I Was Right About Dishwasher Pods and Now I Can Prove It [video]
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A YouTuber claims that using dishwasher powder with a pre-wash dose is more effective than single-dose pods, sparking a discussion on the merits of different detergent types and dishwasher usage.
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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.
American dishwashers don't have their own heater? All dishwashers I've seen in Australia only have cold water supply.
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.
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.
Natural gas is mostly methane, which is lighter than air and easily escapes most structures.
Doesn't match my experience. My colleagues and I are able to turn on or off the gas supply to our houses at will.
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.
I discovered the unexpected value of a YMCA membership when my hot water was offline for a while.
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.
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.
Here is what I got from Gemini:
Bosch does not refer to their dishwashers as having a "heat pump" in the same way the term is used for HVAC systems; rather, the part is often called a circulation motor and heating assembly or a combined "heater/pump" unit by users and repair sites. Bosch dishwashers use a flow-through water heater (a type of resistive element) to heat the water and a different, non-refrigerant-based system for drying. How the Bosch System Works
Water Heating: All Bosch dishwashers use a flow-through water heater, which is a heating element integrated with the circulation pump. This system rapidly increases the water temperature to the required level. It uses electrical resistance, not the reverse-refrigeration cycle of a true heat pump.
Drying: Bosch dishwashers (especially the higher-end models with features like CrystalDry) typically do not use a separate heating element for drying. Instead, they rely on a process involving a stainless steel tub and a heat exchanger or a mineral-based drying technology (like Zeolith for CrystalDry) to condense moisture and wick it away from the dishes. This is an energy-efficient method of moisture removal, not active heat generation for drying.
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.
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.
It's for comfort and convenience.
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.
This almost made a mess when the sink was clogged and the dishwasher tried to pump the water out but had nowhere to go.
The airgap causes the pump to be physically incapable of backfeeding the drinking water supply with dishwasher waste
15, dishwasher manufacturers can't assume the dishwasher is on a 20.
Trying to run a resistive heater on the same circuit as a fridge compressor without tripping leans towards very conservative wattage
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.
Ouch. Code here (Ontario) is that not only does the fridge need a separate circuit, but counter outlets need two separate circuits: each socket on the duplex outlet is required to be on a separate circuit (although multiple outlets can all share the same two circuits, but you're supposed to alternate top and bottom).
Of course, if your home is older than I am or it's a handyman special, all bets are off. If I run the microwave while someone is vacuuming in another part of the house it'll trip the breaker.
> 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.
Didn’t notice the coffee was cold?
Overall, given the massive fears of a fridge failure, which can happen beyond just electrical failures, very very very few people have any kind of monitoring/alarming for this event. You’d think that would be the first requirement.
It sounds like this law is outdated.
Kitchens in general have required 20 amp general purpose circuits since at least the early 80s. However the NEC (but not the Canadian equivalent) allows for 15 amp duplex receptacles on 20 amp circuits so home builders looking to save a few pennies often use those. Besides, there are few if any, residential appliances out there that have NEMA 5-20 plugs. Then again hardwiring dishwashers was pretty common up until recently.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
All I would add to what you've said is that when my Bosch does include a pre-wash in a cycle, it checks how dirty the water is and only drains the pre-wash water if is dirty. If the dishes haven't caused the water to become dirty, it keeps the same water for the main wash cycle.
Also, I want to expand upon my first paragraph a little: I'm not having a dig at anyone who doesn't understand their dishwasher. I am just venting/observing that the world is filled with all kinds of different people and reminding myself that I shouldn't make assumptions about people as often as I do.
I've had this realisation many times, but it doesn't hurt to have it again. Communicating with people is lot quicker and easier when I remember that.
my dishwasher after few months suddenly instead of filling water and starting wash cycle initiated some kind of fill & drain cycle that went for a while without going into wash mode.
i called in service. they replaced pump, solenoid. talked with manufacturer directly, swapped a couple of main boards. it made dishwasher snap out of it.
few months later it started again. this time i allowed it to do whatever it was doing. after 15 minutes it started to wash.
over the time i noticed that dishwasher does this water cycling every few months and adds extra time to estimated program duration.
about once a year after asking a few questions if sprayer hands/filters/etc are clean, it will add 2 hours to wash cycle.
none of it described in manual, manufacturer service personal and "Factory support" that service talk to know about it (maybe they do by now. they didn't few years ago)
On the other side, you see appliance companies responding to that and shrinking their manuals of useful content because they assume you might just go watch YouTube videos instead. Some of the better ones might even include a QR code or 3 to officially produced YouTube videos, though so far that still seems rare.
