use.
Not sure if water can be introduced to bind the press, or maybe some other material.
At the end of the video he mentions that the good store sells those as well. https://good.store/products/dishwasher-tablets?srsltid=AfmBO...
Not to just bandwagon on Alec but he is the epitome of a hacker. He is always tearing things down and explaining how they work. An absolute gem.
I remember watching this[0] video by the OP a couple years ago. Never would have thought I could listen to someone talk about dishwashers for 30 minutes but it was surprisingly fascinating!
[0]: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBO8neWw04
My only addition to this discussion is that the Dirty Labs dish soap has been legitimately better for our baby stuff and other plastic stuff that sometimes gets oily. I recommend it.
I started using powder about a year ago, because of this guy. It legitimately works so much better than pods, because of the bit you 'spill' into the pre-wash part; and it's cheaper!
One surprising thing I got from this is that the "Energy Saver" mode used just as much energy, and even more water.
But he said that almost as a throwaway, with almost no explanation of his methodology in determining this, nor discussion about how common this problem might be.
He made a follow-up video in which he explains his testing methodology and what the dishwasher is doing in heavy detail:
https://youtu.be/WnBb3DLlVPwsi=1fW2qg8_Y1SmxkKo
Tl;dr He actually tested each cycle, timed what it did, and measured the energy with a Kill a Watt. He also found the repair manual, which included a diagram of each cycle that matched his tests.
His ultimate finding was that all of the cycles and modifiers did wildly different things, none of which correlated in any way to their name.
Maybe it means energy as in human effort.
I've found it harder and harder to find powder dishwasher detergent in my country. I think they intentionally pull them off the market, I used to buy a large Finish container and now I can barely find a place that sells _any_ sort of dishwashing powder.
Yeah, in Poland two "premium"-ish brands stopped selling powder in favor of tablets, and the cheaper brand is often missing from shelves, I need to order it in delivery separately. Situation is funny, since salt and rinse liquid are still widely available along with supposedly 3-in-1 tablets :) . I guess they are not so 3-in-1 as the ads say. But I will continue buying powder for as long as it will be manufactured. It's cheaper and more efficient. Same with washing machine power.
Tablets are fine. You can still break them and use half of it in the prewash dispenser.
Pods are a different story.
I, too, went through like 18 months in the UK with the big stores not selling any until one reintroduced it recently. Alternatives on the internet were like 3+x the price, at least. It was incredibly frustrating. I now stock up and have 2-3 boxes of the stuff, in case it does vanish again.
Doubly frustrating since mine is a small, single-drawer dishwasher, so pods are even worse since I can't break them down. It leads to me having way too much detergent in the dishwasher and I end up with residue on the dishes.
The big Sainsbury's near me never stopped doing this:
https://www.sainsburys.co.uk/gol-ui/product/sainsburys-conce...
And this has worked for me too:
https://www.waitrose.com/ecom/products/essential-dishwasher-...
Or… use a (dirty) knife to split a solid tab; put 2/3 in the dishwasher compartment and 1/3 just in the dishwasher.
I thought about it but wasn't sure if it would really do the trick. I kinda don't wanna buy more detergent right now because I'm stuck with a lot of pods
Interesting, here in New Zealand every supermarket has at least one brand of powder. Normally Finish is one and competing brands includes locally made and/or eco-friendly ones. Hopefully that practice doesn't reach here!
I went to my Costco right before they banned phosphates in the dishwashing detergent and got a pallet of Cascade with 5% phosphates. People looked at me like I was was crazy. I'm still going through my pallet 15 years later and my dishes are always clean :-) I just throw a bit of the detergent in the tub for prewash rather than put it in the cup, as it will leak out anyway. One thing you could probably do for the phosphate-free stuff is to add a "teaspoon of TSP" to the detergent and that would probably help - not sure if the formulation in today's detergent would agree with it though. I'll find out in another 5 years I guess....
I wonder if that's why my now something like nearly 40-year-old dishwasher is so bad for leaking, on certain cycles? Maybe the pods foam up too much, because it seems hell of a foamy inside.
At some point, I'll maybe post up the pics of repairing the door hinges - previously it was leaking badly because the chunky metal hinges had cracked and bent, pushing the door up enough to not squash the bottom lip seal. Unobtainable parts now, but if you have a welder...
If you don't use a JTAG cable and a MIG welder on the same project in the same day, can you really call yourself "full stack"?
> Maybe the pods foam up too much, because it seems hell of a foamy inside.
Dishwasher detergent doesn't make suds. Dish soap does. Are you sure you're using the correct stuff? Or prewashing the dishes for some reason and not getting all the soap off?
Anecdote: My spouse and I visited some friends for supper at their place. After the meal, was when they decided to try out the dishwasher in their apartment for the first time.
With dish liquid.
It's almost like the movies where the wash machine fills the house with suds, and the occupants go floating out the front door.
I bet they had a really clean kitchen floor afterwards!
Anecdotally we started using these dishwasher sheets and the dishwasher started erroring during the cycle and also leaked slightly. On observation when it errored it looked very foamy inside.
Simply changing back to powder completely stopped the error and the leaking and this was in a 1 year old dishwasher
At 40 years, there is an expectation that the rubber and most plastic components have become embrittled. The hinges likely only wore out after the spring had reduced function (and lack of lubrication)
After your weld, I hope you consider replacing all rubber with silicone, and add lubrication to at least an annual list.
The plastic and rubber bits are absolutely fine.
The hinges broke because someone leaned on the door with their full weight while it was open. The grease on the hinge pins was perfectly okay too.
Ariston used to be a quality company.
i replaced few years ago dishwasher that was at this point of time 20 years old (GE). When it was removed from below countertop plastic connector on top of dishwasher (water hookup) fall apart into dozen of small pieces.
MIG is for hobbyists. Real programmers use TIG.
I haven't got space for a TIG. However a couple of weeks ago Hofer had an inverter gasless MIG about the size of a Commodore 64 power brick, not including the spool of wire. Can't say I wasn't tempted to get myself a hot-glue-gun-for-metal kind of tool.
> gasless MIG
I hate when people use that term the G in MIG stands for Gas. If you are not running a Gas (argon, CO2...) it isn't Mig. There are flux core wires that are commonly used and called Mig, but they are not Mig (unless there is also a gas flow - this isn't uncommon) and have very different weld properties.
I have been using Dirty Labs dishwasher powder for about a year, since we got a new dishwasher, and inspired by some of his older videos on this topic. The performance has been good, no complaints. I don't torture-test my dishwasher like Alec does :). With the powder, I can do the whole some-on-the-door, some-in-the-dispenser thing mentioned here, or just use less for light loads. It is without a doubt not a budget option.
One aspect I like about it is that they have a fragrance-free variant, and even the "fragrance" one is not too bad. A second aspect I like is that it's biodegradable, et cetera. So a bit lighter on the environment, I hope, and the SDS is prominently available on the website.
I think another thing which is under-appreciated is that you need to know how to do the basic cleaning chores for your dishwasher-- for example if it has a filter, learn to clean it! Otherwise its ability to clean will probably be compromised.
I watched the video, but may have missed this, but shouldn't the testing have shown that the powder was substantially better?
Or did they not test the "putting some powder into the prewash" thing and so it was just "powder released all at once" vs "tablet released all at once".
Even there I'd expect some mild improvement from the powder mixing more easily than a plastic wrapped tablet (though maybe if the content inside is liquid this factor is reversed?).
Does this mean the big corps do have some chemical advantage that cancels out the crappy delivery mechanism?
Or does it mean that a mechanical spray prewash step isn't meaningfully improved by chemicals in most circumstances?