Even in this video is the surprise reveal that something that used to be very common in manuals, full cycle timing diagrams, was "hidden" on a data sheet attached inside the door itself. Admittedly, it's great in that case to know that should that model be taken to repair that a repair shop might find that data sheet easily without having to search manufacturers' websites, but on the other hand some of those diagrams would be quite useful to me if I was the user of that machine.
my dishwasher manual breaks down each program. pre-wash exists only in half of programs
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.
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 also specifically calls out Great Value brand powder as one he finds to be consistently on par with pod performance
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.
Like in the video: https://youtu.be/DAX2_mPr9W8?si=Njn749InqNCbjhQd&t=822
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
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.
This dishwasher also came with a box of Miele pods (and they encourage you to buy more). I think it's designed first and foremost to not use powder.
This is because the profit margin on them is much, much fatter. Miele still makes powder if you want to use theirs.
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.
This! I mean, at least get all of the low-hanging fruit with a quick, needle-spray pass of hot water. And to do so while the plates are still fresh so that stuff hasn’t had the time to dry.
Like, we’re talking about powering through table settings for a half-dozen people at a family dinner in less than 60 seconds. Plates, bowls, cups, silverware; everything done in about 10s per person. This isn’t any kind of a deep scrub; it’s removing everything that will come off easily as fast and expediently as possible before the dishes go into the washer.
Alec's dishwasher videos are based on some rather primitive dishwashers. For instance he talks about his test unit not flushing out the spray arms, but Bosch/Siemens filters the water going to the spray arms so it wouldn't recirculate dirty water anyways. Same deal with the prewash. Bosch uses a turbidity sensor to determine how many "prewash" cycles to run and when to reuse the water, something his test unit very clearly does not.
I know this type of person very well. They always have some reductionist approach to things, where for them, the expensive stuff is mostly marketing with added bells-and-whistles and largely works the same. My experience is that this isn't quite right. Some brands do have a premium that is more related to style/status but if you buy some seriously engineered stuff it will work much better most of the time.
For reference I'm pretty cheap too but try to be pragmatic. My fridge is a $600 Frigidaire (AEG/Electrolux) top freezer unit. The main selling point was that another youtuber (an appliance repair guy by trade) pointed out that it still has a mechanical timer. They get mocked by appliance sales droids but the top freezer design is significantly more efficient than the alternatives and the lack of electronics mean that you're more likely to be able to repair it.
I agree that KitechnAid is more on the higher-end side, he even said himself that it's kind of a premium device. It doesn't surprise me, because at some point in your life you want to stop with the frugality shenanigans and just want stuff to work if you can afford them.
To be clear that's not a critic, I tend to be as cheap as can be reasonable as well, it's generally a decent way to proceed, to avoid overpaying for useless over-marketed, over-engineered stuff. I'm just trying to give some context but I think we are in agreement anyway and I do believe anyone who watches him long enough will get the gist of it at some point.
have you watched his videos? dude is on the spectrum.
to be clear, he makes good vids. but his fascinations exist for a reason.
The Extra Dry setting seems to help with getting the glass and ceramics dryer. Plastics still come out quite wet since it uses a hotter final rinse rather than a heating element to get dishes “dryer”.
He is known as Angry Dishwasher Man for a reason.
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'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.
There will be instances when both are just full and you still end up visible filth, but even then, you at least have to go just once into clear-out mode. It works out great so far. If it didn't... well, I guess I'd need to buy a third one ;-)
I.e., he started off with all his things clean and in dishwasher A. As he used things he pulled them from A and put them in B. When B is nearly full and A is nearly empty, run B, move any remaining items from A to B. Then B becomes the storage space and A becomes the place to put the dirty items.
It seems so arcane for the operator to have to do this before running a cycle
Yes, purging the cold water manually does exactly the same thing. We live in a flawed world.
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.
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-...
I did find the Waitrose one and it was going to be my next buy, but my local didn't have it and I never got around to ordering it before Sainsburys came back in stock. Interesting that it's now cheaper, maybe I'll check again...
Pods are a different story.
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"?
After your weld, I hope you consider replacing all rubber with silicone, and add lubrication to at least an annual list.
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