I was more alarmed by the wrappers being plastic. I had assumed they were some clever biodegradable thing but they're not.
The pods cost about 6x as much per load as powder.
So, even if they had equal cleaning performance, economically the powder would come ahead.
As it turns out, the 1/6th-as-expensive powder does an even better job than the pods, making the powder an even more obvious choice
(Unless you really value the handling convenience of using a pod and were willing to accept poorer results at a higher expense)
This is his (at least) third video on this. Your questions are answered in the earlier ones.
I believe expensive pods do have a chemical advantage, in the form of some enzymes that help break things down.
The powder in the video has enzymes as well.
Given the stupid pods are way more expensive I think it's enough to show that there's no benefit.
Pods work great for me, and I love not having crumbs of powder under the sink, or a bottle of liquid detergent with encrusted drips down the side. It's just gross.
They are more expensive, but I buy them on sale at Costco for about $16/100, so at $0.16 per load I really don't care if powdered detergent is only $0.03 per load or whatever.
There is clearly a revealed preference for pods among consumers for these things, and "proving" that everyone is wrong for liking them is just not a very interesting exercise imo.
The issue of letting consumers choose the worse product is that the good products get pushed out of the market.
Grocery floorspace that was once primarily staples and whole foods is mostly now junkfood.
Proper razors have been replaced with disposables.
Skincare & toothpaste products contain sodium laureth sulfate , which lathers well, but causes mouth sores and skin irritation.
Letting consumers choose usually ends up optimizing superficial and sometimes harmful traits.
giant, bright red, almost-flavorless strawberries
His specific thesis is that pods fundamentally clean worse than powder because they're inherently single-stage releases of detergent in machines designed for two-stage releases. Despite this, he still explicitly says that pods have their uses. So I'm unclear on how his goal is "proving that everyone is wrong." Did we watch different videos?
Is there list of machines that designed for two stage releases?
Even if it doesn't have a specific prewash section you can literally just toss a bit of powder in to the machine, since the prewash happens first.
More interesting would be a list of machines not designed for two-stage release. They probably exist, but it'll be a much smaller list.
All of them
i have dishwasher that is loaded with cartridge that has 400g of powder. ideal scenario for dispensing detergent at will. yet, never mind what cycle I am using, it dispensed only during main wash cycle.
i also had in past machines from 5 different manufacturers. none of them had mechanisms that facilitate 2 releases or pre-wash compartments
I'm 1.5 minutes in and I already learned to purge cold water from the pipes before running the dishwasher. Assuming this is evidence based and true, I mean come on! Is it really so alarming to see someone deep dive hard and do the work to mass educate the public?
It seems like it would be trivial for the machine to pump water in, turn on the heating element, and wait until it reaches optimum temperature before beginning the cycle.
My understanding is that energy efficiency requirements prevent this. Dishwashers have a fixed energy budget they are allowed to expend, which may not be enough to heat cold tap water up to the optimal cleaning temp.
So instead it pulls in hot water, but not for long enough to purge the line, so all the 140F water it pulls from the water heater sits in pipes till it cools off.
This is what most (all?) of machines do. Heat water when they need hot water
Read the manual of your washer. I’m willing to bet it instructs you to run the tap until it’s hot before you start the dishwasher. This is common for American dishwashers, because they can’t get the water hot enough, fast enough, for the prewash cycle
it doesn't.
i also went to american lg website and checked manual of cheapest dishwasher that they have. it doesn't instruct to run water either. it says that if water is not hot enough cycle will run longer.
anticipating comments that LG is not american enough, i went to GE and checked manual of cheapest (349) dishwasher. it doesn't instruct to run tap either. it does say just like LG that if water not hot enough, cycles that use hot water will take more time (because water needs to be heated)
depends very much on where you are, unfortunately. in USA, this is definitely not the case, they're almost all incredibly dumb. especially the cheapest-possible models that most renters are forced to use (and renters account for about a third of all households).
as a concrete example, the video has a section in it where he shows that his doesn't so any sensing - hot or cold water have exactly the same timing on the heater's use (and resulting water temperature graphs).
so like. I agree with you that it should be true, it's simple and cheap to implement and it obviously works better. unfortunately it's not a sane reality for tens (hundreds?) of millions of people.
i am in usa. rented few times here. both in apartment complexes and houses.
cheapest GE dishwasher that i found now - $349 heats water. of course, for video he could go and find some ancient dishwasher that doesn't heat water just to make a point (or maybe he has a broken one ? ), but i think it will be outlier today.
many (vast majority I've seen) have a heater, but won't heat the water sufficiently for the pre-wash cycle from cold. or, frequently, the second / wash cycle, unless you set it to a high temp mode, and even then it's questionable / often just a timer and not thermometer-based.
check your user manual. huge numbers of them tell you to run your nearby tap until it's hot before starting a cycle because of this exact reason. this is also part of the video, and it has been true for literally every washer I've lived with (I read essentially all manuals), including the "good" ones.
In the video he mentions that the machines heat for a set time and not for a target temperature. So as majority of machines (in US market) are meant for hot water input. Then if you feed cold water they don't heat it enough
if you have powder crumbs under your sink you might need to improve your technique.
This reminds me of how some of my house guests will accidentally splash water all over the bathroom counter and even the mirror when they wash up in the morning. I don’t say anything, to be polite, but they clearly lack technique lol.
This works for me:
0. store the dishwasher powder (box) under sink.
1. Open dishwasher door
2. grab box, place OVER the opened door.
3. dispense powder into cartridge in door (with spoon, tilting box, etc)
4. put spoon back in box OR fully tilt box back upright. “Crumbs” will drop onto the door, that’s OK.
5. move box back under sink.
Even if I was messy, I personally couldn’t make myself spend 5x on pods to avoid cleaning crumbs under the sink once a month. When i think of convenience i think of a dishwasher saving me hours every month. Not saving 10 seconds a month to wipe crumbs under the sink. :-)
We clearly all have different preferences and ideas of “convenience”. I respect that.
> if you have powder crumbs under your sink you might need to improve your technique.
With a pod there is no technique to be improved. They just work, every single time.
I have a bad habit of not fully drying my hands when retrieving pods. The pods all clump together if they get wet. This is one of the many reasons I prefer powder.
"if they get wet". Ok, so don't get them wet. If not wet, did you ever consider using chopsticks to pick one out of the bag/container? That might work well.
Sounds like a technique improvement. But wait, I was just told there "was no technique to improve".
I find it easier to just use the powder.
And I totally get the appeal of paying for “convenience”! But saving a few seconds a week? Very weak argument i’m afraid.
Except if you get even a drop of water in the pod storage bin and they fuse together and you have to carefully rip them apart.
With pods you can’t add some detergent to the prewash while adding the rest to the main wash cycle. That’s the thing that makes one of the biggest differences.
Yes but my dishes come out spotless with pods, so I don't need to change anything to make them cleaner.
You can still add powder to the prewash dispenser.
So do a pod and detergent powder? No thanks.
Seems like a market opportunity for dual pod packets.
I used an old container with a 3" lid and a handle, and fill it regularly with the cheap dishwasher powder that I buy in bulk. I put a whole in the screw on lid so I can just pour out the powder. 98% clean and much much cheaper than any pods and much better for the environment because the packaging is all paper.
Strange that nobody seems to notice the video was one big ad for a soap company.
I applaud this man's commitment to dishwashers.
But you can buy a large box of generic and very cheap no-bullshit pods at Costco, and simply put two or even three of them in a load.
If you're going the multi-pod route, you can put one in the dispenser and one or more right in with the dishes.
His crusade is in part about how pods are overdosed which can reduce their effectiveness (and be super wasteful)
even the cheap costco pods are 3x the cost of powder. And his point is that the pods undermine the dishwasher because they don't let you control when and how much detergent is deployed during the multiple washing cycles.
powder deploys during rinse and wash. pods deploy only during wash (or only rinse if people put the pods into the tray, which is common)
And the dishwashers are designed with a hardness index in the hopper . you're supposed to line up the soap with your local hardness level to avoid residue.
But the multi-pod strategy means you can give the machine soap to use in various cycles. Put some in the little flap, and some just in with the dishes.
I'm not sure if my machine even has a hardness marking, but when I used liquid dishwasher soap, I simply filled up the compartment every time.
As to the cost, yes it's 3X, but if you're reading this and you have a Costco membership, it's still a rounding error.
Pods just make life simpler and cleaner (no messy powders and gunky liquids in the soap cabinet), which is why I even have a dishwasher in the first place.
I thought that the multi-solution pods - they're usually have differently-colored, for I presume marketing reasons - have pockets with different dissolve rates, so that the solutions are dispensed in sequence. I've not tested that, though.
Alec actually looked at that in a previous video of the dishwasher series. There is no "different dissolve rate" or "dispensed in sequence".
https://youtu.be/Ll6-eGDpimU?t=718
One segment of this video quite clearly shows that the fancy pod does dispense its contents in stages.
Not in any sort of meaningful way no. Pockets dissolving seconds later by random chance does not do anything in an hour long wash cycle.
Making part of the pod out of 3mil PVA and bonding it to another part made of 1mil PVA does not sound like unachievable technology to me. In fact, the first Google result for PVA films that I see sells them based on their various dissolution times.
It would be probably very difficult to engineer a good dissolution rate that takes into account the different length and water temperature of the pre-wash cycle of the many many different dishwashers out there. So no, as the video in the sibling comment shows, it's just fancy marketing.
He has another video talking about pods specifically:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rBO8neWw04
Wow, this will be helpful.
I was a long-time adherent of powder for all the reasons in the video. I used the Seventh Generation powder that is widely available, or once was. One day I couldn't find it, so I got Cascade Free & Clear Pods. I was completely blown away by how much better the pods work. And they work faster, too, because my dishwasher cycles are based on water clarity and they end sooner if the detergent is working faster. So I permanently switched, nevermind the cost difference.
Perhaps part of the issue is that the presenter in the video is using a somewhat primitive machine.
We attempted an experiment in our own dishwasher after the video, trying Cascade Platinum boxed powder (only stuff available here) and Cascade Platinum Plus pods (which we had been using before). The experiment showed that, for our dishwasher and our water, the pods just worked significantly better. The main difference was in the silverware (tiny bits would occasionally be left with the powder).
A couple of months into the experiment with the powder, the dishwasher started to smell a bit foul, which usually indicates time to clean the filters, which I did. But this happened vastly sooner than I was used to with the pods.
Even if the powder's performance sucks intentionally because Cascade made it worse now, as a sibling comment suggested, ultimately that's the only powder option still available here.
His tests found that a brand that makes both powder and pods makes the powder substantially worse.
I used pods and tried out powder after one of his previous videos on this, it was pretty terrible even following his advice and using rinse aids.
I like chocolate milk, made by mixing chocolate powder (Nesquik) into milk, and somehow everything except pods manages to leave a film of the chocolate powder over everything. I haven't watched this video yet, but my suspicion is he's using bad pods - ones that really are just packaged detergent without the extra chemicals they often include in the pods nowadays.
Same here. Tried using just power, and his other advice and it didn't work out. Didn't clean as well and many dishes (especially plastic) ended up with a white film despite trying multiple brands of powder and dish dry solution.
I wonder if part of it is differences in water hardness and such.
I think water chemistry is under-appreciated, and a lot of people also seem to believe that the rinse agent does nothing, but it does.
Because the pods are so much more expensive, it means they make more money on them. There’s a very real incentive for the companies to intentionally reduce the performance of the powders just so they can sell more pods (as people notice the performance difference, they think it’s because powder is naturally inferior instead of being manipulated into being so).
In the video he ran a similar test and had similar results. IIRC his conclusion was that the manufacturer is deliberately sabotaging the performance of powders in order to direct more sales to the higher margin pods.
It's also why he's endorsing a new powder product he was involved in developing: it performs as good or better than the pods.
I don't think the difference in my anecdote was due to sabotage. I think it was the difference between Hippie Bullshit® and Motherfucking Chemistry®
i used multiple dishwashers in multiple countries. blomberg, ge, bosch, miele, lg. used pods for as long as they exist (with exception of miele that has detergent cartridge that is good for two dozens of cycles). the only times when I had problem with dishwasher performance it's when either dishwasher had physical malfunction, dishwasher arms were blocked by some object or when i forgot to put pod.
is my experience of dishwashers extraordinary ?
His stance is less that pods don't perform, and more that powders perform just as well and are less wasteful.
pods are about convenience. exactly same reason that i got dishwasher with detergent cartridges and washing machine with build in container for detergent.
but if we talk about powders, they can be very different with different performance. There are commercial powders (for restaurants and such where dishwashers run on very short cycles) that I afraid to put in my dishwasher and there are eco powders that are made from unicorn tears (tried once, they cleaned dirt but leave stains on clear glass). i went through sds of a bunch of them. most of them have same similar basic ingredients, but in different proportions
I can't remember if it was main video or second channel one, in which Alec states with confidence that big brands make powder worse on purpose to push their higher margin pods.
The opinion is based on his experience (horrible residue left by big-name powder in contrast to store-branded great-value powders being problem-free) and lab results.
i used cascade powder to refill miele cartridges. there was 0 difference with regards to residue/etc. also SDS was very similiar.
i just went to check amazon. cascade complete powder has 4.6 with 9k reviews. if it was subpar, pretty sure that rating would have reflected it. for example plant based detergents hover around 4.
It's also highly dependent on how soft your water is. The people complaining about performance probably have hard water. Do you ever have to descale your kettle / coffee maker?
i used to live in area with very hard water. used softening salt in dishwasher. later switched to pods that were advertised to have water softening compounds and used them without softening salt.
I have used Kirkland pods for years and have never noticed residue.
How is fiddling a thing out of a box more convenient than putting a spoon in a box? I don't get that argument.
when i used pods, i had open box under counter. i could with literally closed eyes to take one and put it in machine without looking. using spoon involves more actions and there are chance that some of the powder will end up on floor/inside cabinet/etc.
now i use cartridge like this that is replaced once in 3 weeks https://www.mieleusa.com/c/powerdisk-automatic-dishwasher-de...
it's even more convenient.
If you have to go to a laundromat, carrying a couple pods with you is way more convenient.
Vs. carrying a small box, that you would also carry for pods, because you don't want to hold them in your hand the whole time?
I bring a bag to the store. Is it more convenient? no, is it the right thing to do? yes. I'm just making the point that they are more convenient for people in this situation.
you can put pods with laundry. no need in box
Having the cleanest dishes is not always the optimization one is looking for.
I like pods because there is less of a chance my clumsy self, or younger kids can accidentally spill costly soap for my dog to try to lick up or overfill the dispenser. My dishes are almost never caked in fats and oils when I put them in. I do not use a pre-wash. If I do I break a pod in half and toss in the bottom.
This guy makes me roll my eyes. There is nothing more exhausting than a self-assured YouTuber lecturing others as if he has all the right answers. He is not wrong per se but not everyone has their own preferences and needs.
One of my favorite YouTubers. Watch every video.
Anyone who downvoted care to tell me why? Am I watching trash?
Probably relevance. I wouldn't downvote for that unless it was the top comment or something.